WANTED Week Three

The Ohio River

I am always seeking home. I was born and raised on the Ohio River at Louisville, Kentucky. Speed boats and rope swings and King Fish. Generations and Derbies and Cardinals. Calliopes and Barges and Fossil Beds. Ohio River Valley allergies never bothered me. I drove along the River to my high school. I know upriver and downriver in my bones.

The Ohio River is a 981-mile-long waterway flowing from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to Cairo, Illinois, where it meets the Mississippi River. The River runs through Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois — faster in the spring as the snow melts from the Appalachian Mountains in the East.

The name stems from the Iroquoian word Ohi:yo’ — “great river” or “beautiful river”. For thousands of years, Native Americans used the River as a major trade and transportation route. The Falls of the Ohio, a fossil bed at the McAlpin Locks where the River turns toward St. Louis, Missouri, nods to life beyond the life we know.

To this day, I return to the River. I drove along the River to the Obama field office in 2008 after his election listening to an NPR Toni Morrison interview. I lived on the River at Cincinnati, Ohio — two hours from Louisville — for 5 years in my 30s and 40s, returning closer to home after having lived all around the United States.

I admit I never really left. But, geography is bigger than place. I do not know how I am in and of. But here I am wrong, it all runs through it all.