I’ve heard your cries over inept drivers and overrun highways marked with potholes or People Doing 10 Under In The Left Lane. I’ve listened to your stories of unoriginal speed trap locations and witnessed your Hell Is Real signage.
I’m not here to share these age-old tales once more.
I’m here to speak the word of Interstate 71 in Ohio between Medina and Polaris. I’m here to tell the story of Absolutely Nothing.
This stretch of three-lane misery encompasses just about 60 percent of my semi-regular journey between a nondescript town in northeast Ohio and the grounds of America’s finest producer of NFL-ready wide receivers.
But — as any veteran knows well — the destinations are worthless constants in this calculus of pavement and semi trucks. As soon as you’re forced to leave the comforting embrace of I-271, the Road is the only entity you report to. The well-paved kingdom of nothing that awaits you for the next hour and a half is your new God.
Every time I begin this trip (which I’ve made somewhere between 30 and 10,000 times in my short life), the same pattern of thoughts runs through my mind, sanded down by the grate of repetition and stretched to the limit by my fading sanity:
Okay, we made it to Medina. Only an hour and 45 minutes more of this.
Oh no, we’re just now passing the fun1, train-themed outlet mall? It’s only been 15 minutes. Oh no.
Why is there an exit labeled “Congress/W Salem”? Are we in 18th-century Massachusetts?
Just need to make it to the next exit.
Just need to make it to the next exit.
Just need to make it to the next exit.
You get it. I know you get it. You get it, right?
At this point, everyone in the vehicle with me has already given into the void; they are sound asleep, dreaming of a commute filled with traffic jams and roads with curves and water features and buildings.
Why am I always the one driving?
I’m not a big Elon Musk guy, but damn do I wish those fully autonomous cars he’s been crafting up would stop hitting pedestrians on test drives. I would go into a lifelong debt just to have one of those right now.
Once upon a time, I took a trip from my hometown to the Toledo area — a drive that takes almost the exact same amount of time as my Journey to the Center of Ohio. (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson not included.)
I took Route 2 the entire way. It was a magical experience.
Big cities, suburbs to the left and right, an abundance of visible buildings to keep the mind occupied, Lake Erie at your side the entire way like a familiar passenger, the Sandusky Bay — it’s the little things that matter most on a long-but-not-like-we’re-going-on-a-vacation-long drive.
Back to reality.
Why am I even considering how much time is left? Does it really matter? It takes the same amount of time every time, yet I still have to try to win the race against the inevitable every time.
The everlasting trudge down I-71 has approximately no little things. Instead, it has plenty of exhausting Big Things that remind you you’re still in the middle of a place with an exclusively lowercase p.
That place could be Ohio. It could also be central Pennsylvania. Or Indiana. Or Iowa. Or Kentucky. These things don’t matter when you’re staring directly ahead for nearly three hours.
There are Big outlet malls and Big fields of unidentifiable crops, Big rolling hills that somehow provide zero Big things to look at, Big exits teeming with fast food joints and nothing else, Big trucks everywhere you look, slowing down and speeding up and taking up all three lanes on a hill, causing the inevitable backlog of traffic that should definitely not exist on a road through Nowhere.
The halfway point comes and goes as you speed past Grandpa’s Cheese Barn2 and the “Discover Ashland World Headquarters Of Nice People” sign, bringing with it a sense of hope that just as quickly fades into the blackness.
For some reason, there are no fewer than 15 Mansfield exits on I-71. Each one has progressively more fast food locations. This series of exits (at which I’ve never seen one car leave the highway, by the way) provides a strange sense of hope. After Mansfield comes Sunbury and Delaware, and when you’re in Delaware, you’re only one county away from salvation.
It may be the only sense of hope anything related to Mansfield has ever provided.
Sorry, Mansfield. This drive changes you. It makes you ruthless.
As Logan Roy would say, this drive makes you a killer.
If you make this drive at night, streetlights often become the only signs of humanity, the only indicators that you’re not living in a Last Man on Earth situation.
The real apocalypse is happening only in your thoughts. And you’ll never be Will Forte.
I ran cross country for two years in high school. It was fun. I liked making fun of other cross country runners (and the sport as a whole) with my teammates, because obviously we were Better and More Cool than all of them.
The one thing I hated about cross country, though, was the running. There was so much of it, and once a week, that running would be in the form of an actual, OHSAA-sanctioned race. This means a lot in high school. It was time to try hard and suffer for just over three miles.
The first mile or so was fine. I often sprinted way too fast and felt like a world champion when I reached the one-mile mark surrounded by actual fast runners. The rest of the race was a nightmare I mostly spent battling my own lungs, legs and brain as they called for me to fall to the ground at once and never run again in my life.
The terrain was always the same. The people passing me on all sides were always the same. The same parents shouting were always shouting the same things. I will never experience a longer 13 minutes than the last two miles of a high school cross country race.
But in the end, I knew crossing the finish line would feel much sweeter running than walking. The pain — though 100 percent not worth it at all — felt like it was paid off in some nonsensical way.
And that’s how I feel about The Nothing Drive.
Literally walking to and from Columbus would be the only thing worse than this 100 mile dead zone in the universe.
Thanks for reading. This was entirely thought up on my drive back to Columbus earlier this month. I write and edit this myself, so any grammatical errors or mistakes are not my fault in any way.
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Fun in a depressing sense. Every time I pass this mall, it appears to have significantly fewer stores and cars parked out front. A fitting metaphor for this journey.
Definitely worth a visit if you’re a first-timer.