20 Hours in Ohio, and Free Doughnuts are a Lie

You do not have to work hard to convince me to take a trip with you, ESPECIALLY if you tell me that I can pick some of the stops.

So when the younger kid came to me with the information that the lead singer from her favorite band was going to be playing a concert in Columbus, Ohio--

--and she suggested that if we went, maybe I'd like to also do a little sightseeing along the way, she basically barely had time to put a period at the end of her sentence before I had concert tickets in my online shopping cart. 

And a couple of weeks later, there we were at this bar in Ohio!

Do you guys like to stand as close as possible at concerts, or are you calm and happy to stand at the back? I'm short, and I like to stand in the front so I can see, although a lifetime of this has definitely contributed to my current hearing loss and the front of the crowd, pressed against the stage, is the last place I'll want to be when the inevitable zombie apocalypse hits. Oh, well. I wasn't planning on surviving the zombie apocalypse, anyway...

Although Jake Ewald didn't play all the Slaughter Beach, Dog deep cuts that the kid had been hoping for, he did play one of their biggest hits, "Summer Windows"--

--so my own personal basic bitch self was satisfied:

I didn't know Ladybird before the concert, but this is my favorite song of theirs now:

The next morning, I picked our breakfast spot solely because of this TripAdvisor review that lauded the complementary DIY coffee bar and complementary serve-yourself doughnuts:



The DIY coffee bar was as indicated and was awesome, but y'all, the complementary serve-yourself doughnuts was a LIE!!!!! They did indeed have serve-yourself doughnuts, but you for sure had to pay for them. 

I think that TripAdvisor reviewer accidentally stole herself some doughnuts...

Ah, well. My doughnut-less but very en-coffeed breakfast was delicious:

Afterwards, I managed to snooker us into not one, but TWO sightseeing stops!

Obviously, if you're going to Ohio, you HAVE to visit an ancient Native American mound:

Shrum Mound is said to be an Adena burial mound--

--but as far as I can tell, it's never been excavated or even really researched, so I'm not sure how accurate that identification is. It's right next to a quarry, across the street from a housing development, and next door to another house, though, so probably its biggest claim to fame is that it wasn't destroyed the same way that whatever other earthworks were surely around it must have been. For example, there used to be a mound twice as tall at the intersection of Mound and High streets, but it was destroyed in the 1830s.

Here it is with me for scale!

Since it's roughly on our way home, I was also able to convince everyone to detour over to the Charles Young Buffalo Soldiers National Monument:

The kids and I have been here before, but didn't realize until we got there that back then it was open "by appointment only," so this is the first time I've stepped foot inside!

There weren't a lot of artifacts inside, but the signage was VERY informative. I didn't even realize until this moment that I didn't actually know what a buffalo soldier was!

Charles Young's story is very interesting, and I'd love to read a more substantive biography of him. Apparently, his whole life, during his education and his career, he suffered from systematic, institutionalized racism, and he just... persisted!

He did incredibly well for himself, and worked consistently to lift others up with him, but who knows what he could have accomplished if he hadn't been beaten down at every opportunity?

Racism is so depressing. Let's eat an apple fritter about it:

Will we be able to complete the Butler County Donut Trail in a timely fashion, considering that most of our trips to Ohio are for college drop-offs and pick-ups? 

I don't know, but I'm fully prepared to get diabetes trying!

P.S. Want more obsessively-compiled lists of travel spots and activities around the Midwest and the world? Check out my Craft Knife Facebook page!

One More Site To Go Until I Earn Wilbear Wright

Local, independent museums are always so delightfully surprising and strange.

As in, I never would have told you that when I planned to hit up Butler County Warbirds, part of the Dayton Aviation Trail, early on a Saturday morning, I would also be visiting one of the best, most interesting, and absolutely most surprising private collections of World War II memorabilia.

But there we have it!

The primary goal of Butler County Warbirds is to preserve, protect, and restore its collection of antique planes and equipment, but the founder also made a small museum out of his own personal collection of military memorabilia, padded out with donations and loans from other collectors. The display is my favorite kind of intense--as in, there's a LOT of stuff, and a lot of it is the kind of everyday item or ephemera that it's more unusual to have had preserved for our present-day benefit. 

World War I gas mask

I remember this one from when the kids and I studied World War I. We engaged in trench warfare and listened to rousing tunes on Spotify!

A newspaper is usually a great example of ephemera you wouldn't normally see preserved, but people actually often saved entire newspapers when there was a big headline. It doesn't make it any less interesting to see, though!

The displays are well-organized chronologically and by theme, but one place where there's room for a research-minded volunteer to contribute is in explanation of provenance, meaning, and context. The volunteer docents had excellent general knowledge but weren't able to speak about specific pieces, so I had to martial my patience and bide my time until I could look everything up at home, ahem.

