Notes from my Knapsack 3-28-19

Notes from my Knapsack 3-28-19

Jeff Gill

 

Spring is flowing through the county

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While reading an absolutely delightful blog post by a fellow named Gerry in Liverpool (and if you don't understand how that can happen, you probably don't spend much time on the internet, and good for you), which you can find at gerryco23.wordpress.com, I found the inspiration for my last column and this one.

 

He cites another author speaking of the London suburbs while trying to prise apart the landscape of his Liverpudlian surroundings. Specifically, Gerry quotes:

 

"As Gillian Tisdall remarks in The Fields Beneath, her wonderful study of the landforms that lie concealed beneath her own London suburb of Kentish Town, 'the town is simply disguised countryside':

 

Main roads, some older than history itself, still bend to avoid long-dried marshes, or veer off at an angle where the wall of a manor house once stood.  Hills and valleys still remain; rivers, even though entombed in sewer pipes […] Garden walls follow the line of old hedgerows; the very street patterns have been determined by the holdings of individual farmers and landlords. […]

 

From this, it is only a short step of the imagination to envisage the onetime fields being still there, with their grass and buttercups and even the footprints of cows, merely hidden beneath modern concrete and asphalt – as if you had simply to lift up a paving stone in order to reveal it."

 

So a quote within a quote, but a reality all around us in Granville. I work in Newark, and much of the same sort of thing is going on there, as well. Water will out, you might say, as the rain falls, the spring floods rise, and it all has to go somewhere. We channel and guide and re-route, but we can't make it run uphill (without pumps, anyhow) and it will always tend to seek out the path of least resistance.

 

Which has had me fascinated for years by Log Pond Run, a name that itself evokes some interesting questions of our Ohio narrative and a landscape formed by both nature and history.

 

Log Pond Run actually starts north of the village, just off of Route 661 southeast of Cambria Mill Road and what you might still call North Street that far north of Granville. In your car heading that way you might catch a glimpse of a small pond to your right, the land dropping away to the left and the right, a break in watersheds.

 

It meanders down to the area behind Goosepond, one name of Newark's former northern marshes more broadly called "the log pond," and down behind the mega Kroger and then east under 21^st Street, meandering through post-war neighborhoods, and then down past Moull Street and into older, oddly angled streets. It cuts across under Mt. Vernon Road, past the cabin where Edward Roye was born in 1815, and below Elmwood Avenue, named for the stately home of Israel Dille built in 1837 but now ironically facing Hudson Avenue.

 

Then no more than a littered ditch it creeps around the southern edge of the Owens Corning fiberglas plant and enters the North Fork just above the renewed totem pole at Truck One.

 

Log Pond Run is easy to ignore today, but its course has shaped streets and infrastructure still prominent in today's city. Smaller streams have had their impact on Granville, as well.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he's got a few more cricks and runs to tell you about. Mention a stream that's caught your attention to him at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.