Warsaw, Ohio

It was a little before seven, time for me to take a quick break and crunch up a pack of ramen into my Tupperware bowl and cover it with water so it’d be softened and ready to eat when I stopped to camp in the next half hour.  I pulled in to the small post office on the outskirts of Warsaw for the quick operation.  I took a look at my GPS and noticed there was a campground just ahead.  

I thought it might be a nominally-priced, low-key municipal campground so was willing to give it a look, especially since it had been a 90-degree day and a shower would feel mighty nice.  It was a church campground with no evidence of anyone being around.  The office was closed and the rows of parked RVs were barren of their car and truck attachments. The toilet complex with showers was open.  I took advantage of that before finding a place to set up my tent.  It was my first official shower of the trip, having made do with faucets to pour water over my head, and a soaked  neckerchief to wipe down my extremities.

As I set up my tent in an open space near a set of picnic tables beside the Faith Pavilion a woman came by in a golf cart.  She was a resident and said she’d try to find the manager.  He pulled up shortly after, a burly forty-seven year old guy with a cut-off t-shirt and baseball cap, both adorned with logos of the Reds.  

He was initially perturbed that I hadn’t checked in with him and said this was a church campground and not for the public.  But he quickly softened when he realized I wasn’t too much of a ne’er-do-well.  Among other factors I had in my favor was that I had set up my tent in the open and wasn’t trying to hide.  He said that the vast majority of RVs are only used on weekends or when there’s a church activity, so I’d have the campground pretty much to myself and that there was no reason to pay.   There was going to be a large gathering this weekend, virus or no virus. He was of the school that it wasn’t something to be overly concerned about, though there had been sanitized wipes in the toilet complex. 

He wondered how I’d coped with the hot day and offered to bring me a cold drink—water or a coke.  He said about the only disturbance I might have would be he making the rounds after dark and maybe the sheriff too.  I’d been seeing lots of dead raccoons along the road and wondered if any of them might come by.  No, but possibly rabbits, as he’d stirred up quite a few while cutting the grass earlier in the day.

He acknowledged there are lots of raccoons in the area. He used to have a hundred acre farm growing corn and he reckoned the coons got about a quarter of his crop.  He couldn’t shoot ‘em until the hunting season started at the end of November, and they were too smart to be trapped.  He did like hunting them.  He got 286 last year, some of which went to make a coat for his daughter and the rest he sold.  He could get between two and four dollars a pelt.  When he was a teen thirty years ago, the market was much better and he could get as much as $45 for a pelt.  Most of them now go to Russia, though the Russians prefer pelts on the other side of the Mississippi where there are larger parcels of land and fewer barbed wire fences.  The barbed wires damage the pelts when the coons crawl under them.  

We talked a little baseball too.  He was a great admirer of Pete Rose and thought it a travesty he wasn’t in the Hall of Fame.  What a joy to have a lengthy conversation without dwelling on all the unrest that is dominating the podcasts I’m listening to, news as well as sports.

It made a pleasurable end to a day sitting under a tree capturing a cool breeze after being unable to find an air-conditioned refuge from the heat all day. None of the three libraries on my route were open and the Burger King in Coshocton had walk-in service but not seating, unlike all the other Burger Kings I had stopped at.  I even went a mile out of my way for it, desperate as I was for a cool place to sit.  Coshocton’s Carnegie was vacant and the new libary a few blocks away was only providing drive-up service.  The Carnegie had been neglected and was deteriorating into an ancient ruin. 

The new library traced its lineage to the Carnegie. A sculpture acknowledged the hundredth anniversary of the Carnegie and a plaque laid claim to the library being the thousandth Carnegie funded.

The Carnegie in Zanesville, forty miles to the south, was only open from two to six, no good to me as I was there at ten a.m. after another nice ride along a river, this one the Muskingum.  A plaque beside the former entrance to the library commemorated the 100th anniversary of its having been flooded in 1913 by the overflowing river, overwhelming the city eight years after the library opened.  It had a huge addition jutting out from it in a giant V.  “Open To All” was above the entry below “Public Library.” 

Halfway between Coshocton and Zanesville the non-Carnegie library in Dresden wasn’t open so I had to sit outside a Circle K for my rest. I sat as far from the entrance as I could sipping an ice-filled cup of soda, eating a peanut butter and banana sandwich while reading Jack London. I cringed whenever anyone pulled up fearing I might stir their sympathies, but only one, a young woman with two children came by and asked, “Sir, can I get you anything while we’re in here?”

The day before was my first day without a Carnegie since I began making the rounds in Ohio.  I was headed to Germantown outside of Marietta and then Kinsman, but discovered fortunately before I reached them that they were small hamlets without a library and that the Germantown and Kinsman with Carnegies we’re elsewhere in the state. But not so fortunately, the Germantown with a Carnegie was near Dayton, which I had already passed though.  I was heading back that way, but it would still require nearly fifty miles of backtracking if I wanted to complete the entire slate of Carnegies in Ohio.

Luckily the Kinsman with a Carnegie was among a cluster of towns with Carnegies in the northeast of the state that I hadn’t gotten to.  It was a relief not to have gone all the way to Kinsman, over 80 miles upriver from Marietta before I made this discovery.  I had gone fifteen miles beyond Marietta along the Ohio River and camped across from an ominous non-nuclear power plant on the West  Virginia side of the river.  It was in my tent when I tried to find the precise location of the Carnegie in Kinsman that I discovered it was just a tiny hamlet.  

At least doubling back to Marietta allowed me a second chance at its Carnegie.  It was open, but not beyond fifteen feet into the building in the addition to a desk where one could pick up books.  Not even my having biked over six hundred miles from Chicago to see it was enough for the trio of librarians on duty to allow me a glimpse of the library proper. 

One told me there was another Carnegie in Marietta and that it was the only city with two Carnegies. I told her that wasn’t true, as this past fall I was in Iowa Falls that had a public and an academic Carnegie at Ellsworth College, and that later in Ohio I’d be visiting Tiffin with a public and an academic Carnegie (Heidelberg University), not to mention of course numerous cities with multiple branch Carnegies, including Cincinnati, Cleveland and Toledo.  She was another example of one with an inflated pride in her Carnegie similar to those who think their town is the smallest with such a library.

She said there had only been minor protest when the library was built on the site of an Indian mound.  In later years when it became more of an issue in the public mind, it was ruled that if there were to be any any further expansion to the library requiring digging, even for a deeper shaft for its elevator, it would not be allowed.

One of the other librarians overheard our conversation and that I was headed to Zanesville sixty miles north for its Carnegie.  She was sorry to report that it wasn’t open, though it turned out it was, but with just afternoon hours.