Best American Travel Writing 2003

Introduction I travel for all the usual reasons - to see new places, meet new people, have exciting experiences, etc. Also, I travel just because I like to move. Motion simply for its own sake is often my goal. This is true not only when I travel but anytime. The other night as I was loading the dinner dishes into our freestanding, roll-around dishwasher, my sister-in-law, who was staying with us, observed me carrying each dish individually across the kitchen, and suggested I could save myself some steps by rolling the dishwasher closer to the sink. I told her that I didn't mind, that I was enjoying the walk. I was being kind of glib with her: I know this love of motion must be controlled. When I'm doing research in a library, reading microfilmed newspapers on a microfilm-reading machine, I always have to restrain myself from zipping the whole roll back onto its spool at high-speed rewind, just for the thrill of it, before I'm completely done. The whine of the spinning spool, the accelerating flicker of the speeding days, express my restless disorder perfectly. I attribute this disorder partly to my being from Ohio, and partly to my dad. 1. Ohio. When I was growing up there, Ohio seemed centrifugal. Some mystical force the place possessed flung people from it, often far. The northern part of the state was a corridor where westbound traf.c on the Ohio Turnpike picked up speed on its first real stretch of flat country past the Allegheny Mountains. When we slept with our windows open in the summers, the sound of accelerating traffic on the Turnpike a couple of farm fields away was with us morning and night. I remember Rose Rugan and Kim Gould, two girls I had crushes on, leaning on the railing of the Stow Road bridge over the Turnpike and watching the trucks and cars whoosh past beneath. As I rode by them on the bridge on my bicycle, they turned to look at me over their shoulders; for a moment, a huge concentration of hope and longing and possibility shivered through me invisibly. Not many years afterward I walked to that bridge carrying a small suitcase, hopped the fence, climbed down to the highway, stuck out my thumb, and disappeared, like the taillights of that famously fast local dragstrip racer whose racing name was Color Me Gone. Ohio seemed not somewhere to be, but somewhere to be from. We knew the Wright brothers, from Dayton, had learned to fly and had flown away, and John D. Rockefeller had departed with his Cleveland-made millions for New York City, and popular local TV personalities had vanished into vague careers in Hollywood, and most Cleveland Indian baseball players didn't get to be any good until they were traded to the Yankees. The high school kids our parents held up for emulation, the brains and athletes, went off to distant colleges and never returned, while everybody's grandparents decamped to Ohioan-filled retirement communities in Florida or Arizona. When we were still in elementary school, some of our fellow Ohioans began to leave the planet entirely. In fifth grade our teacher brought her black-and-white TV to school one morning so that we could watch the launch of the rocket carrying the .rst American to orbit the earth - John Glenn, of New Concord, Ohio. Ten minutes later, it seemed, Neil Armstrong was walking on the moon. Armstrong came from Wapakoneta, in the less populous western part of the state. We watched on live TV as he stepped from the lunar lander and spoke his historic first words, his rural Ohio accent clearly audible through the staticky vastness of space. Of course Americans in general like to move, not just those from Ohio. I do know that in almost any far place I go, someone from Ohio either is there already, or was. RecenFrazier, Ian is the author of 'Best American Travel Writing 2003' with ISBN 9780618118823 and ISBN 0618118829.