I'm From Peebles

On Death and Hayrides

Hayrides shouldn’t be fun, but they are.  We’re a generation raised on limitless entertainment.  We can play video games that let us steal cars, zip through space, and fight zombies in World War 2.  We can go to the movies, sit in plush leather seats while we suck sugar into our faces and watch cities explode. 

Yet, we still enjoy a hayride.

The bales of hay are hard, the wagon creeps at parade speed—but that makes it even more fun.  Kids love hayrides because you’re in the open air, you’re free with your friends, and best of all you see a familiar world through fresh eyes.

 I remember my nephew’s first hayride.  He pointed to buildings he’d seen a hundred times from a car: “Look, it’s Mr. Reed’s house!  Oh, that’s grandma’s road!”  Passing by in a hay wagon was like flying over them in an airplane.  Then my nephew’s dog Kenya ran underneath the hay wagon, and was killed instantly.

There has always been a pet curse in my household.  The Arey family crest probably reads: “Another Day, Another Collar.”  A few of the furry casualties from my childhood:

• Our cats, Ebony and Ivory.  A car hit Ebony.  She was lying in my parents’ room, waiting to die.  I peeked.  I remember half her fur being ripped away, exposing her naked red flesh.  Looking back, I think maybe she was just covered in blood.  Soon after, Ivory was eaten.  My brother found pieces of him behind our trailer.
• A stray dog I took in and named Kipper.  I always had a big heart for stray dogs.  I was six years younger than my brother and sister.  When they had friends, over I was locked outside their bedroom doors.  I didn’t have many friends, so it was a blessing when one wandered into our yard and needed me to feed him.  Kipper lasted maybe a week, before Dad and I drove him out to the country and dropped him off.  I watched him chase after us until he disappeared into the dust of the gravel road
•  A cat named Piawackett.  He was a stray, already fixed and missing his front claws.  One day he started choking.  He could barely breath.  He had been with us a year (an Arey record) so we took him to the vet.  We stored him in a cheap cardboard pet carrier.  He thrashed around in the box like a captured raccoon.  He kept thrusting his nose through one of the box’s small air hole.  He rammed his face into the hole, until his head finally burst free.  The look in his eyes was terrifying.  He looked insane, like our soft Piawackett was possessed by a demon cat. The vet discovered a mouse lodges in his throat.  There was some kind of internal bleeding, and Piawackett was put down.

• Katie was our first puppy, a newborn collie.  She liked to chew my Grizzlor action figure, and when I came home from school she was unconditionally excited to see me.  One day my sister was crossing highway 41 to go to the general store.  Katie decided to follow, and was hit by a car.

There was nothing we could do for her.  The family gathered in the living room, and we took turns holding her until she died.  My sister was consumed with guilt.  She carved a tombstone for Katie, and we buried her in the garden.  I put Grizzlor on her grave.

Pets teach kids how to take care of another life.  We invite animals into our homes, and they become our friends.  In some cases, they’re our only friends.  Pets also teach kids that everything will eventually go away.  No matter how much you love a pet or a person, someday they will leave you forever.

When you learn tomorrow isn’t promised to you, today is brighter.  Simple hayrides on familiar roads will fill you with constant, total amazement.

NOTE: I owe a debt of gratitude to John Patrick Shanely.  The last sentence is paraphrased his wonderful film “Joe Versus the Volcano.”

Peebles Solutions

The tree was gone in a couple hours.

The Case of The Peebles Detective

If you drive through Peebles, you’re sure to pass by this house.  It sits right on Main Street.  If you had walked past it in the 1990s, you would have noticed these words on the door:  

WM. JUSTICE DETECTIVE AGENCY

When I was eleven years old, this sign inspired me.  I opened my own detective business.  After all, I had already solved numerous Encyclopedia Brown detective stories, and I was a lifelong student of Scooby Doo.  How hard could it be?  I made a sign from poster board: 

RY. AREY DETECTIVE AGENCY

…and waited in the garage for customers.  My fee was five cents.

I only had one case: “The Mystery of Mom’s Missing Purse.”  The whodunit was solved in a few minutes, after I found mom’s purse under her bed.  My case file noted that she probably hid the purse for me to find.  She had watched me spend a nice summer day sitting the garage, waiting.  That must have been depressing.

