Seeing the world at 60 miles per hour

"So what is the drive to Jackson like?" they ask me, and I'm always tempted to reply, "It's, like, 90 minutes." What can I say about the drive I've become accustomed to making twice a week? It's like a lot of other drives in rural southern Ohio: an hour and a half on a four-lane divided highway through rolling hills, not particularly dramatic but pleasing all the same.

I follow the Ohio River west out of Marietta, sometimes seeing coal barges and other boats or watching a parade of fluffy white clouds reflected on the water. Later I leave behind the mighty Ohio for a series of ever diminishing waterways: I cross the Hocking River three or four times and Raccoon Creek three times within a mile, then Little Raccoon Creek, barely visible from the road even at flood stage. The long stretch of the Hocking River that runs along the edge of Athens looks tame and lifeless, but sometimes I catch a glimpse of a heron or some geese or ducks. Turkey vultures and hawks frequently circle overhead and there's never a shortage of roadkill.

What do I look at for three hours a week? The wide road snaking past trees and more trees, chemical factories and trucking depots along the river, campgrounds and fish ponds and Ohio University's airstrip, where I once matched speeds with a landing plane so that it looked as if it was hovering motionless in midair. I pass a dollhouse-like structure purported to be the smallest functioning church in Ohio, and later I pass a much larger church surrounded by 30 or 40 American flags on poles, though I've never seen any signs of life at either place. 

I pass cell towers and cattails nodding above a wetland, a phalanx of red tractors begging for buyers, a storage site for fracking waste and a row of tiny square houses, the last remnants of a company town once housing coal miners. I pass cemeteries and cornfields and the back side of a strip of big-box stores, but mostly I see trees and hills and then more hills and trees until I reach Jackson, where I have several options: if I need groceries, I take the road straight through town with its thick Friday-night traffic waiting impatiently at a million traffic lights, but I prefer the less traveled route, a twisty back road that takes me off the highway and leads past decaying country houses, a defunct rail yard, and big empty brick buildings of uncertain provenance. I like to follow the little creek that runs along the road until I reach town, where a few right turns take me to my weekend home.

The route offers nothing much to write home about, no majestic cliff faces or waterfalls or breathtaking vistas; it's just a smooth, easy ride through nice enough terrain. And yet I like it, especially after I enter Jackson County, where there's little traffic and the road seems to wend onward through hills and trees forever. What's the trip like? It's about like that, only moreso.