I volunteered, once again, to go away from Pediddleville for yet another three week stint to work as a relief/ mercenary field technician, this time in rural Southeastern Ohio. The fucked-up Corporate politics that soured my last trip to Michigan popped right up at the outset of this trip. First, it was scheduled for three weeks, and I was told that I had made the cut and would be going. Next thing I heard was that the trip was shortened to only a week, and was asked if I still wanted to go. At first I thought I wouldn't, that it would be a waste of time--I was still not caught up with myself from my first trip back in March-- but then I thought better of it. Any reason to have an adventure, I thought, was good. I admit I am bored out of my fucking mind in this job and just being somewhere else makes it more bearable, I have found. Plus I still haven't clambered completely out of the Hole of Pediddleville, so the opportunity to make more money working tons of Overtime, eased by the Novelty of being away, made my decision for me. But then my boss told me that I now was NOT going to be able to go, since they changed the time frame and re-canvassed everybody. The last email I had gotten had said that it was the FINAL LIST, arrived at by seniority, and there I was the last candidate on the list, confirmed. I sent off an email to the administrator who was coordinating the trip. In it, I demanded an explanation as to why I had been on the finalized list, and then was not, and I added that I wanted an HONEST explanation. I think the word "honest" gave them the Heebie-Jeebies, and soon my phone rang with a call from my boss saying I had been given premature information, and that I was going. It was Adventure Time again...
Nineteen of us from different parts of Connecticut left, a day later than the original start date, for the Southeastern part of Ohio known as " Outstate". It was a long drive to be making in one day, a long time to muse on the screwy situation and anticipate the next week's adventure. Somewhere in Southwest Pennsylvania, near dusk, when the final fingers of gravitational pull from Home let go, I saw an inspiring sight that brought me back to my first trip to the Thumb of Michigan: up on the tops of twin flat-topped mountains, dozens of wind turbines, spinning serenely. They stood there on the mountaintops like two armies of giants, two armies of Hope for the Future, resolute, yet breezy...
What I found in Ohio was a land that Time forgot, a shadow of what it once was back in the black old coal mining days. It had been a depressed area for quite some time. You rarely see a house or building that has even been painted in decades. Abandoned houses and buildings are not torn down, they're just left there to collapse and get grown over with vines. Often a mobile home is moved onto the property and placed next to the old house while it stands decaying. There are many small oil rigs seen on properties where the people have sold the mineral rights to their land.
Driving from my hotel in Zanesville, through Crooksville and Roseville, every day nearly an hour South to Nelsonville, New Straitsville, and others, the cell signal vanished. I use an iPad for dispatching my jobs, testing lines, chatting with support people, all things needing cell signal. It was very difficult working like this. Sometimes I'd have to drive ten miles out to get signal, do everything I could possibly need to do on the iPad, then drive all the way back to do the physical part of the job. There were few places to get lunch in some of the towns I was in. I kept noticing all the decay, the vacant buildings left to collapse, often covered with thick mats of vines. It wasn't fun like being in Michigan. It was pretty in the rural parts, very hilly, and most of the people I met were all very nice, but a weird thing I noticed that was a little disconcerting, like getting used to the grid over in Michigan had been for me, was that the area was so hilly, just gentle rolling hills and valleys, that you could never really see any kind of horizon. Pretty and rural, but claustrophobic.
Claustrophobic, yeah, maybe the kind of locale that could foster a scene like the Redneck Conference I witnessed with my own two eyes. I was up a telephone pole looking at a property with a big flat lawn and a mobile home at the back end. There were at least ten young men, what I would call Rednecks, and a few young women, all hanging out in this yard, blasting Country Radio, whooping it up, drinking Bud Light (exclusively). They were loud and boisterous and they yelled up to me on the pole asking if I'd like a beer. I declined because I was working, and because it was Bud Light. "It's too late to be working on a Friday." one of them said to me. They didn't know I would probably end up working until at least ten PM that night. At some point I heard one guy say "Hey, lets get a picture of us and our babies for Facebook!" It didn't register with me, but I would have expected to see some of the guys and their girlfriends line up for the photo, but what actually happened next I could not have predicted. They all got into their pickup trucks and revved them up. Black smoke suddenly filled the yard and drifted my way. One-by-one they lined the trucks up next to each other, all ten of them across the left side of the yard facing the girl with the cell phone. Then all ten guys sat on the hoods of their "babies", held aloft their Bud Lights, and posed for the picture!