Back to Mr. Justice.  Until recently*, I never asked anyone about the detective inside the house.  It was more fun to let my imagination run wild.  Was he a professional detective from the city, or a retired man chasing his dream?  I love the idea of a man looking at his front door and saying, “I can really do this.  No more slaving away at the lumber mill for me.  I’m gonna be a PI.” 

What kind of cases darkened his door in Peebles, Ohio?  Cheating husbands?  Murder?  Police corruption?  There’s not much crime in Peebles, so he probably dealt with lost pets, or stolen bikes.  My friend Lori’s Schwinn was stolen when we were kids.  She could have asked him for help.

Did he butt heads with local police?   Our police mostly sit at intersections and wait for teenagers to gun their engines.  But Mr. Justice was a loose cannon who didn’t play by their rules.  He was out working the beat, digging up clues, building a rep as Peebles’ preeminent gumshoe.  When there’s a case at hand, the Law be damned.

At least that’s what I liked to imagine.

The sign isn’t there anymore.  For years I wondered if Mr. Justice moved away, died, or removed the embarrassing sign after never having any customers.  That’s what happened to my detective agency. 

No: that wouldn’t happen to William Justice, PI.  He’s out tracking  bicycle thieves around the world.  Even now he’s running through a bazaar in Cairo, hunting for Lori’s bright pink Schwinn.  Someday he’ll push that small bike back into town, ringing its little bell, ready for his next case.

*I solved the case of the William Justice Detective Agency earlier today, when I called my mom to ask who lived in that house.  The real story is much less dramatic, so I’ll leave the case file open for you.  If you have a moment today, invent an adventure for him.  Ignore gray reality, and live a little while in your dreams. 

Our Serpent Mound

This is Serpent Mound.  A prehistoric marvel built 500 years before white men stepped foot in North America.  It winds for one-fourth of a mile.  Its every coil marks the movements of the moon and sun.  This earthen calendar was built without benefit of machines, by a people with no written language.  The mound is Peebles’s only world-famous resident.  It is studied by scientists around the world.  Travelers go hundreds of mile out of their way to look upon this majestic work. 

I grew up 4 miles from Serpent Mound, in a trailer park.  When I was a kid I thought it was built and designed for family cookouts.  If you’re from Peebles, you might have thought the same thing. 

Scientists visit the mound, but so do people seeking a spiritual connection.  Or, as my uncle Charlie calls them, “devil worshippers.”  I ran into him in the bait shop once and he ranted about it, “They can call it whatever they want, but when they go up there and bow down to that god damn snake, it’s devil worship.”  I would love to take Uncle Charlie to burning man and count his strokes.

Uncle Charlie was referring to an incident in 1986, when what seemed like a thousand hippies and gypsies and Indians came to Serpent Mound.  I was six years old.  The Channel 5 news van was there.  They let me sit on the snake and play the tambourine.  This was a big, big deal because you are never allowed to sit on the mound, unless you’re playing a tambourine.

Side note: my best friend grew up a few hundred yards from the mound.  Near his property there’s a tree growing where two or three fault lines converge.  Apparently, this tree is significant for people that like to bang drums and chant in the middle of the night.  A couple times a year the tree drummers would keep my friend’s family awake into the wee hours of the morning.  They are devout Christians, so I have no doubt they spent those extra waking hours praying the drummers would come to Christ, and do so quietly.

Anyways, Serpent Mound is currently enjoying a tourism renaissance.  A non-profit group called Friends of the Serpent holds events to commemorate the winter and summer solstices.  On the summer solstice (also the longest day of the year) the head of the serpent aligns perfectly with the setting sun. 

I went to the summer event a few years ago.  I was seeking some kind of new experience ,from a very familiar site.  It wasn’t at all what I expected.  Look:

Gone were the throngs of hippies and Bedouins I remembered form my childhood.  These were the same old boring white people, wearing Wal-Mart shorts and red baseball caps.  My high school gym teacher was there.

I expected the sunset to create a majestic moment.  The final rays of sunlight would burst outward in a ripple of color.  Sunbeams would practically spray out of the sky and shine directly into my chest.  I was hoping for some minor levitation.  Maybe just a couple of inches off the ground.

Instead, it wasn’t even that good of a sunset.  The sun drifted behind some trees and it got darker.  I felt nothing, not even disappointment.  This didn’t seem like celestial bodies were converging with the spirits of the Fort Ancient Indians; it felt like the end of just another day.

