Why Martins Ferry?

I’ve always had a fascination with my hometown of Martins Ferry, Ohio. Situated in the Allegheny Plateau and running along the Ohio River across from Wheeling, West Virginia, the geography provided everything I needed to live out a Tom Sawyer kind of boyhood.

Remember the cave where Tom and Becky got lost? My friends and I had a cave up in the hills, too, and spent countless hours playing there. The Mississippi River is ingrained in the lives of Tom, Huck, and their friends every bit as much as the soil they ran around on, and fortunately for me and my friends, we had the Ohio River, along with Wheeling Island. While not abandoned like Jackson’s Island is in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, the north end of Wheeling Island was empty of people whenever we road our bikes across the Aetnaville Bridge and peddled on the bike paths behind a baseball field on the island. Once there, we would play in the water and enjoy the small waves that passing barges provided. Sometimes we’d sneak some food out of our houses and picnic there. Why sneak the food? Because no way would our mothers permit us to go play in the river!

And we also played in the Orange Crik. It just so happened that the area where the coal mine runoff was located, at the corner of Indiana Street and Breitenstein Lane, was also a major gathering area for the kids in my neighborhood. Sometimes it felt as if we lived at that intersection, playing Wiffle Ball, touch football, kickball, and riding skateboards. We also played a lot of kick the can, which we called Tin Can Alley, in the alley between Indiana Street and Zane Highway. I tried to capture this feeling a little in my short story, Orange Crik. Martins Ferry tends to tug me back to my childhood, and I’m not trying to fight it.

The barn was another place we stumbled upon when we were kids. It was located up on a hill, and we took the hard way to get there, climbing upward through the woods, walking on fallen trees over streams, and at last coming to it in the middle of a large open field. We didn’t go there that often, but I made it an essential place in my Apocalypse Weird: Strange Change short story.

While I make Martins Ferry sound like an idyllic place to grow up, it wasn’t all fun and games. The neighborhood kids did a pretty good job of sticking together as friends, but we certainly had our share of squabbles. And probably like most kids in the 70s and 80s, I was on the receiving end of some bullying from time-to-time. But we dealt with it and continued having fun.

When a place becomes ingrained in you, when you’ve played there, bled there, suffered there, and had triumphs there, you feel you owe it something in return. Martins Ferry native James Wright, the Pulitzer Prize winning poet, wrote a poem about his hometown that is often anthologized, called Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio. There is an economy of words in his poem, and you can’t help but notice the importance of high school football to the residents in this masterpiece. Want to know just how big a deal the football team is to the town? ESPN actually made a short film about it.

So what do you do when you no longer live in the place that has so many memories for you? For Martins Ferry natives, the Facebook page Memories of Martins Ferry, Ohio, is a wonderful place to explore. It’s a treasure trove of pictures, events, and old friendships being rekindled.

And that’s the answer to my “Why Martins Ferry?” question. It is for these reasons that my Apocalypse Weird fan fiction short story is centered there, and I’m thrilled that I’ve been given the opportunity to expand it into a novel. If you’re from the Ohio Valley, and more specifically from Martins Ferry, there will be places, streets, and geography you are sure to recognize. Some of the action takes place in Pittsburgh, and some in Washington, PA, and Wheeling, WV, but the heart and soul of it come from my memories of growing up in Martins Ferry.

If you want to learn more about Apocalypse Weird, click on the name. There are also a couple weeks left in the IndieGoGo Campaign , in which you can get some very cool perks for your donation.

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