Orangeville, OH

My parents moved to Orangeville, Ohio when I was seven years old. It is the place I remember most as home. Once a hub along a river with which I am well acquainted, but the name of which I do not know, Orangeville's bank, post office, grocer, cheese factory, and other shops have mostly closed down. There is a park next to the river where old men fish and where young kids come to throw rocks in the water and swing and slide at the playground. I used the park as my starting point for what I then thought was trespassing; though, then, I didn't give it much thought (I had yet to learn about the Public Trust Doctrine). I "trespassed" along the bank of this unnamed river every chance I got, in summer and winter. I ran into beavers building dams, geese protecting their nests, and deer confused by the shallow, miniature archipeligo of sandbar and island and fallen tree and mudbank. I crossed thin ice with trepidation to explore banks I had not as yet learned to reach by land. My mother told me to stay away from the river. Obeying her never crossed my mind.

When I think now about why I love nature so much, why it seems to take precedence over so many of my thoughts, I think of this place. I think of the mist in the morning and the exhilaration I felt running along the shrouded maze of inlets and ravines. It seems to me so beautiful and elemental that I almost fear to go back to it, that such a return would erase the meaning the place provides, the kind of ancient wellspring of inspiration I envision it to be as it lives in my thoughts.

I know that this strip of wilderness is not wilderness at all. I know that it is created by the Pymatuning Dam, that it is left alone because it is too steep to be farmed by the Farmer's who own most of it and because the rest of it serves as public hunting grounds. I know that it is a relatively narrow area, surrounded by fields of corn and soy and likely polluted by agricultural runoff. I know from old people in my town that the old cheese factory along the river used to stink up the town and dump whey into the river, which would kill the fish. I am not so naive to think it exists in reality as it functions in my thoughts. Yet, it lives in my mind so beautifully, so usefully, that I deplore the denial of the watery arbored sanctuary of youthful imagination.