But then, I listened.  There was no announcement to be quiet, and yet…we weren’t saying a word.  No one needed to talk on their cell phones, make jokes, or use their ipods to give the moment a soundtrack.  They were all….just content, to stand among strangers and watch a mild June day roll over into night.  A moment of prehistoric silence.  That was enough.

Super Peebles

This is the mighty Appalachian Highway, a four-lane wonder that connects Cincinnati to the Appalachian Mountains.  Before the Appo was finished, getting to the city was like backpacking to Mordor.  Cincinnati was a two-hour drive on a two-lane highway, clogged with tractors and hay wagons.  Now the city is a smooth 70 minutes away. 

It seems like the Appo has been around forever, but it was finished in 1982.  That means it’s only a little older than a Thundercat.  In a way it still isn’t finished.  The highway was supposed to be Phase 1 of an ambitious project to remodel Peebles.  Phase 2 of this plan was to create a massive artificial lake just north of town.  The idea was that this lake would attract scores of tourists and new business.  Positioned between the lake and highway, Peebles would become a boomtown, or a “Super Peebles.”

The plan fell through because it turns out a lot of landowners didn’t want their homes to be underwater.  I still have to wonder, 30 years later, what kind of town Super Peebles would have been.

Bigger, for one.  More people means wider borders.  The school would be bigger too. We would have had a football team or our own TV studio.  There would have been more money for the township for building a fancy town hall, like the clock tower in Back to the Future. 

We wouldn’t have been a dry township for so many years.  Tourists’ money means bars, liquor licenses, maybe even a monorail.  We’d have the cash to beautify main street—or heck, build a whole new main street just outside of town.  Commerce would bring Wal-Mart, followed by the Super Peebles Shopping Mall.  We’d have a multi-sceen movie theater, so no more driving 23 miles to see Twilight.  Super Peebles would also need a small concert venue, where we could see the Goo Goo Dolls.

Infants would have higher birth weight in Super Peebles.  Tom Selleck would buy some land just out of town, then tell his celebrity friends about this quaint country town, sandwiched between a picturesque lake and a convenient highway.  During the season we’d spot George Clooney or Renee Zellweger shopping around town.

 Carpet bagging tourists would wander down to Old Main Street in Old Peebles, and they’d see us in the diners, wearing John Deere hats and talking about how the town used to be, before the highway.  They would adore our quaintness, then snap secret pics with their smart phones.  We’d get tweeted.  They’d make memes of us. 

They’d never know that before the Holiday Inn and Applebee’s, buried underneath the Apple Store, Starbucks, Ikea, Brookstone, Old Navy, Target, Honda Dealerships and Best Buys, this used to be a real place.  People lived here for the land, not for the shopping malls.  Super Peebles would become an everytown, or even worse the dystopian Hill Valley from Back to the Future 2. 

But, that didn’t happen.  The highway came in, and maybe we lost some businesses but we gained some population.  New people move into Peebles all the time, even though they commute an hour to the city.  They could move closer to work, but they like it here.  It’s small and quiet.  Not super, but it’s home.

Opening Day

I love April.  It’s a good month for hoping.  It was chilly in Peebles today—in the 40s and dropping fast when the sun went down—but you know the warm weather is coming.  That’s what hope is, believing that something better is just ahead.

Speaking of hope and optimism, the Cincinnati Reds played their first game today.  Opening Day is celebrated in Cincinnati with parades, music, and fireworks.  In Peebles we celebrate Opening Day in our own way, by listening to the game at work.  Or, if your boss is a jerk, you cut out to the parking lot and listen to the game in your car.  Hopefully, we can make it to Cincinnati to see a game.  

If you live in a city, going to a baseball game isn’t a big deal.  You get tickets, and you go.  But if you’re from a small town, you’re not just going to the ballpark: you are embarking on a seventy-mile pilgrimage to navigate the sprawling urban metroscape that is Cincinnati. 

Like a lot of small town kids, my first trip to the city was to see the first Reds play.  As far as I knew, Great American Ballpark was at the center of Cincinnati, and Peebles was one of hundreds of small towns spinning around it like satellites. 

It takes two things to create a community. First, you need to celebrate what you have in common with your neighbors.  Second, you need to celebrate how you’re different from your other neighbors, the ones in other towns.  For instance, I was always told that Manchester is filled with smelly people, folks in West Union are stuck up, and people in North Adams shouldn’t even have the right to vote, or assemble in public places. 