For instance, check out this INSANE KNIFE!!!

Have you ever seen anything more baller outside of a movie? It's apparently a Skull and Cobra Fighting Knife, and in my enthusiasm I just happened to take a photo that shows that it's also the even rarer "pig nose" variant, so probably made for a Marine with a blade repurposed from another knife. It's interesting that soldiers wanted fighting knives enough to make them for each other when they weren't being issued, but now I'm curious to know if soldiers were really out there knife fighting each other during World War II or what?

I thought it was cool to see a real syringe, but I wish I knew whose Purple Heart that was...

My partner and I had just seen some other examples of painted flying jackets when we were at the National Museum of the Air Force, but I love that this display has several of the pilot's things together:

This display was also pretty wild. The caption for this armband reads "JEWISH ARMBAND VILIJAMPOLE GHETTO":

That location is particularly notable because there was a well-documented underground resistance movement there, but over a year before the end of the war that ghetto was emptied and everyone who lived there was sent to be murdered in concentration camps. 

This page from the Zekelman Holocaust Center has examples of the typical badges that Jews were required to wear in different regions. The one in the photo matches the first example. I'm curious about the stamps on the badge in the photo, though. I've seen stamps on other badges, but I've never learned who did them or why.

Here's another amazing, and also baffling, artifact:

Its caption reads just "CONCENTRATION CAMP ARM BAND JEWISH HOMOSEXUAL," and I have so many questions! Obviously, I want to know where it came from, who wore it, what concentration camp they were confined in, and what happened to them. I'm also curious about how atypical the badge is:

People normally had to make their badges themselves, or obtain them from someone else who had handmade them, and this one is beautifully done. But it doesn't seem to be how they were technically meant to look, and I can't find another one like it. The closest comparison is here, interestingly also part of a private collection.

It's almost physically painful to look at it and not know who had to wear it and what happened to them, much less what happened afterwards that led it to a display case in a tiny museum in Ohio. 

After the Butler County Warbirds--and its Dayton Aviation Trail stamp!--we went to Wright "B" Flyer, Inc., another small non-profit that makes and flies recreations of the Wright airplanes. 

We got to actually climb up and sit inside a working recreation of the Wright B Flyer--

--and an actual Model T, including honking the ooga horn--

--and check out another modernized version of the Wright B Flyer that's still in progress. At this point, I think we've encountered 50 Wright Flyer images, models, and recreations!

Here's a good video that shows what the organization does. Pay a lot of attention to that good footage of wing warping--that's the Wright brothers' biggest innovation!

At some point while touring the Butler County Warbirds planes with two docents, I asked about how people were able to fly these DIY and kit-built literal airplanes. Was the FAA not... concerned? That's when I learned that there is literally such a designation as "experimental airplane," and yes, you CAN get the FAA to come to your backyard shed and certify your experimental airplane so you can tool it around unmonitored airfields!

Y'all. I think I found my mid-life crisis.

My other mid-life crisis plan is to buy land that has genuine prehistoric Native mounds on it and then, just, I don't know... roll around on all my mounds, I guess. While preserving and protecting them, of course.

So obviously, after all this airplane content, we had to 1) pick up Raising Cane's chicken (my favorite fast food place because the menu is so manageable, so PLEASE do not tell me who the company's owners donate money to or what other atrocities they've committed because I promise you I am boycotting enough businesses at it is) and 2) take it to the nearby Miamisburg Mound to eat it:

I did not realize it until we got there, but you can also CLIMB the mound!

So we did!

I find it frustrating when a mound like this doesn't seem to have been professionally studied in contemporary times (this excavation in the 1800s doesn't count, because they're also talking about how the mound definitely contained Nephilim skeletons, sigh), but I'm also horrified whenever I learn that a mound has been taken apart and then put back together just so people can see what's inside, so I guess there's no pleasing me.

When I buy my property with mounds on it, you're not even going to so much as look at them while you've got a garden shovel in your hand or I swear to God I'll bite you.

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

In Which I Drive to Ohio, Talk to a Stranger, Eat a Disappointing Bagel Sandwich, and Tour Octagon Earthworks in the Sleet

The teenager's Trashion/Refashion Show was also the occasion of my college student's very first weekend visit home. It was a pretty great weekend in which she picked back up right where she left off, walking the dog and gossiping about our favorite books and then reading more books while sitting side-by-side on the couch. 

Of course, like a good college student, she had class at 9:30 am the next Monday. So even though at 9:30 pm on Sunday we were on our way to get post-show ice cream with all the other cool teenagers--

--at 4:30 on Monday morning we were pulling out of the driveway and on our way to Ohio!

