Car in a cornfield. Ya, that wasn’t very inspiring, was it? My mornings are spent frantically writing in my hotel room while knowing full well that the sun is rising without me there to witness it. By the time I’m on the road, depending on the time, I get moving again, so I feel like I’m making progress inching closer to Buffalo, New York. No coffee, no hot breakfast, typically anyway, but when a quiet location inspires me, I pull over and have a roadside breakfast. Today, it was in a cornfield off the Old Lincoln Highway. As I’ve written here before, or so I think, I have an ice chest with provisions and a crate with dry goods, such as my homemade granola.
While I’ve shared a few images of old-fashioned grain silos over these past few days, I’ve ended up neglecting these new versions; this particular setup is used for a small farm instead of a co-op that shares those giant ones.
The small town of Bucyrus, Ohio, is really a beautiful place, but here I am taking a photo of the mural depicting the main street instead of the real thing. It’s relatively accurate, except for the two structures left and right supporting the arch.
Leaving Upper Sandusky this morning, I was still on the fence about stopping at the prison in Mansfield, Ohio, but as I crested a hill on the road that was passing it anyway, I was enthralled by the sight of it. With it opening in just a few minutes, I thought, “Why not throw them a $10 or whatever it costs, and I’ll race through it to not delay myself too much. Ha, this place costs $30 to visit, and that’s for a self-guided tour. The official name of this prison is the Ohio State Reformatory; it is also one of the filming locations of the movie Shawshank Redemption.
I’d imagine a lot of the visitors to this prison are here just for Shawshank Redemption; it is, after all, often the number one rated movie on IMDB ahead of The Godfather, The Dark Knight, Schindler’s List, The Lord of the Rings, Pulp Fiction, and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, yeah, it’s that popular. Seeing I was the first person in line to buy a ticket, I was ahead of everyone else and was able to grab photos at the location where the movie was shot, but I was also able to judge how others found the rest of the prison, which wasn’t very interesting as they all passed me at some point.
The only lingering was being done by the cardboard cutouts such as this one of James Whitmore’s character Brooks Hatlen, and those of Bob Gunton, who played Warden Norton, and Clancy Brown, who played hardass prison guard Captain Hadley. I also found myself lingering quite a bit, though not as long as the decaying ruin will. That stuff was nice, but things were about to get better exponentially.
While the outside of the prison drew my attention, walking up a short flight of wooden steps into the prison church took my breath away. At this point, I was certain things could only get better.
Oh, my holy wow. Prison is everything I could have hoped for, full of darkness, a foreboding, maybe even despair.
Yep, all buttons have been pushed, except for that flush mechanism on the wall above the toilet. I can only imagine the joys of learning to shit in the presence of your cellmate. Without cell phones for reading the news back in the day, you’d just open a conversation or maybe continue the one you were having without the need to excuse yourself while heading to the can for a dank bowel movement. Obviously, some of the joy in this experience would be lost when one considers life inside an all-metal tiny box called home, sometimes for an entire lifetime.
Now, if living in a cold, solid-steel cage with another man who may have been guilty of whatever terrible deed the world wanted to hide wasn’t good enough for you, there was this library, which I think could have made the whole ordeal a little better. Consider the long afternoons lounging in the sumptuous wood-lined reading rooms of the library with all the classics and all those years to take them all in; seriously, this starts to look kind of dreamy.
Your new home even came with these classic spiral staircases, but thinking about this caged tube of men descending the stairs packed in tightly, I’d bet about anything that this would be a fart fest. Sure, that would be rank; then again, everyone would be splitting at the seams laughing as so-and-so gets royally fumigated.
This was the hospital where the best care was available to prisoners when all things were considered, you know, such as their horrendous crimes that should have seen them tortured, but that’s beside the point. They were still human and required medical care, and this was where they got it.
The examining stool.
Fresh air to purge the misfortune of getting sick in a place you probably didn’t want to get sick in. I have this idea that enemas were the cure-all for everything, thus dissuading inmates from seeking the services of a “doctor.”
Somehow, this place wasn’t closed until 1990, by which time we understood smoking wasn’t good for you; hence, the stencil informing the prisoners that no smoking was allowed in the hospital.
