Sunday, May 24, 1998

Spring gives visitor a whole new look at Ohio

Peter had this awful image of Northwest Ohio. It was always cold. It was always windy. It was always gray. The sun never broke through the clouds. The landscape was barren.

That distorted view of Ohio came from a number of visits over the Christmas holidays. He must have brought bad-weather karma with him, because it always seemed to be especially nasty when Peter came to town.

He would leave his home in balmy San Diego, board a jet, and four hours later step out of the terminal in Detroit where 30-mile-an-hour winds and minus-20 chill factors would cut right through his sinewy frame. He did not have a very good image of what Ohio has to offer.

Now Peter knows his geography and climatology. He's a brilliant guy. If we were picking teams for an intense game of Jeopardy, he'd be one of my first choices. He knows our section of Ohio has four distinct seasons and plenty of favorable weather. He just never got to see anything but the worst of it, until recently.

Then a spring wedding in the family brought Peter to Ohio and he got to experience some of the wonders of the area. He saw lilacs top-heavy with an explosion of blooms, and had his olfactory area bombarded with their heavenly scent.

He saw some of the greatest grass he has witnessed since he left his native Vancouver. In San Diego, the only things that are green are either irrigated around the clock, served in a salad, or painted. While here, Peter saw spring wheat tall enough to wave in the wind and pastures rich with a thick, new growth of alfalfa.

Since Peter married my sister, Maureen, so many years ago, he has seen only Ohio's nasty side. Snow drifts, frosted windshields, salt trucks and pewter gray skies from horizon to horizon. When he thought of the Midwest, his mind had images of The Blizard of '78, the bitter winds that brought down the Edmund Fitzgerald and paralyzing ice storms.

But fortunately, that all changed this year. Peter got to see Ohio's richest outdoor resource -- spring.

Those monstrous oaks and maples that look so lifeless in December were decked out in brilliant new leaf growth on every branch. There were tulips and daffodils and countless patches of crocus fighting each other for the best view of the sun. The crab apple trees were painted in a lace of white and pink blossoms that flew like confetti with each breeze.

During that brief spring visit, Peter's senses were finally treated to some of Northwest Ohio's real beauty and charm. But he missed a lot, too.

Time didn't permit him to take a drive along the Sandusky River and watch our bald eagles patrol their domain from high in the sky, ready to dive bomb an unsuspecting sucker and take it straight from the stream to the hungry mouths in their nest nearby.

Peter didn't get to see Lake Erie's gulls working over a school of minnows, crashing into the water repeatedly to pull out their lunch, bite by bite.

He also missed walking through one of our numerous old woodlots and stumbling upon a patch of morels hidden away like a leprechaun's treasure. He's probably seen these delicious wild mushrooms dried and bagged and sold for $70 or $80 per pound in the markets in California, but until you've picked them fresh, cleaned them and tasted them within the same day, you don't know Ohio's morels.

Peter missed observing the spring spectacle that is river-run fishing. He'snot a fisherman, so it would have been even more of a shock to see several hundred angles, in shoulder-to-shoulder formation, working the waters of the Sandusky and Maumee rivers in pursuit of walleye and white bass. He would have noticed their stringers heavy with fish, their sun-burned necks and arms, and the fact that every age, race and economic class was represented.

Peter didn't get to see the spring winds fill the air with a blizzard of cottonwood or start a downpour of those maple seed helicopters. He missed the sight of farmers working the fields in every direction, and of robins pulling worms off the lawn after a spring rain.

Peter's back in San Diego now, where in the days before El Nino, a weather crisis was a cloud. The ugliest of Ohio's winters had scared him off, but after this spring visit, I think he'll be back. He only got a sneak preview of what we know are the real wonders of Ohio in the spring.