“Dad. I want to explore.”
When I heard that word explore it took me a second to recognize it. Explore. How quaint. How old-fashioned. My young-adult son and I were on vacation in our traditional rental house on the banks of the Ohio River. We’d arrived a day before everyone else in the family and had some time on our hands.
I did recognize the word after a moment. Explore. You mean just go out and discover what’s out there without using the phone?
That is what he meant. I do want to point out that the young man who asked me the question spends no time on social media. I ain’t gonna make no grand conclusions but it seems something worth considering.
Off we go
My idea of a great vacation includes not driving, and since we were on vacation and my son said he’d drive, we went exploring. And we learned a few things via direct experience. This has been about three weeks now. The experience has remained with me to such an extent that I had to write about it. Lucky for you all.
They say that highways are the rivers of today. Or something like that. It means, however you want to put it, that there was a lot of life happening on the Ohio river in its time as a primary means of travel. This would be just before trains, telegraphs, and the Civil War.
It turned out that even though we’d spend a good amount of time here over the years, there was lot to discover. One place was Rome, Indiana. This small town sat on the river and around 200 hundred years ago was the county seat. My son and I checked out the courthouse building from 1812. It had been a school at one point and a few other official places of importance. It was blazing hot on this 4th of July weekend and the old brick building sat in the middle of town like it didn’t care at all.
A little later we stopped on the side of the road to read on of those historical marker signs. We were stading on the sight of an actual Civil War battle. Sure, it was a small one by Civil War standard but it happened on banks of the Ohio River where now there was a hell of a lot of corn growing.
The spot that we visited resonated with me the most was one that, in the interest of transparency, was one I’d been to before. This was in Magnet, Indiana which is a small town that sits on the- you guessed it- The Ohio river. I’d been here but it was about ten years ago on one of the first times we came to our rental on the river. So, of course, I got us lost on the way. But to me that’s just a different way to explore, so it counts.
I wanted to revisit the ten graves of Civil War soldiers who died in steamboat explosion. There had been discharged, the war was over, and they were heading home. The headstones sit across the road, in a grove of trees a rock throw away from the river. Most of the men were from Cincinnati, but one headstone is marked ‘anonymous”. As I said it was hot as all hell that day, but the trees helped keep us cool enough to take our time to read the headstones. Three of the men were named John as it happens. And as it was 4th of July Weekend, someone had carefully placed a small bouquet of flowers, topped with mini-American flag at each stone. Under the shade, near the mighty river seemed a fine place to be laid to rest.
The time years ago that I came across these headstones I told myself there’s a novel to write here. Maybe I just started it. But this is a blog post. So, we’ll keep it at that. I guess the point of the post is that external exploration can lead to internal exploration. Either one is better for your mind than asking the phone for an answer.
Coffee Novelist 