Noble County, Ohio 2009.

Jorge pronounces it “oh-hiii-o” as if it were the chorus of an old folk song.

“Col-um-bus Oh-hii-o” he warbled on the plane. “Are we there yet?”

Ohio does have an element of folklore to it. It is a quintessential flyover state, birthplace of many a starry-eyed ingénue trying to make it big in Hollywood flicks, freedom loving flag waving heart of Middle America, swing state extraordinaire, producer of the classic Midwestern trio of coal, cars, and corn.

It’s a place people go back to. Americans have a penchant for going back to places. How many movies have been made and books written about the trip home for the holidays, for a wedding, for lack of money and a tail-between-the-legs breakup, for a mid-30’s identity quest?

And what better place to go back to than Ohio? The agro-industrial bosom from which many a promising and disenchanted young thing has emerged and fled. Not so rural or wacky that you could base an acerbic indie film there, but not so cosmopolitan that you couldn’t find a waitress to call you “hon” or a creepy freedom bumper sticker or a 19th century town full of antique stores and diners selling pie. Whatever your homebound soul needs, you can find it in Ohio.

Our plane touches down on an unusually chilly night. The passengers assemble themselves for the tired shuffle down the gateway. They are the Midwestern bouquet, all local species present and vibrant. Overly blonde businesswomen with French manicured nails who sip 64 oz. diet Cokes and talk just a little too loudly on their cell phones about how tedious it is to fly so often. They leave half-eaten bags of pretzels tucked into the seat pouches and are indulgently, excessively kind to the stewardesses, who look as if they might reach over and start throttling anyone at any moment. Men in checked polo shirts with potbellies try to joke with the manicured women, who indulge them with coy smiles as if they were big, dumb babies. Elegant older couples with crocs and wisps of professorly gray hair gather their shoulder bags and leather backpacks. A 30-ish hipster couple, he with scraggly beard and falling-apart thrift store T, her with long hair, baggy jeans, and glasses, moan and roll their eyes at the sheer stupidity of it all.
We start the shuffle out the door.

Twenty minutes later, we’re walking through the airport parking lot. Ohio air has an unmistakable smell. Coming back it always seems to me like the first whiff of air you get opening the tent flap in the woods in the morning. In summer it’s light and drifts with the smells of cut grass and clover and water from the hose. In fall it takes on a sharpness that snaps at you like the steam from strong coffee, and behind the sharpness is the vague sweetness of falling leaves. In winter it is laced heavily with wood smoke and the first whiff of it in the morning burns in a yes-I’m-alive kind of way. Later, in the afternoon, it smells like ice.

The air this time was on the border of fall and smelled mostly like late summer sycamore trees. I opened the window and let it blast me all the way back to the apartment.

The first thing we did was go to the supermarket. My obsession with supermarkets has moved from being a sideline feature in my trips to the dominant priority.

“What are we doing?” asked Jorge. “Why are we getting in the car again?”

“We’re going,” I said, “to Krogers.”

Krogers is a warehouse-sized American-style grocery store. The frozen foods section alone could probably house 500 Mexican miscelaneas. I fondled the chips in the snack aisle as though they were family heirlooms. Dragged Jorge by the hand to the ethnic foods section.

“Look!” I said. “Greek! Thai! Chinese! Mexican! You can have it all!”

“Uh-huh,” he conceded. “Wow.”

“And look!” I guided him through the labyrinth produce section, a wonderland of oddly shaped fruits and veggies in colorful heaps. “Organic baby carrots! Kiwis! Portabella mushrooms!”

“Can we get some beer and go to bed?” Jorge asked.

“Beer?” I said. “Wait ‘til you see the microbrews!”

The supermarket is the epitome of the excessive opportunities and endless decisions Americans can face. Jorge is not used to this. He starts to get claustrophic in such a plentiful realm of Ruffles and soup varieties.

“Just choose one,” he’ll say, “whatever.”

But what he doesn’t understand is that I revel in the sheer possibilities; I like just walking the aisles. For some reason, I find all the potential combinations, all the foodie bounty, exhilarating, liberating. Perhaps I have in my blood the awe settlers felt centuries ago at the abundance of resources and land, the abundance of possibilities (once the natives, of course, had been dealt with). Perhaps I have thin-sliced, to borrow from Malcolm Gladwell, and I’ve unconsciously chosen a few dominant American themes which stand out and give rise to a repressed, thrilled nostalgia. One of those themes is this ridiculous overflowing of possibilities and variations – without the framework of a culture rooted in tradition to guide us, we can eat Barbeque Bleu Kettle Chips for dinner or make Vietnamese spring rolls or microwaveable mini burritos.

