Category: Northeastern Ohio

In 2005 Cache Owner Rattlebars brought the caching cosmos to a splendid spot.

On this, our last caching adventure with our northeast neighbor, the city floats by. Westward bound, we cross into Austintown. One of us, ready to get out of Youngstown, is rolling through red lights, while the other one prays Ohio’s finest are busy somewhere else. Coordinates will stop at the Meander Creek Reservoir, winner of the Best Name Ever for a creek.

Built in 1831, the Strock House has won the prestige of National Historic Landmark, from its perch overlooking the creek. The road has aged from dirt, to plank, to brick.

After two decades of life on the creek, the Strocks sold to Francis Henry. Oral history lists a tunnel between the house and barn as a place where escaping Southerners hid as they traveled the Underground Railroad north. Flitting among the trees are the wispy, silhouetted shapes of fear, hope, dignity, and courage in this compassionate land.

During the Civil War, the house passed to an Anderson, who became impressively wealthy in the general store business. His son became a judge, lived in the house, and framed in an addition. Oral tradition lists President McKinley as a guest in this house. The marks of the stone mason live on in the huge blocks of sandstone hauled from nearby quarries.

Back on the brick road, we wade into the wet leaves, brambles, and rotten logs across from the barn. Autumn’s last liquid glistens.

The mystery unravels into a perfect geopile.

Unlike the first decade of cache logs, local law doesn’t seem to be quite as close by. For those loggers complaining about broken colors, the crayons have shaped up.

We turn homeward. As lights flicker on in town after town, we pass high school stadiums, Christmas lights, church steeples, courthouse spires. The radio surfs through jazz, country, rap, football news.

We are back in our own corner of the earth and sky, back on our soil, whether owned by us or by another. The places familiar to us, the names, final turns, and at last the closing of the front door, draw us in, even as what we left behind encloses those there.