08.18.03 - 12:02 p.m.

Economies of necessity, sentimentality, and scale: how we make them. There's an interesting article in this morning's New York Times regarding the Valley of Peace cemetary in Najaf, Irag, where many Shiites from around the world want to be buried. The graves are free, but innumerable people are associated with the trade:

When the cemetery workers reel off the list of professions tied to the trade, the degree to which it floats the local economy is readily apparent. There are 200 pallbearers who lug coffins around the shrine of Ali for extra blessings before the burial; at least 100 ulema who read the Koran over the graves; 600 undertakers; 4,000 grave diggers; 250 body washers and countless professional mourners, shroud sellers, tombstone calligraphers and others.

That list, iteration after iteration of cemetary workers, and the whole whole dusty strangeness of it, makes me think that a city whose only industry was the burial business would make a great starting setting for a fantasy novels: one of the good ones that follows someone growing up, or developing, some coming of age tale. Those are the only such stories I remember with fondness, except for a few by the greats, the coming of age stories. Those, I think, are universal, and it's pretty easy to identify with the protagonists when you, yourself, are still growing up.

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The drive to and from Columbus reminded me of the romance of farmland, fields, tractors and barns, the sprawling series of barns and outbuildings that surrounds the farmhouse. We drove out via Route 35: up to Point Pleasant and across the Ohio there and Route 35 past Jackson and across to Chillicothe, then 23 north to Columbus. We came back the direct way, heading for Waverly and Portsmouth from Chillicothe, instead of Jackson. Although there's a lot of good farmland in the wide river valleys around the scioto and the ohio, the country doesn't really open up for a midwestern feeling until Chillicothe. There, the ring of framing hills spread farther away, and the fields of corn and soybeans spread to the wooded bases of the hills. We raced the same train from somewhere west of Chillicothe on 35 and then on 23 north through the farmland toward Columbus for a long time. We were faster than the train, but it caught up and managed to get ahead of us after we stopped for gas, so 15 miles, here we were, drawing abreast of it again. The whole time, the train was well within view of the road, until the tracks went off a bit differently. Around here, even where trains are ubiquitous, you're more likely to hear than see them: where the land is flat, there are trees to conceal the train, but mostly the land isn't flat, and everyone sort of fights for a clear path through the mountains.

I like the long vistas, particularly around Chillicothe where the wide flat plains are bordered by little ridge systems that give the whole setting some visual interest, framing the farms below. I noticed yesterday that I find myself thinking almost the same thing everytime I drive through that portion of Ohio: I wonder what life was like there before the European settlers came, before we cut down the trees for those wide rolling fields of grain. Maybe cornfields can, somehow, vaguely simulate what the prairie grasses looked like, but Ohio would've been wooded, not prairie land.

In WVa, it's easier to get a sense for "what it would've looked like" because - with the narrow valleys bordered by tight-knit mountains, the hollers and so on - it's easy to lose the world. You don't really need to go that far. Now, summertime, there are plenty of European imports studding the forest, including kudzu, which, thank god, dies back each winter and thus has not overtaken WVa the way it can and does in southern states.

But anyway: Ohio. I like to think of it as a land of plenty. Imagine old growth hardwood forests carpeting the wide, wide valleys, maybe mixed with pine. Heat in the summer, thick heat, lazy heat, and just the sky above you. In the middle of the woods, you probably wouldn't be able to see the ridges that border the valley. The canopy would be too thick, and you would've only had a view like that from a clearing on a small rise. Threading through the valley, one of those lazy Ohio rivers that loops and whorls around fat and happy, like a sunning snake. That would be the highway: a canoe or flatboat heading down the river, to another river and then another river, and then - somewhere at the end of that vast, linked chain - the Gulf.

It's just not possible to actually have that experience because the corn fields are everywhere, everywhere mostly flat, at least. But I always think about that - literally, whether driving or riding, I always muse about that, between Chillicothe and Waverly and Portsmouth and Ironton, for no apparent reason.

Oh, and I love the way, on sunny days, you can see the shadows of clouds skimming over the waving fields of corn like skiffs on a wide, lazy river, moving quickly, or slowly, as the wind dictates. That is prairie-like, as opposed to WVa like, that variety of cloud formations, the way, driving along, you can see angry clouds boiling out of the sky far to the north, raining, storming, all that, but staying well away from you. That's more prairie than Ohio, more southwest too, but that happened in Columbus this weekend, too, a sudden storm that lashed and swarmed to the north and west, into which we soon threw ourselves, cos that's where we needed to go.

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There was an article in the Sunday morning Columbus Dispatch about the Teays Valley school district. Now, aside from the tremendous coinkidink between the place where I spent my teenaged years and the name of this place. Okay, it's not a coinkidink: it's the same big-ass valley, the bed, presumeably, of an enormous prehistoric river. See? The Teays River System.

Columbus always confuses me. There are no natural landmarks out there, just this vast circle of sprawl. Sprawl here, sprawl there: there was nothing, natural or otherwise, to block it, and so the city and its ring of suburbs are ever-expanding, congested, cluttered but flat and featureless nothings amidst which there are flat and ugly tracts of condos - the older ones are beginning to be somewhat seedy, the newer ones are different in their sameness, disturbingly plasticene and allegedly "homey." Or whatever. The pre-fab and/or pre-planned homes are much the same, and last decade's McMansions seem small, really, compared to today's monstrosities.

So: Columbus always confuses me, but since the Teays Valley School District is near South Bloomfield, a little farming community that has always been the last landmark on any trip to Columbus, I know where it is, and more than intellectually. Once there was a saddle shop and... hmm, maybe a DQ and a used car dealership, an old church and maybe a gas station. Now there are a few fast food places still, plenty of cornfields, but now one farmers' fields are no longer fields. Raw and ugly, McMansions have sprouted about a quarter mile from the road in that cul-de-sac spiral they always do, with the foreground all green but fenced with signs: reserved for future commercial development.

The Columbus Dispatch... (oops, I've been writing on this all day, but now it's time to head home. Place marker to finish the story.)