Two posts ago I shared an info-graphic of the Ohio counties through which I have biked, color coded by somewhat arbitrary age divisions. There are two colors which correspond only to one county. Red is for Cuyahoga, the only county I biked in before I reached a working age and made it to an adjacent county. Blue is for Mahoning, the only county I added to the list in 2017. I was 31 that year, and had just the year before biked a few thousand kilometers and hit 11 new counties. It was 2016 that I first thought to map out all the counties through which I had biked and set the goal of getting all of Ohio. Looking forward to 2018, I again biked thousands of kilometers and hit over a dozen new counties. So what was 2017? As I reflect now on the year as a whole, it was almost comical in its arc from one of the most hopeful times of my life, to one of the most hopeless.
As of January 1, 2017, my dissertation was complete and I was on vacation, actually relaxing instead of studying even harder, for the first time in six years. My job applications were away and there was no point worrying until February at least. I was picking up old hobbies again, go and guitar, that I had dropped in the struggle to achieve academically while fighting cancer and raising an infant. I had no doubts about the quality of my work. It was my own, I knew that I would successfully defend, and did so as early as the committee was ready to go. I was fit, healthy, sleeping well. Our family was what we wanted it to be. The possibilities were as dazzling as my imagination would let them be.
By December 31, I had been rejected for all the most viable jobs in academia, changed track towards software development and was not making much progress when my undergraduate institution offered me a position very late in the season (well into June). The pay was good, but the institution was one that I had elected not to walk at graduation, for the quality of the school was so low that I had no pride in a degree attached to a 4.0 gpa. Succeeding in getting a job there was kind of like failing at everything that mattered but getting a ribbon because the market was so bad that two of the six graduates in my class got no jobs and were supported by their spouse and parents respectively.
We had a buyer of our house in Kent back out on the day we were loading the moving truck and ultimately lost money on it a month later. This meant that we ended up in tension with the sellers of the house we had contracted to buy near Central State, and spent six weeks paying them rent while also paying our old mortgage. I had already cashed out the small amount of retirement I had accrued as a graduate student just to float us through two more months without income over the summer. We were still the lucky ones in our generation, passing through having a young child, graduate school, and getting a real job with no debts and even some equity, but we had no cash and it was very stressful.
My wife got pregnant over the summer and then miscarried, also while loading the moving truck. Our relationship started to fragment as her mental health deteriorated and our family struggled in a new town with no social network. My mental health started to deteriorate as I attempted to work a terrible job well, teaching four courses for the first time in my life, and constantly unsure of what situation I would arrive to at home when I got there.
In the fall, my mother's parents both died. I had never been very close to them. They were kind of not good people, but it still hit me hard. They were my namesake. I wrote a long blog about their memorial a few posts ago, entitled Goodbye to Love.
It had become clear that my pay wasn't good enough to cover the aggressive mortgage we had elected. The resulting downward trend in the bank account only further drove a wedge between me and my wife, who had elected not to work against my wishes and against our original plans upon marriage.
With all that in mind, some might wonder how I managed to get on a bike and get to an adjacent county at all that summer. I remember trying hard to sneak in rides, just biking long routes home from school to get up to 20k in a day (usual school and back added up to 12). I had a chat with an old friend at some point that summer who biked distance. He asked me how much I was riding, and I said not much, only maybe 20k rides. He said "that's if I just went on a ride." Indeed, now when I just go on a ride at random with no plan and not much time, it'll be 15-25k. But biking is such a huge part of my life. I need to ride in order to motivate myself to keep putting up with all the other bullshit. So I rode as much as I could, and did get up over 40k, and then knowing I wouldn't have easy access to the North East again for at least a long time, I made a trip out to Mahoning county before we moved.
I remember it well. My target was Lake Milton, just inside the county line and a significant landmark. I rode on Tallmadge road almost all the way, straight east west. The weather was perfect for me. Mostly sunny, just a few fluffy clouds to make the sky pretty and give you a break from the heat every once in a while. Maybe 25 to 28 degrees. I remember passing these rural middle and high-schools well away from any major city and even any substantial town. There were football teams doing summer practice in fields next to both schools. Huge teams, what seemed to me must have been every youth of the correct age in the district in a football uniform. I remember my sense of bewilderment that they could fill out such large teams as I gently climbed one rolling hill and drifted down the other side, over and over.
Just when I got into the county, I stopped at one of those marts you get in rural places, a kind of not quite grocery store, definitely more than a convenient store sort of establishment that has bait, some hardware, ammo, and a run down deli counter, but still only three aisles of food and two of them are snacks. I just wanted salty snacks anyway. I grabbed those after going to the bathroom and the checkout lady called me 'Baby' several times and had this really elegant elephant head tattoo, like this one:
I told her I liked it, and that my wife loved elephants. (Yeah, I talk to crazy check-out ladies who call me 'Baby'. Why not?)
There's a bridge that crosses lake Milton, and just before that bridge, coming from the west as I was, there's a little pier with a gazebo at the end, maybe 30 meters out. It's just a wooden dock, no railings and about a meter wide. I risked it and rode out to the gazebo, knowing that if I fell it was just going to be a sopping ride home. I sat down on the picnic table and ate a medium sized bag of something salty in the shade while looking out over the lake. It was beautiful. Everything I wanted it to be.
I did the same thing the Saturday before last. I biked up to Urbana and hit a new county doing it. And it was everything I wanted it to be. Just the right thing to help me keep putting up with all the bullshit. I'll write about it sometime.
Your Obedient,
-Ian Hogan, PhD
