The eastern half of Richland County is full of forests, fields, and folklore.

Shawnee warriors once hunted the area's rich store of deer and fish, but today it's farm country:  corn and soy, red barns and silver silos.  In the easternmost sections of the county, where Richland bleeds into Ashland, Amish and Mennonite families maintain the farming lifestyle of the original white settlers who first pioneered the land, no electricity, no machinery, no frills or foolishness -- traveling by horse-and-buggy, tying their hay up in old-fashioned sheaves, and hanging their laundry out to dry in the wind.  But mostly, today's inhabitants of Richland County are normal folks with televisions, baseball caps, John Deere tractors, basketball hoops, and Ford pick-up trucks.  Generally speaking, the people in the eastern half of Richland County work hard, vote Republican, and love Ohio State football.

Skirted by colorful sprays of wildflowers, purple, orange, and yellow, Ohio State Route 96 weaves its way from Shelby to Ashland, following the contours of the land.  It's a route that demands one's time and attention -- carefully accelerating and braking, following the curves in the road, watching for white-tailed deer, especially at dawn or dusk.  Red-tailed hawks perch on fence posts and telephone poles, watching and waiting to swoop down for a groundhog, rabbit, squirrel, or mouse.  Around this time of the year, the corn is tassling, and the evenings are humid and moist, like a whispered secret.  Late in the day, an amber light slants across the landscape, forming long, cool shadows, with the soy forming soft, verdant beds in the fields, in which the mist nestles down for the night.  As the sun sets and the moon rises, lightning bugs sparkle from the forests.  Crickets sing on the breeze, but otherwise a hush hangs over the land.

And in these moments, the stories return to me.

There are so many stories from this countryside:  legacies, legends, myths, and ghost stories.  Each one seems to be connected to a particular landmark.  There's the Crying Bridge, on Geisinger Road.  And the Olivesburg Fork, close to the spot where State Route 96 and State Route 603 intersect.  There are stories of the Ku Klux Klan and Satanists, convening in the forests and occasionally venturing out to the settlements to wreak their havoc on unsuspecting citizens.  My wife's family -- Richland County residents for seven generations -- has a story about a Moonlight Interrogation.  And almost none of these stories have been written down, as far as I can tell.  After a little bit of research on the internet at at the local library, it seems like very few of these stories exist beyond the aural accounts of Richland County residents -- and the ones that do exist are very condensed, very short, and honestly not recorded the way that I remember hearing them.  So I want take some of these warm summer evenings to see if I can remember some of these stories, draw them out and give them room to breathe, and then set the stories down in written form.  I don't know if I'll be able to get around to all of them, but I'm going to do the best I can do to harvest some of the fruit of this Rich Land of Stories.

Did you know that you can travel from Amsterdam to Calcutta to Toronto to Damascus... without ever leaving the state of Ohio?

It's true.  Ohio has an astonishing number of cities which are named for other world cities.  Dozens of them.  As I drive throughout the state, I see signs pointing to all of these various places, and I can't help but smile.  It's become something of a hobby to catalog all the different names that fall along these lines -- several of which have comically-different pronunciations than the other (generally more well-known) cities which have similar names.  For instance, most people have heard of Milan ("mee-LAHN") in Italy -- but how many people have heard of Milan ("MY-lun") in Ohio.  Most people have heard of the capital of Peru:  Lima ("LEE-ma") -- but did you know that there's also a city in Ohio called Lima ("LY-ma")?  The French may have their famed palace, Versailles ("ver-SY) -- but Ohio has a city named Versailles (ver-SAILS)...

European cities are the most popular namesakes for Ohio knock-offs.  Names from the German-speaking world are quite popular:  Berlin, Bremen, Dresden, Frankfort, Hanover, New Bremen, and New Vienna (not to mention Germantown!).  From the Low Countries, one can find Ohio cities named Amsterdam, Holland, New Holland, Antwerp, and Ghent.  Hearkening back to the British Isles, there are also Ohio cities which have been named:  Dublin, East Liverpool, London, New London, Manchester, Oxford, Plymouth, and Sheffield.  Greek/Balkan names also feature frequently throughout Ohio:  Athens, Berea, East Sparta, Macedonia, New Athens, and Troy.  There are also a couple of names derived from the Iberian Peninsula:  namely Toledo and Lisbon.  Throw in a few Italian names: Geneva, Genoa, Milan, Parma, Venice Heights... A few French names:  New Paris, Strasburg, and Versailles... A couple of Polish references:  Poland and Warsaw... And << Voila! >> you've got a veritable Continent within a state one-third the size of Germany.

When it comes to African namesakes, however, the only thing that comes close to such a parallelism is Sahara Sands, Ohio.  And I couldn't find any Ohio cities that share the names of prominent locations in Australia / Oceania.

But still, there's quite a bit to be discovered in Ohio.

I'm woefully out-of-touch with American life.  It's incredible how much some things have changed over the last seven and a half years, since I moved from Ohio to Amsterdam.

Take text-messaging, for instance.  When I left America, mobile telephony was nowhere near as common as it is today.  In fact, I didn't get my first mobile phone until I moved to the Netherlands.  At that point, people mostly used cell phones for making phone calls.  Over time, though, text-messaging started to become popular -- in Europe as well as in North America -- and though the technological part of it didn't give me any troubles (I actually wonder if Europeans may have adapted to text-messaging more quickly than Americans), I just couldn't keep up with the popular American usage and cultural evolution of the technology.  Text-messaging short-hand in particular.  I heard about it in the media, and I understood the ways that the 4s and 8s and R's and U's and consonant contractions were supposed to save time and space -- but I genuinely thought that it was just a silly thing that high-school sophomores did, like practicing your "autograph" a thousand times on the back of your Trapper-Keeper.