Eventually, due mostly to Jorge’s lack of shared joy over the abundance of Krogers, we bought beer and chips and left. We navigated by car back to the apartment, a novelty for us, and we fell silent as the car glided like a detached vessel through the night, past neon signs and intersections, pulling up to the curb with a crunch. We walked the leaf-covered sidewalk up to the door.

That was our first night in Ohio.

Columbus is not a very exciting city. Nice does a spectacular job of summing up its appeal. It’s a nice place, maybe even a very nice place, but as far as jolt-you-out-of-your-seat architecture or cultural movements, well, not so much. It does have some great restaurants, and perhaps foodies would be surprised to learn they can get their organic seasonal beet blue cheese salad on there. But overall, it’s not exactly pushing the envelope on anything. It’s comfortable, non-threatening, and uncomplicatedly Ohioan.

So after doing the American coffee shop thing, bagels and pissed off baristas and skinny-decaf-hazelnut-latte mega-orders and friendly well-groomed dogs and The New York Times and the whole package, we left Columbus and headed for the countryside. 70 West out of Columbus towards Wheeling, West Virginia. About thirty minutes outside of the city, past the suburban clutter of Springfield, we hit the hill country.

In southeastern Ohio, the hills are the topographical and aesthetic blueprint, the basic framework for everything else.  Some are gentle and some dive like a bird after a worm. They cross flat green-yellow swaths of corn and soybean fields and slip between patches of dense Ohio woods.   There are pines, maples, walnuts, elms, birches, sycamores, and cherry trees; passing them, my imagination slips into the the woods, where light drifts to a leaf-covered floor, creeks the color of slate and clay run under thick foliage and old logs acquire a deep wise brown. This kind of woods that always draws the same comment out of me—

“Wait,” my brother says, “don’t tell me. This hike makes you feel like you’re in The Last of the Mohicans.”

Yes, Ohio hikes always make me feel like I’m in The Last of the Mohicans.

We get to the farm in late afternoon when everything is steeped in a gold-peach light. The cluster of apple trees on the hill, the horses, the woods.
Ohio is the only place I use the term “woods.” A woods is different than a forest; more familiar, less intimidating. The difference between the two is to me the difference between midwestern and western landscapes. Where the West has that sublime, spectacular mountain scenery, peaks and valleys and pine forests that make you feel like one of the barely perceptible figures in American 19th century landscape painting, the Midwest has a subtler type of wilderness. It embraces and lulls one into contemplation more than it wham-bam-wow intimidates. This is the difference between woods and forest.

This place, this patch of Ohio, is what I have come back for this time. Here are the smells and the landscapes and the sensations braided into my Ohio-born self.

We eat grilled cheese, we have bonfires in the apple orchard, we make s’mores much to Jorge’s disgust, we play cards, we walk trails through Ohio woods that are a hyper summer green, we play frisbee racing through fields of Queen Ann’s lace. We visit caves and antique stores. We drive to Dandy Don’s general store, where Jorge gets an illuminating lesson in American culture.

“Do they have paletas?” he asks.

“Suckers?” I say.  “I don’t think so. I don’t see any.”

“Yes, honey, we have suckers!” pipes up a voice from the front of the store. I look up to see a big, vibrant white-haired woman getting up from her chair. “They’re over here.” I shoot a glance back at Jorge and he follows me to the next aisle.

“You see?” says the woman, with a sweeping gesture across Dandy Don’s impressive sucker collection. “Ring pops, push pops, dum-dum’s, you know, we got ‘em all.”

“Thanks,” says Jorge. But the woman is just warming up.

“And here,” she gestures at a lollipop tree, “are tootsie pops and blow pops. Do you know the difference?”

“No,” Jorge says meekly, like a third grader being called on in class.

“Well,” the kindly teacher says, “the blow pops have gum in ‘em, and the tootsie pops have chocolate in ‘em!”

Then, satisfied, she sits down again.

Of course, we had to buy a blow pop. I chose sour apple. Jorge thanked the lady, who didn’t blink an eye at his Mexicanness and wished us a nice day, and we walked out into the afternoon. The drive back to the farm was a memory of blue and white sky, green field and forest, red barns, and the white lines in the center of the road undulating up and down over low hills.

The blow pop was sourer than I remembered, but Ohio, as often happens when you’re away for years and familiar places begin to drift into the realm of myth, seemed to me sweeter.