Jessica Cyders Archives

April 20, 2015

Phillip Sheridan Statue

I drove 590.1 miles from Athens, Ohio, to Cape Girardeau on Sunday. While on the road, I listened to an audio book about World War II submarine warfare.

That was an appropriate topic because, except for about the first 20 miles and the last 75 miles, it felt like I was IN a submarine. The rain varied between light to “Holy Cow! I can’t see.” Then, somewhere around Louisville, the Holy Cow rain mixed in with road spray and fog.

So, what does that have to do with the statue of Civil War General Phillip H. Sheridan’s statue in the Somerset, Ohio, town square?

Did Sheridan die in battle?

To be honest, my brain is fried and I either had to skip a day or post something that didn’t take much research.

Sheridan was a local Somerset boy, and his statue is near where his house was. I asked Curator Jessica if she could remember the “horse code” that says the number of legs in the air indicate the way the rider died. I don’t recall her exact answer, but Snopes set me straight. If the leg count equals death status, it’s more likely to be coincidence than plan.

For example, Somerset’s statue of Sheridan has both front legs off the ground. According to the urban legend, that would indicate that he died in battle. A statue of him on Sheridan Circle in Washington, D.C., has a horse with all four hooves on the ground, which is supposed to signify that he died of other causes. In Sheridan’s case, the Washington statue would be correct. He died of heart failure.

Waiting for the bird to fly

Photography is all about capturing the moment. By the time we finished dinner, it was getting pretty dark, but Jessica wanted to walk up to see the statue up close.

I stood there patiently waiting for two things:

A puff of wind to come along to bring the flag to life
The bird to fly off the horse’s head so I could capture it in midair.

The flag finally moved, but, after several minutes of waiting, I discovered that the “bird” was the horse’s ear, and it wasn’t EVER going to fly away.

April 19, 2015

A Cemetery Mystery

I have to head back to Cape on Sunday morning, so Curator Jessica wanted to do one last ramble around SE Ohio on Saturday. We found some neat stuff I’ll share later, but this tale shows the value of knocking on doors.

We wanted to see if anything was left of a street scene I had shot in the late 1960s in Rendville, Ohio. It was a small town that was predominately black and produced the first black mayor in Ohio, and one of the first black union organizers.

At the top of a hill overlooking the town was a cemetery. What struck us right off was that a wide path had been mowed to a circle in the middle of the graveyard. (Click on the photos to make them larger.)

It gets even more curious

In the top of the circle was a small black fence surrounding a freshly-planted tree. A tree so freshly-planted that the ground was still wet where it had been watered.

Next to the fence was a metal post with an upside-down bottle on it. Glued or somehow affixed to it was a small bowl, and in it was a glass with water in it and some fresh flowers. On the ground was a lei made of orchids. Miz Jessica pointed out that they wilt quickly, so they had to have been left recently.

Knock on a door

I said, “There’s a house across the street. Why don’t you go over, knock on the door and ask if they know what this is all about?”

She demurred, so I said I’d do it with her in tow.

Steve, the man who answered the door, said he didn’t live there. He just borrows the house for two weeks a year to go turkey hunting, and he didn’t know what was going on, but we had made him curious.

Scratching our collective heads

We all went back to the circle, walked around a bit tossing out theories, and admitted we were stumped.

“I know the mayor,” Steve said. “I’ll give him a call. If you give me your phone number, I’ll ask him, then let you know.”

I never expected to hear from Steve again, but we were half-way back to Athens after a great dinner in Somerset (just down from a big statue of Civil War General Phillip Sheridan) when my phone rang from an unknown number.

Mother of the town clerk

It was Steve. He said the mother of the town clerk had died and they held the ceremony in the circle and planted the tree in her honor. She must have been cremated because there was very little earth disturbed. So little, in fact, that I thought it might have been excess from when they dug the hole for the tree.

A minute or two after we hung up, my phone rang with Steve’s number showing. I heard him telling the story of the funeral to someone in the background. Evidently he had butt-dialed me.

