The Land Between the Lake and the River

Many thousands of years ago, a glacier thousands of feet thick sat where Cleveland now sits, and the weight of it had depressed the land by hundreds of feet. When it retreated, the meltwater left behind a landscape of kettle ponds, moraines, and river valleys cut deep and fast into bedrock. Ohio is shaped by that departure.

The northern third of the state tilts toward Lake Erie; the southern two-thirds tilt toward the Ohio River; and the continental divide between those two great drainage basins runs, unremarkably, through the middle of ordinary farm fields. Lake Erie is the shallowest of the Great Lakes, warming and cooling faster than the others, prone to extraordinary storms and extraordinary stillness within the same week. Its southern shore was the economic spine of northern Ohio through the entire industrial era: Toledo for glass and auto parts, Sandusky for shipping and later tourism, Cleveland for iron ore and steel and finance, Ashtabula for coal loading.

The lake fed the cities, carried their freight, absorbed their pollution, and spent decades in ecological crisis before the Clean Water Act began to pull it back. The Ohio River marks the opposite boundary: a navigable western highway since the first canoes, used by Adena people, by Shawnee traders, by flatboat families pushing into the frontier, by steamboats burning wood and then coal, by diesel towboats pushing long strings of barges. The river drops roughly four hundred feet over nearly a thousand miles, and the Army Corps of Engineers has tamed it with a series of dams and locks into a staircase of still-water pools.

It is one of the busiest inland waterways in the country. Between the lake and the river: the Appalachian foothills in the east, the flat glacial till plains in the west, the Hocking Hills sandstone canyons in the south, the oak savannas and prairie remnants in the center. Ohio is not dramatically beautiful the way the western states are.

It is deeply, quietly various.