Yet, despite these vast cultural differences, we’re all Reds fans.  Great American Ballpark holds 42,000 people.  You could put my whole county in every seat and it wouldn’t be close to a sellout crowd.  When we’re sitting in a stadium filled with strangers from a hundred other small towns, we’re all suddenly from the same town.  We’re all hoping we’ll be safe at home.

Just don’t sit downwind of anyone from Manchester.

The Absolutely True Ghost Story of the Wickerham Inn

There have been some grumblings about the fast few blog entries, about certain items that weren’t 100% true.  I admit: I am sometimes prone to exaggerating for the sake of entertainment now and then.  That’s why this week’s blog is three days late: I wanted to thoroughly research today’s topic to make sure it was 100% accurate.

Peebles would not exist if it weren’t for State Highway 41 (which is 438 miles long).  Long before our town was founded, this bustling roadway brought commerce and travelers into our area, when it was simply known as “Zane’s Trace.”

Zane’s Trace was a pathway pioneered through the forest by Ebenezer Zane.  I was astonished to find, during my meticulous research, that Ebenezer Zane is an ancestor of actor Billy Zane, who slapped Kate Winslet in the face in the movie Titanic.  (Titanic made over $1 billion dollars worldwide.)

Follow 41 about a mile outside of town, and you’ll find a 220 year-old orange brick home that used to be called the Wickerham Inn.

The Wickerham Inn was built by a man named Peter Wickerham, nearly 100 years before Peebles was founded.  It was a popular way station for traders, travelers, and ruffians on the old Zane’s Trace.  Local legend also says that the Wickerham Inn is haunted.

According to my research, one night in the 1800s a stagecoach driver rented a room above the tavern.  He had a bit too much to drink, and bragged about the large sum of money he was carrying.

The next morning, all that was left of him was a bloodstain on the floor of his room.  For the next hundred years, passersby warned that the tavern was haunted.  Legend has it that on moonless nights you could see a headless ghost staring at them from the windows.

Some suspected the Wickerhams themselves might have been involved in the murder, though I found no proof of this during my research.  Even in these modern days, the Wickerhams yield considerable influence in the county.  A politician does not get elected without kissing the rings on a Wickerham’s hand.  Whether or not their fortune stems from the robbery of a stagecoach driver in pioneer days, I cannot say. 

This much I can say: in 1922 the old Wickerham Inn was renovated.  Construction workers in the basement dug through the soft concrete and discovered a skeleton—missing its head. 

After the body was disturbed, there are documented cases of a headless ghost being spotted wandering outside the building. Farms closest to the Wickerham Inn complained of, “Erratic cattle behavior, and a premature spoiling of the crops.” 

Coincidentally, Babe Ruth (who once hit 60 homeruns in a season) was also visiting Peebles.  He was traveling across the country, challenging strangers to homerun competitions.  He left the train when he heard these where ghost sightings in the area.  Ruth had a well-known fascination with the occult, and with farming towns.

Word of the disturbances reached the ear of famous 1920s ghost hunter Howard Carter.  Carter journeyed to Peebles in hopes of “sighting the ethereal being, then trapping the beast and showcasing it to the crowned heads of Europe.”

However it was not to be.  Carter, despite his ghost hunting expertise, was no match for the undead spirit.  According to my grandfather, a band of precocious young boys (and their tomboy friend Ruby) who put an end to the haunting.  Led by a boy named Tommy, they found the ghost’s missing head and placed it on the corpse’s body. 

No further sightings were reported.  I can only hope that somewhere that poor stagecoach driver has finished his delivery, and is at peace.

Carter, or course, went on to discover the tomb of Tutankhamen and die at the hands of the mummy curse.  Tommy and his friends had many more adventures.  In later years he married Ruby, and they had three children.  I am their grandson.   

Every town in America has a ghost story.  Haunted buildings, Indian graveyards, roads you’re supposed to avoid at night.  These stories are hard to prove, but they’re fun.  

May I suggest that should you drive past the Wickerham Inn, tell your kids how a headhunting ghost, the curse of King Tut, and Babe Ruth all came together for an adventure in their hometown.

My Niece’s Birds

They Who Rule by Night

They say news travels fast in a small town, but smells travel faster.  Peebles is built on top of a wide, flat hill.  When the wind is right, smells skyrocket across town. 