“We all win”

“We all win,” I told Miz Jessica. “We got our question answered, and he can dine out for a week telling his buddies about this crazy couple who banged on his door with something that sounded like it was out of the Twilight Zone.”

History is all about HIS story and HER story, and I love knocking on doors to capture snippets of history.

April 18, 2015

Sunset on Moonville Road

Curator Jessica and I were headed back to Athens, Ohio, after trekking over a muddy trail to the allegedly haunted Moonville Railroad Tunnel in Vinton County. (More about that soon.)

The sun was thinking hard about going down when we passed over a low-water crossing and saw the sky splashing orange over Raccoon Creek. When I spotted the house glowing dimly in the distance, it was time to stop for a photo.

The first photos were just a little bit “cool,” or blue, so I changed the color balance adjustment on my Nikon D3100 from “Auto” to “Shade” and dialed in a bit of blue because the orange was TOO orange.

I won’t say this was entirely faithful to what Mother Nature provided, but it’s close enough that I don’t feel guilty.

March 21, 2015March 21, 2015

Citrus Inn Restaurant

When Road Warriorettes Anne and Jessica journeyed to Florida last May, we left Athens, Ohio, passed through places like Albany, Georgia, and Athens, Georgia until we got to the Sunshine state.

It was getting late, and my passengers had, in addition to the Ohio and Georgia towns, gone through Whiny, Grumpy, Cross City and were approaching Armed Insurrection before we got something to eat and stayed overnight in Chiefland. They were in a better mood the next morning when we checked out the Levy County Quilt Museum.

Talked it up to Warriorette Shari

When it came time to haul Warriorette Shari back to Missouri, I talked up this great old restaurant in Chiefland that had the quilt museum and some inexpensive lodging nearby.

By the time we got to the general area of those cool places, it was dark. Even though we were northbound, we were beginning to get close to Whiny and Grumpy. Cranky and Hungry were far behind us. When the lights of Chiefland came and went with no restaurant, my passenger started to get concerned. “‘When you said you were a cereal killer, you WERE talking about Cheerios, right?”

Just about the time I was beginning to doubt myself, the Citrus Inn Restaurant appeared out of the darkness. I was right about stopping in Chiefland for the night on our last trip, but we had EATEN at Cross City.

We pulled into the lot afraid that it would be closed, but an EMT opened the door for us, and we saw two guys sitting together, some folks paying their bill, and another fellow sitting at a table near where we were going to wind up.

Huge oysters in the stew

I ordered the oyster stew (with two spoons, because I’m a nice guy), and a shrimp and oyster combo. Shari had a seafood combo with scallops and something else. It was a good thing I had asked for two spoons. The stew came in a bowl the size of a small bathtub, and half a cow of butter was floating on top of it. There were at least eight or 10 HUGE oysters hiding under the butter. These weren’t oyster chunks, they were slurping-size bivalve molluscs to be proud of.

Unlike Road Warriorette Jan, who is a foodie by trade, my first instinct is to chow down, not to take pictures of my food. That’s why there are pieces missing from our plates.

“I’m going to hurt myself”

When I got to the “if I eat one more bite, I’m going to hurt myself” stage, the guy who had been sitting across from us got up to leave. Catching his eye, I said, “We’ve got way more shrimp, scallops and oysters than we can finish, and we’re on the road, so we can’t take them with us. Would you like some of them?”

The guy patted his stomach, then said, “Thanks, but I’m almost in the same shape. I don’t think I could eat another bite. ” Then, before he could take another two steps, he turned around and said, “I’ve changed my mind. I’ve never tried the oysters. I’ll take a couple.”

We made the same offer to the two other customers. They considered it, but ended up passing.

The Citrus Inn Restaurant, established in 1928 (I think), is the kind of place where you could have those kinds of conversations with perfect strangers and not feel at all uncomfortable. I ate there in the middle 70s while covering a Suwanee River flood. It’s going to be one of my regular stops when I’m taking Hwy 19 through the middle of the state.