Journey of The White Bear #5: A Kid from Ohio

This isn't me, but spillway sliding with my friend Robert was probably the most exciting thing I did as a kid in Ohio.  I was always a weird kid, really shy, pretty smart, horrible at sports, and I liked to draw.  My family moved nearly every year.  I was born in Barberton, Ohio, right outside Akron.  By the time I finished 8th grade, I'd lived in 12 houses and apartments, and gone to nine different schools.  My family was more dysfunctional than most and less dysfunctional than some.  Thick, oozing psychological tension was the overwhelming force at play in our home sprinkled with continuous drama.  I spent my life crying, saying "I'm sorry," and walking on eggshells trying to stay out of trouble.  It never worked.  So I ran off to the woods and wandered around whenever possible to escape.

My dad was a draftsman, a guy who drew pictures of machine parts on huge sheets of paper.  Although he didn't have a college degree, he worked his way up to being an engineer.  The last place he worked in Ohio, Plymouth Locomotive Works, made custom locomotives, lift trucks, and ceramic extruding machines.  By 1979, the company was in trouble, and my dad found another job.  Even 35 years after the company went out of business, Plymouth locomotives are going strong all over the world.

My childhood was a series of small towns and rural areas in Ohio when there were still lots of fmaily farms and most other people worked in factories, or the office next to the factory, like my dad.  My mom was active in my school, Cub Scouts, and church.  Like most other kids in the 70's, I was expected to do a job much like my dad did for my whole life.

My last 2 1/2 years in Ohio were spent living here, in Holiday Lakes, outside Willard in northwest Ohio.  We lived in a small cottage on the very end of the main lake, and there was a dock that no one else ever used where I would hang out for hours, if I wasn't hiking around the nearby woods and creek.  My friends an I went fishing on a pretty regular basis, hoping to catch huge bass, but catching bluegill, crappie, and the occasional pumpkinseed sunfish instead.  My freind Robert found this hidden little pool below the Holiday Lakes spillway, with three big bass in it.  We tried for months, but could never get those bass, the biggest about 18" long, to bite.  But I did hook a huge bluegill that broke my  little kid's rod and got away.

One day, the spillway was pumping hard.  There was a big square hole in the spillway, and usually a small stream of water flowing out of it.  But on that day, it was blasting water.  We forgot about fishing and took turns running across the spillway ramp and jumping into the water and sliding down the algae slicked ramp.  We both wore holes through our jeans, but it was a blast.

I was a Midwest kid who had John Denver's "Thank God I'm a Country Boy" as my anthem.  Fate stepped in, and right after finishing 8th grade, my family moved to Carlsbad, New Mexico.  Culture shock doesn't even begin to describe it.