In summertime you could smell the town pool from blocks away, even hear the children scream and splash.  You could almost be living in a town by the sea.  Then again, when Daulton Reed spread fertilizer on his fields, the towns smelled like it just dropped out of a cow’s butthole.

Everyone knows how fast odors pass through Peebles.  That’s why at night we let the town be controlled by skunks. Our nocturnal masters roam in gangs, bully dogs and scare school children.  When skunks lurk outside your home, you can’t call the police or sic your dog on them.  They’re like Western outlaws riding through town, spilling trash all over your lawn.  All we can do is hunker down, and wait for some sort of coyote sheriff to run them off. 

Honestly, skunks are at the top of the food chain.  No one messes with them.  Skunks could taste like chocolate and chicken fingers and we’d never know because everyone is afraid to kill one.

I remember one particularly cool summer night, the sort of night when couples take walks, and we linger on our porches.  Except no one was outside.  The porches were empty.  Our streets were filled with the stink of what must have been a thousand skunks firebombing the whole town.  We hid inside our homes, sealing our windows against the greatest Mid-West disaster since the dustbowl.

There was a knock at the door.  You don’t want to open your door during a skunk attack, for fear the smell would—like a boring relative—barge in and attach itself to your furniture.  Also, what if the skunks had learned to knock on doors?  Maybe they were tired of foraging through our trash, and were going door-to-door to shake us down for protection money. 

It turned out to be our old friend, Frank McCoy.  He was bringing us an armload of microwave pizzas.  Apparently—and I’m not making this up—a pizza truck just north of town wrecked, and they were giving away pizzas.  The driver swerved to miss a deer, but ended up hitting a skunk instead. 

Maybe you’re thinking one dead skunk wouldn’t make the whole town smell, but it did.  Either this man had killed the Lord of all Skunks, or all the skunk’s friends sprayed down Peebles in retaliation.

Frank was braving the stinky fog to bring free pizzas to his neighbors.  He was showing up on doorsteps like a man in a yellow raincoat delivering provisions in a hurricane.  The whole town would eat pizza that night.  People came from all over to swarm the wreckage, salvaging pizzas while they still could. 

After all, when the skunks showed up, this territory would be theirs.  

Working for Wee Wages

The recession’s been hard in Peebles.  Seems like we lose businesses  every year; people have to drive farther and farther away for work.  But there’s one particular business that’s thriving, that ships its product all over the United States: Frank’s Deer Urine.

I know deer urine sounds like something only eccentric billionaires would buy, but it has a purpose.  Urine attracts other deer during mating season, so hunters can sprinkle it on a bush and wait for horny deer to target.  I always felt bad for these bucks.  One minute they’re about to have a great day, then they die.  Their last thoughts: “Ah, dammit Frank.”

A gallon of high-octane deer pee costs $220.  If that seems pricey, remember this is the highest quality animal urine money can buy.  According to Frank’s motto: “Use the Best, Piss on the Rest.” 

Deer urine is sold in three varieties: Dominant Buck, Double Doe, and Doe-n-estrous.  Doe-n-Estrous is created by tagging a deer and monitoring when it is about to go into season.  You can see for yourself in this horrifying, yet hypnotic, video.

I’m sure you’re wondering: how does one collect the urine of a deer?  I always thought they hovered under a doe’s vagina and waited for it to wee into a bucket (imagine the splashback!).  Or, by somehow milking it.  However, according to a friend of mine, Frank & Company gather the urine by capturing deer and training them to pee in certain buildings.  These building have a sloped floor, with a collection trough at the bottom. 

When deer tell this story, there is no way humans are the heroes.  We hold them captive and use their own urine to murder their friends, like evil wizards in the deer fairy tales.  “Don’t let the humans capture you Bambi!  They’ll use your pee to murder your father!  Now, it’s getting dark.  Let me show you how to go stand by the road and freak people out.” 

Yes, times are hard in Peebles.  Everyone has to scrape out a living.  Some people build houses or pump gas, while others are busy harvesting urinary nectar out of deer vaginas.  I love my hometown.

(NOTE: I changed the description of the video after an enterprising rocket scientist commented that the men are tagging the deer, not inserting estrogen into their deer vaginas.  I regret the error, but am glad I made a new friend.)

(ANOTHER NOTE: We have a lot of thriving businesses in Peebles.  Over 60.  I can provide a list if you like.)