There’s just no way that this much decay is the result of the past 34 years. It makes me happy I don’t rust and wasn’t painted with lead paint.
This is likely my favorite photo of those I shot in here. The idea of living in a tower of cages is revulsive, even if I was joking about things earlier. Even being a guard here would have been as close to living in hell as it gets. I have a big F-that for the idea of something like this being a career objective.
Cages in the mazes of a prison, where men not only try to escape their cells and the facility walls but are also likely trying to figure out a way to escape their minds.
The architecture might be interesting, but the humanity is missing, gone, crushed under the fucked souls of those who would build such horrid dungeons.
Some of these photos might be iterations on a theme, but you can trust that I had to pare ten images from my list of favorites. Redundancy for some might be tedious, but these are my memories forever visualized and I’m telling you, I’ll never be able to see such things frequently enough.
When entering the prison, I was admonished not to close cell doors because if I inadvertently locked myself in, it would be a $300 charge to cut me out, and I might be stuck in here for a few hours. That’s too bad because I would have loved to see the perspective of being in this hole and looking out through locked iron doors to better imagine what the prisoner saw on a day-to-day, hour-to-hour basis. In addition to not shutting doors, I was asked not to eat or lick the paint chips as they likely have lead in them. People have been witnessed doing just that.
Two photos above, I was looking one way; this is looking in the other direction.
This was one of the cells in solitary confinement where no natural light falls. In some of the cells, solid steel doors blocked all light and were simply too dark to photograph. As it was, this photo took a lot of patience and bracing the camera against the rusting door frame. [Did you intentionally trigger my pareidolia with that face, John? Caroline]
While thick with dirt, these mattresses appear to be authentic from the time prisoners lived here; I’d say the same might be true for the scratchy woolen blankets. After two hours and leaving a lot of photos unpublished, I’m done visiting the prison, reluctantly.
I’ve not yet grown accustomed to the tree-lined roads.
Amish farms are incredible-looking places. Again, I’m struck by the efficiency and effectiveness of the community in supporting these operations outside the world of tradition and modern tools, yet they survive and seem to thrive.
On another Amish farm across the street here on County Road 700 in Polk, Ohio, a family was selling gourds and pumpkins. While they’d probably survive the trip back across the United States, I’m not sure how Canadian customs would deal with us bringing three giant pumpkins into their country.
I’ve driven through some rain that arrived by the buckets, so heavy that I pulled over more than once. During one of those stops on OH-88 in Bristolville, I saw lightning strike and splinter a wooden utility pole in an impressive explosion and instantaneous thunder. That was it; now I was really scared. A mile down the road, after I got going during a lull, it started hammering down again. This time, I pulled into a fire station whose electricity was off and barely operational with the help of some minor power from a generator.
Last of the Ohio corn with hints of blue skies in the background.Tthe break in the weather wouldn’t last, but the corn continued.
Maybe because this is a tertiary road in the scheme of state line crossings, it only required this afterthought of a Welcome To Pennsylvania state sign simply asking us not to litter. Better than nothing, or as my grandfather Wise used to say, “Better than a stick in the eye.”
This was too random to let go by. I have to question out loud: Who reads German out here? Maybe the Amish, but aren’t they of some kind of Dutch heritage? [No John, the Amish are not Dutch, they are Deutsch, from the Pfalz region – Caroline] For you English speakers, it reads, “Wood is wonderful.”
While the hills have been rolling off and on since yesterday, I seldom get to pull over on the road when there is no shoulder, jump out of the car with my hazard lights on, and snap a photo while standing in the middle of the street. Good thing there was just that Amish buggy a short ways down the road. He’d never be able to race up on me.
The sun came out when necessary for photos. Otherwise, it rained or was so cloudy that any images would have been dull and gray. Sometimes, it feels like nature is working as a nudge to keep us going so we don’t miss the important stuff and are not sleeping in the car by the side of the road 100 miles from a hotel.
At the edge of dusk, I crossed into New York State, reaching Jamestown just a few miles from the state line, checked into a hotel, and had to settle for some generic fried cod instead of some incredible walleye or pike caught in a nearby lake. So it goes, this was never meant to be a culinary adventure, well, not yet.