Not gonna lie--I am maybe about five years too old to pull off a four-hour drive at 4:30 in the morning. The airport, now? That's only like an hour away. I can do the airport at any old time. But a genuine 4:30 am road trip, with the dark, empty highways and nothing good on the radio and turning the headlights off bright whenever a car passes even though I can't see for shit without them on bright... yeah, I'll be fine if I don't have to do that too many more times in the rest of my life.

Fortunately, I had an alert and capable college student with me, so after I'd driven maybe an hour, just long enough to convince myself that I'd done my share for a bit, we switched and I had a good, long snooze while my kid drove the sun up.

It turned out that this day was also the college's Admitted Students Day--I remember when my kid and I were attending Admitted Students Day!--so campus was quite a bit busier at 8:00 in the morning than I'd anticipated, and when I swung over to park after dropping the kid at her dorm to freshen up, there was a line to get into the visitor parking garage.

A guy was attending cars as they pulled up to the garage, leaning into each driver's window to chat and then beckoning them on. I guess my sweatpants and hoodie and bags-under-eyes look didn't fit the vibe of all the other cars with family groups and teens in tow, because instead of just directing me to the parking, the attendant looked at me and then said, "Are you faculty or staff or..."

I said, "Hi! I'm actually just here visiting my freshman!"

The guy literally replied, "Visiting a freshman. Huh! I've never heard that one before!"

We both blinked at each other.

Finally, I was all, "So... the sign says there's visitor parking here? Where I can park while I'm visiting my freshman?"

The guy was just like, "Pull forward," and then turned to the next car.

THIS, you guys. When I tell you that I have a ton of social anxiety about talking to strangers and I hate doing it, it is because of THIS! I SWEAR to you that my social interactions with strangers are baffling and strange MOST OF THE TIME. It's definitely me, too, because every time I'm with Matt and I keep my mouth shut, his social interactions go fine. But if I am there and I happen to open my mouth, suddenly the Wal-mart cashier is telling us all about how all her friends think she's weird or the guy at the gas station counter is ranting about Ft. Lauderdale... that latter incident will happen to me approximately ten hours after this parking garage interaction, when all I want in the world is to buy my Diet Dr. Pepper, barbecue Pringles, and Flipz. 

Even though my kid had a full day of classes, I met her in the Student Union first for a breakfast that she'd been telling me all semester was gross--turned out, it WAS gross!--and then off she went, popping back in to check on me off and on all morning while I got some work done. After another sandwich, this one only slightly less disappointing, we finally said goodbye, so that I could spend the afternoon on my own Ohio adventure before trekking back home. 

Because as excellent luck would have it, Octagon Earthworks, which is currently leased by a golf course of all things and is only open to the public four days a year, was having one of its rare open houses THAT AFTERNOON!

Y'all KNOW how I feel about the ancient mound builders of North America. I am OBVIOUSLY not passing up a chance to see the Octagon Earthworks!

First, though, I revisited the Great Circle Earthworks for a guided tour and a look through the museum that was closed the last time I visited.

This is the view into the Great Circle, looking towards Eagle Mound.

This moat did once hold water, likely as an architectural feature to incorporate the reflections of the sky. Early archaeologists even observed standing water. When the site was used as Ohio fairgrounds, though, animals were kept in the depressions, and the area deteriorated enough that it no longer holds water. 

It was cold and raining the last time I visited the Great Circle. It was cold and raining again on this day!

Looking towards the three-lobed Eagle Mound, likely once the site of ceremonial buildings that were purposefully burned and buried over.

The guided tour was well worth holding my camera under my coat out of the freezing rain and furiously berating myself for thinking that my hoodie could effectively substitute for a wooly cap, though. We hardy few learned that the land that the Newark Earthworks was constructed on had been previously maintained as a prairie, even though this area of Ohio was traditionally woodlands. The prairie had been purposefully maintained via regular burnings, probably at least partially for hunting, and would certainly have made a temptingly perfect spot for the earthworks construction that began around 160 BCE. 

This site is currently the largest complex of earthworks known anywhere in the world. It was also likely a tourist or pilgrimage destination for much of North America, as objects were found at the site that can be traced to places as far-flung as Yellowstone and Arizona. Post-colonial farming, construction, and urban development destroyed most of the earthworks, but there are some enticing early archaeological records that hint at earthen walls running for several miles and crossing the river, pointing directly at the ancient Chillicothe Earthworks. 

The various parts of the Newark Earthworks were also created using the same base unit, shared by both the square and circle earthworks. Even Octagon Earthworks is that same square with the sides opened up. There are a lot of interesting equivalencies and patterns, and it's clear that there was some sort of overarching organization. 