After a week of trying to assimilate back into my "home" culture, though, I realize that I was seriously mistaken.  Text-messaging is at a totally different level than I ever anticipated.  And the usage of the text-messaging short-hand is far more widespread than I had ever imagined.  Last Friday, I responded to one of my friend's text messages with a suggestion and he wrote back "k."  I knew that his single-letter response meant "OK / Affirmative" (I'm not that clueless about text-messaging short-hand).  But when I laughed about the incident to my sister and her husband, saying that I would have to harass my friend (who's my age) about his teeny-bopper short-hand, they stared at me with blank looks on their faces that told me how far off from reality I was.  It turns out that "k" is a perfectly professional and adult way of responding to text messages -- confirmed by several people my age or older, with occupations as prestigious or more prestigious than my own -- and, if anything, it's considered just plain silly to write back the extravagantly overblown two-letter version of the affirmative response.

As you can see, I'm woefully out-of-touch with American life and linguistics.

Part of me wants to be indignant and stubborn about this -- pouting about how text-messaging "impoverishes" the English language, fussing and fretting about grammar and syntax.  But ultimately, I don't want to be that guy.  Truth be told, American linguistics have always been about adaptation and transition.  Looking up the history of the phrase, "OK" (or "okay," depending on your preference), it's easy to see that "k" is every bit as good as any of the other derivatives.  No one actually knows what the "O" and the "K" are actually supposed to stand for.  Some think it's a bastardization of the Choctaw (Native American) word "okeh," which means "it is indeed."  Others suggest that it's an adaptation of the Greek phrase "Ola kala," meaning "everything's good" or "all good" -- brought into popular usage by Greek railway workers in the United States during the 1800s, as the initials were stamped on various shipments to indicate that they were ready to go.  Still others trace the usage of "O.K." back to Martin van Buren's campaign for the American presidency, in the late 1830s, in which he used the abbreviated version of his nickname, "Old Kinderhook."  But the most widely accepted etymology of "OK" goes back to an American fad during the early part of the 1800s, in which comic misspellings of common phrases were abbreviated and cemented in the public consciousness:  "K.G." for "Know Good" (no good) and "N.S." for "Nuff Said" (enough said)... and, most notably, "O.K." for "Oll Korrect" (all correct).  Some very interesting -- and widely varied -- theories, wouldn't you say?

Ultimately, no one really knows how the phrase "OK" came into popular usage.  We just know that it was an American phenomenon -- though it's now been adopted by hundreds of other languages -- and that it was likely based on some sort of "incorrect" grammar (possibly intentional).  Based on all these criteria, then, the text-messaging "k" seems to be a surprisingly appropriate adaptation of the old terminology.  I may not like it, and I may be slow to adapt to the cultural transitions -- but hey, such is the American way.  K?

Yesterday, the Dutch national football (soccer) team suffered an agonizing loss -- falling to the Spanish in overtime, 1-0.  It was a hard-fought game.  Even though many faulted the way that the Dutch team approached the game (calling it ugly, thuggish, and brutal), I am proud of the way that my adopted country played in this year's World Cup tournament.  They showed mental toughness, and they didn't let the Spanish intimidate them.  They kept to their game-plan, and it almost paid off for them.  If they could have held out for just four more minutes, they would have had the opportunity to win the game on penalty kicks (against an opponent who was, by most accounts, clearly better than they were).  If they could have held out for just four more minutes, I genuinely believe the game could have been theirs:  the first championship in Dutch football (soccer) history.

But it wasn't meant to be.  It turned out to be just another heart-break for an eternally-frustrated fan base.

Last Thursday, the city of Cleveland, Ohio suffered an agonizing loss -- when basketball superstar LeBron James decided to leave the Cleveland Cavaliers and sign a new contract with the Miami Heat instead.  The Cavs gave it their best shot, managing a clever campaign to keep their native son (James grew up in nearby Akron) playing in Cleveland, which was admittedly an uphill battle for a city which has been having a rough half-century or so.  And unfortunately, the story didn't have a happy ending for people from Ohio.  Similar to the way it happens in business, politics, and industry, Ohio sports are plagued by the fact that the best and the brightest often end up moving on to greener pastures in the South, or on the coasts, or in the bigger cities, where they achieve their glory.  Cleveland, in particular, seems to have a penchant for developing really good teams and really good players, but then losing at the last minute when the ultimate prize appears to be within their grasp.  There had been some hope that the LeBron James situation might be different -- that maybe he could be the "messiah" of Ohio sports.

But it wasn't meant to be.  It turned out to be just another heart-break for an eternally-frustrated fan base.

There's something astonishingly similar about these two agonizing losses, these heart-breaks, even though they're for very different cultures, different sports, and different types of loss.  On the emotional level, though, they're very similar.  Close but not close enough.  Good but not good enough.  Always the bridesmaid, never the bride.  I know the pain of Dutch loss, Ohio loss.  But the pain doesn't change my fondness for Oranje voetbal or Ohio basketball.  If anything, the pain intensifies my feelings of identification and affinity.  We may be mildly pathetic, but we've still got pride.  We may lose when it comes to the "big game," but we're loveable losers.