It gets even better. I continued working, soon moving my ladder across the street to the side of the house I was servicing. I don't know if maybe they noticed the Connecticut license plate on my truck, and wanted to put on a show for the Yankee, or for whatever reason they had, but the scene I witnessed will stand with the short list of most awesome experiences of my life. I may have subconsciously noted the hubbub as I climbed my ladder to attach the wire to the house, but soon enough there were multiple blasts of loud truck engines, and that thick black death smog erupted all over the yard across the street. Revving the trucks and hooting, the rednecks filed out the driveway, took a right onto the street, then a left onto the street where I was set up near the corner, almost all of them blowing their horns, hooting, and blasting thick clouds of that evil black smoke in a convoy right next to me and up the steep hill that was there. I could hear them nearing the top of the hill, then driving the loop that was up there, then they all came back down the hill, still making a big commotion. Satisfied probably that they had put on a heck of a show for the stranger from Liberal Connecticut, they went by me, turned right, and continued past the mobile home out to the main road and drove off towards New Straitsville. Normally I would not condone such brazen destructive attitudes, but this was one of the funniest things I'd ever seen in Real Life, and I suppose not something most people would ever see. Fucking hilarious! Adventure Time...
What they were doing with the black smoke out their exhaust pipes is called "Rolling Coal". It happens because of a deliberate modification that is done to the diesel engine to produce the smoke, and it's done as a middle finger to Liberals and Environmentalists generally, and to President Obama specifically. Rolling Coal has nothing to do with actual coal, but I will relate to you the story of real coal burning that turned some of these towns into ghost towns. Really a little bit of misplaced anger round these parts...
New Straitsville was established as a coal mining company town, complete with all the misery that goes along with such a place, which in the 1880's saw the forming of the first coal miner's Union in the country. Inevitably a strike took place, and getting frustrated with how things were going, some of the striking miners loaded up a bunch of logs on a cart, doused them with kerosene and lit them on fire, then pushed the cart down the mineshaft. The coal in the mine caught fire and it still burns today after one hundred and thirty years! The fire has traveled along the coal veins all these years and sometimes smoke will rise from the ground in Wayne National Forest. Presumably this will continue indefinitely and nothing can be done about it. It certainly ended the strike, with the unintended results of the mine being closed down, the miners all losing their jobs, and the local economy collapsing.
I met some nice people in New Straitsville, the Thompsons, when I went to their house to do a job for them. They sat me down at the kitchen table while I was on hold for a long while for company support people, gave me a glass of iced tea, and chatted with me about my job and why I was there from Connecticut. They gave me a bag of excellent ripe tomatoes from their garden, which I kept in my truck and ate along with some almonds and apples when I couldn't find somewhere to have lunch. The Thompson's issue could not be resolved that day because they hadn't received shipment of a modem, so I moved on, but I dispatched on it again the next day. Doubting the modem would be there, I went anyway, and found Mr. Thompson in the front yard. We sat down on the front porch for another chat. Soon Mrs. Thompson appeared with a glass of iced tea for me. Nice people. Mr. Thompson was on the town council and I asked about the town being "the Mooshine capital of the world". He didn't mention the coal fire--I found out about that later on the internet--but he told me about a local beverage recipe made with Moonshine and apples called "Apple Pie" that he enjoyed. There is a legal Moonshine distillery/ museum in the town right on Main Street, but there remain many illegal bootleggers all over the place here. The town puts on an annual Moonshine Festival, but I didn't ask how the bootleggers participate in a sanctioned function such as that. Dipshit that I am, I never sampled anything from the area because I really do prefer IPA's to any hard liquor, but this is how New Straitsville pulled itself out, to an extent, of the economic collapse. Other towns in the area, Shawnee and Corning, for example, did not fare as well. Nelsonville was propped up for a long time by the Nelsonville Block Company and other brick manufacturers, and Roseville and Crooksville had the famous pottery and china companies, but the competition from foreign manufacturers did it's inevitable damage. The whole area is pretty run-down. The town of Shawnee, in particular, has what was once a beautiful Main Street downtown area that is now basically a ghost town. There are big brick row buildings with store fronts and restaurant spaces and apartments upstairs all empty, boarded up and collapsing under the vines.
Somehow it seemed like more than ten days that I was away. I was able to see a lot in those few days before they split us up and sent two thirds of our group to other locations. Ryan and a few others got sent further west to Xenia, and Welby and others got sent further South to Marietta. Those of us who were working South of Zanesville ended up finishing out the tour in the Zanesville area. Zanesville is a relatively uninteresting town except for the Y Bridge over the brown water of the Muskingum River and some interesting Church and Municipal architecture. They have a brewpub, which I never got to try. Working in Zanesville was easier because there was cell signal, but the plant was just as beat-up as in the rural areas. I don't know what they think we'd get accomplished in only a week in the first place, then they went and dispersed us further. At any rate it was another adventure in a new place, I made a bit more money than I normally would, and I was spared the boredom of the home turf. A sense of Weirdness was creeping in, though. My room had a mildewy funk to it that I should have complained about. The Michael Brown shooting and subsequent riots and protests took place while I was in Ohio, and Robin Williams committed suicide. There were Halliburton work crews staying at my hotel. The Xenia crew got to leave a day early because they ended up with a two-day drive. There was a sense of finality with this trip. Even though there was one more trip (which I did not put in for) to Detroit after this one, we all knew there would be no more of this since the outfit we worked for was going to be sold off in a matter of months to a new company that did not have such a large range of coverage. I know I am stuck where I am now for good.