Earthen walls also form lanes to connect different earthworks. In the photo below, you can see the opening in the Great Circle, with the visitor center in the background. Past that opening, on either side of the visitor center, are earthen walls that form a wide lane that once led to another circular earthwork that contained burial mounds. I believe that these were excavated, but as with Spiro Mounds, study can't really be done on the remains because it's hard to trace a direct lineage to a current Indian nation that can evaluate the ethics and give permission. 

Below is a map of the reconstructed site. We're in that circle up top, and you can see Octagon Earthworks below it and to the right. 

This map comes from an 1840s archaeological study of the site that was published by Smithsonian. That study is in the public domain now, so you can buy cheap reprints!

Here's a fun tidbit from the museum--Stonehenge was completed about 1,500 years before the Newark Earthworks!

I had fully intended to spend the entire afternoon wandering around the Great Circle and Octagon Earthworks, but being wet to the skin and mildly hypothermic, I instead chose to sit in the car after my Great Circle visit, blast the heat, and read on my phone until it was time for my guided tour of the Octagon Earthworks:

And then it started sleeting! YAY!

The Octagon Earthworks, though, is the site that I WAS THERE TO SEE, and I was not leaving. Thanks to the stupid golf course the site is only open to the public four days a year, and it was already a lightning strike miracle that I happened to be there on one of those days.

To be honest, though, I sort of figured the tour would be cancelled and I'd just wait around and then go home, but at 3:00 on the dot everyone's car doors opened and we all bundled our way over to meet our tour guide and go on our adventure.

The golf course idea would be kind of cool if it wasn't completely sacrilegious, because apparently they DO use the earthen mounds as obstacles, like large-scale Putt-Putt. Below, for instance, is a smaller earthen circle, possibly intended for visitors to stop and purify themselves before entering the Octagon Earthworks. The golf course uses it for target practice.

At every corner of the Octagon is an opening, but then in front of every opening, inside the Octagon, is a shorter earthen wall that hides that entrance from sight:

Through photos, you can share with me the scattered showers and bouts of sleet that came and went during our hour-long tour.

So when you stand inside the Octagon and look towards the edges, you're completely visually enclosed by earthen walls. 

It's also HUGE inside:

As with the Great Circle, these trees aren't original to the site and instead grew up afterwards. Part of the Octagon Earthworks was also used as a potato field once upon a time, so needed some reconstruction.

In the 1960s, speculation really ramped up about Stonehenge being an astronomical observatory, and it became trendy to make the same speculations about all kinds of early monuments. The rebuttal to this is that you can draw all the imaginary lines between rocks that you want to, and obviously some of those lines are going to happen to line up with interesting things. 

So two professors from Earlham (my kid was accepted to this college but we didn't really consider it because WOW, the tuition!) decided to debunk the whole "astronomical observatory" theory by bringing a group to Octagon Earthworks. The plan was to draw all the imaginary lines they could think to draw, then match up whatever could be matched up to solar phenomena, then run the math to show that the whole thing was a coincidence. 

Except that they couldn't match ANYTHING to a solar phenomenon, which is both statistically unlikely AND kinda points to the Stonehenge layout being a little more than coincidence, ahem. But when they switched to examining LUNAR phenomena, they started getting hits!

Once every 18.6 years, the Moon rises as far north on our horizon as it will ever rise. Over the next 9.3 years, the Moonrise shifts ever southward, until it rises at the southernmost point on our horizon that it will ever rise. Then it starts moving back northward for the next 9.3 years until it's back to that northernmost point. Octagon Earthworks marks both those points.

Probably once a day, I stop and think about that fact. If you were an ancient mathematician and astronomer, how the fuck would you KNOW THAT?!? You'd have to have direct observational records for the past hundred years to pick out that pattern. You'd have to map it in the sky, or physically mark it on the earth, to record it. Did they mark it, then build it and hope they were right, or did they wait until the timing was perfect, mark the rise that they observed, then build the walls afterwards?

We're lucky ducks, because the next major lunar standstill, this northernmost Moonrise, is in 2024/2025! 

Here's one of the walls that marks that rise:

Another interesting spot is this seeming gate at the opposite end of the Octagon, marked with curved walls:

It was originally thought that it might have once been an arch, but when it was excavated--nope! Just a cool-looking gate that was then built over!

It was still in the upper 30s and spitting down sleet and freezing rain at the end of our tour, but it was fine because a few hours earlier I'd re-rigged the loose windshield wiper back into place in a way that I was reasonably sure wouldn't come flying off again, at least if I didn't turn the wipers too high. 

So back in the car I got, shivering and wet to the skin, and blasted the heat and mapped myself back home. I waved as I passed my kid's exit, then managed to put myself in every single rush hour in every large city that I drove through for the entire trip home.

I'll see you on top of the Octagon Earthwork for lunistice!