A series of goodbyes: Columbus, Ohio

A Parade of Goodbyes: Columbus, Ohio A lifetime ago, I gave Central Ohio a series of hard goodbyes. I got flack for numerous good-bye happy hours to satisfy different blocks of friends. Some I would see again. Some I would not. The newspaper where I worked was bought as I left town, foundered for several years until Columbus’ dominant media group merged the two weekly paper chains. I had a few folks who remember me, but the list has grown shorter.

The first town in my goodbye tour is the only I could see myself casually visiting again as part of a larger Ohio trip – I do still love that old dirty barrel city on Lake Erie. I will find reasons to return to Cleveland, city where I was born, city you badmouth in front of me at your own risk, city that people like when circumstances bring them there.

Columbus is different to me, the big city where I came of age in my 20s. Working as a reporter gave me a deeper knowledge of the place. Since moving, there have been dozens of Columbus weekends, none feeling somewhat final until now.

Chalk up the recent frequency in visits to my need to escape Nashville and the shell of a life I used to live. But the easy trips are about to end. After four substantial visits to Columbus in the past year, this felt like a firmer ending.

For once I did not share in the driving. My friend Chris offered and I had no problem giving directions every 100 miles. Despite losing the rain around the Kentucky border, we had a gray but uneventful trip up 65 to Louisville before taking 71 through Cincinnati and finally Columbus, still recovering from a recent snowstorm, not the sloppy rain that fell furiously across the south through January and February.

South of Columbus comes first whiff from the Franklin County landfill, arguably the highest point in this country. The gulls flock and the scent passes quickly into the industrial belt on the South Side, then the baking bread odors from the Kroger bakery, which may now close forever. Hard to imagine I- 670 without the scent of crisping dough.

A traffic jam on the innerbelt gave us a chance to take my favorite back route into Columbus – Riverside Drive, which follows the Scioto River’s east bank. It’s a pretty road when it hews close to the Griggs Reservoir, where marshes and decorative stone fences line front yards and parks slope down the shore.

Hungry and thirsty, we crossed to Old North Columbus (glad the name stuck for this part of town stuck between Clintonville and North Campus) for Hounddog’s Pizza. We always end up there. It’s a comfortable place, crafted into a bar from a century-old horse stable. My friend Katy proudly gave us copies of her first issue as Columbus CEO editor.

The wind blew hard Sunday morning, dumping recycling bins. Beams of my friend’s duplex rattled and groaned, stirring up old ghosts of construction. I woke up not knowing where I was, emerging from the coma-like sleep I only receive away from my elder cat. Still, I skipped a hangover and was ready to face Columbus in February, the month when the skies could quickly turn nasty.

In Old Hilliard, we paid a welcome visit to the Starliner Diner. Somehow we missed waves of diners, getting a table immediately. Everyone had breakfast burritos and coffee, satisfaction total.

We passed the university, Ohio Stadium quiet and cold. The university only grew, sprouting new towers every year along with its namesake medical center. The older I got, the more important lands of OSU seemed to be its vast farm holdings around several Columbus suburbs. The land was immensely valuable but its crops and herds were invaluable, preserving the last rural patches near Upper Arlington. A second farm unit abuts the university airport, long the source of ire in surrounding communities. But the airport buffered development of thousands of bare acres into subdivisions and new retail development. The tradeoff always seemed worthwhile to me.

Since our primary purpose in Columbus was the Melted Music Festival (see previous post), the nostalgia trip was cut a little short. The last year left me satisfied I crossed off many Columbus essentials, acts I never considered during the eight years I lived here or in the 10 years of previous visits. Melted helped. The festival had a solidly Columbus crowd, light on DBs, mostly friendly and unpretentious.

Of course this last visit missed a laundry list of people and places. No Mike Brown and Gretchen James. No Jeff and Melissa Braithwaite and family. No Franklin Park Conservatory. No Dennis Laycock. No Sinclair Road. No Villa Nova. No Old Worthington. No Rob Treynor and family and the State Theater in London. No Bob’s Bar. No Mozart’s. No 4927 Lunar Drive, 5100 Arbor Village Drive or 1266 Harkers Court. No Stacy sisters. No brewery visits (but plenty of Columbus and Ohio beer). No unfortunate encounters with old friends I am glad dropped off. No German Village. No 5K or half-marathon. No Darby Creek metro park.

That’s not an exhaustive list. There were plenty of glimpses of a former life. That’s true of any place you live for eight years, especially in your 20s, especially as a reporter where you have to learn the quickest routes across town when someone jokingly threatens to blow up a state office building or brake failure sends a firetruck careening into a neighborhood bar only now torn down to add more luxury condos.

Monday morning we left Columbus on a cold morning bathed in sunlight. On the way out, I introduced my friend to Tim Horton’s, explaining the Canadian institution’s unexpected presence in Columbus (Wendy’s once owned the coffee chain and gave it wings around Wendy’s home market). Not the world’s greatest breakfast or coffee, admittedly. It’s a just more special when irregular. Tim Horton’s won’t stand up to the coffee snobs, but its good, unpretentious coffee, doughnuts and breakfast sandwiches.

Once Grove City passes, the drive is a race to Cincinnati’s outer reaches. Farmland rips away. Some struggle for beauty in Ohio no matter the season. On this day, the washboard terrain south of Columbus had a weathered regality. The farms soldiered through seasons and centuries, broken by this highway and others. The Little Miami Valley, then Cincinnati and its descent to the Ohio River, swollen as I have ever known it following the flooding rains of February.

From the passenger seat, I ran through every uneventful drive home, from Comfest a month after I moved to cutting through the Ohio River hills to visit Rabbit Hash. Not once had the route been blocked for hours or detoured, not even with the decade of construction widening 65 from Elizabethtown to the Tennessee border. It always seemed so easy. Somehow the road always flowed when I passed to and from Columbus.