In Search of the Devil’s Hole: Part 1 - Road and Pylon

I drive northwest from the Crystal City, out past the pet resort,  on the road General Hull hacked through the swamp to the Maumee Rapids two hundred years ago. Nowadays the road flees arrow straight through dry corn fields, a chalk sky as still as the landscape itself, vanishing to a horizon punctuated by the spidery fingers of cell towers and pylons. Dark copses of trees and blank houses wait for winter. 

I am looking for the Devil’s Hole.

I’ve heard the name for years and often wondered. What is it? Where is it? Who first called it the Devil’s Hole and why? Is it an actual place or a figment of some unknown author’s imagination, a story written now in the wind and the silences? All I know is that I heard somewhere that the county highway department has stopped worrying about the disappearing road signs—college kids looking for dorm decorations most likely. Best surrender to the invisible. 

Other than this, my knowledge is as two-dimensional as the map on my phone. I drive into the muted November landscape and mid-afternoon, I arrive at a desolate corner where two roads meet and here it is. County Road 61, or Devil’s Hole Road. I pull over by a wall of rusted corn and clamber out of the car. The road cuts straight and white through the dun colored fields, twelve miles east over the interstate towards Pemberville. Straight lines through blank expanses. I can hear the hushed whispers of the wind and feel the spit of rain. There are flat fields and stubble, greens and russets. There’s an old farmhouse amid trees a ways off. A red truck passes me and turns in, pulling past grey buildings and skinny conifers. There are birds swaying on the wires in the fading light.

It’s Thanksgiving day and I drive on, following the road east, imagining all the people sitting down to all the meals over all the years, all the football games on all the flickering televisions and I’m watching the bright sky smeared by rain clouds and there is something unseen behind the empty blue-grey silence. One or two cars pass, lights bright in the gathering gloom. The horizon is flat and the darkening sky wheels above me. Rain drops on the windshield invert the view. To the sky, to the earth. I’m listening to a song by Kit Sebastian whose eerie placeless Tropicalia marks a turning in this year of change. I drive up over the interstate and there are rivers of cars flowing beneath me, tail lights red to Dayton. 

Off in the distance, dark interiors of woods and lonely white houses. Railroad tracks, a maintenance-of-way shed streaked with age. I’m crossing other straight vacant roads that run perpendicular to the one on which I’m driving. Dunbridge, Carter, Anderson, Layman. Their names slide by. Further along there’s a line of pylons heading north so I stop again and enjoy their grandeur, still as monuments. They are stark against the sky. I take a few photos. 

More miles further west, on Bradner Road, I find Salem Lutheran Church and Schweitz Cemetery and so I pull over, get out, explore. The wind is stiff in my face. The headstones look west, to the silhouettes of trees massed black against the fading light. German names, mostly, some of them blurred and illegible: Meierrose, Sielschott, Kahlenberg, Vater und Mutter. Strangers in a strange land, "until the shadows lengthen and the evening comes." Dreams dissolving in acid rain.

It’s true, there are only a few signs for the road to the Devil’s Hole save a couple on the busy intersection with Dixie Highway and, a few miles further west at the intersections with McCutcheonville and Luckey Roads, two more defiant relics, twenty five feet up telephone poles and safe from kids and their screwdrivers. The general absence of signs lends the route an air of anonymity, as if the named cross roads, the circumspect landscape, and all the uneasy memories of the past conspire to keep the Devil’s Hole a secret. 

I've lived in the Crystal City half a lifetime but there's so much here I still don't know, and perhaps I never will. There are troubled spirits out along the highway, yes. But I don’t think I’ve yet found what I came looking for.

[Next time: Part 2 - Devil Hole Prairie]