one of the two susans who occupy the beautiful 3rd (?) floor space at the rear of the building at 26 north 3rd street in downtown zanesville is working on one of her (primarily) appliqued, quilted and embellished fiber art pieces, and at the center of the panels of the piece (still yet to be quilted) is a big, black, volant, wool crow. so i interrupt her, because i want to ask while i remember. we'd been walking, he and i (he, the artist, and i, who, well, just like art and stuff), from downtown to destinations as yet unknown the night before, and we'd decided not to take the y-bridge because it was a shorter distance to where we thought we might be going via underwood street, which is state route 60 until it goes over the muskingham and becomes adair ave and state route 146, and the north banks of the not so world famous underwood-adair (60-146) bridge across the muskingham are overflowing (you might say) with giant trees. i couldn't tell what kind of trees they were that night because we hadn't gotten into zanesville until after eleven and it was dark. but i could tell that the trees were giant, and that they were dark too. actually, i hadn't been paying any attention to them at all until we had already started crossing the bridge and had made noise enough to wake up several hundred of the crows that had been roosting in the giant corona of branches of one of them. the crows scattered, and i jumped into a crouch behind the artist's back with my hands gripping his shoulders so as to brace and direct him as my shield. so we decided to talk more quietly, even for our amazement at realizing that the giant trees had been so dark because they were roosted with thousands of tens of thousands of crows. (the bridge was tall, and it was literally up to there with them.) because if we upset any more of them there was the chance that the sum of the drama might get the artist pushed over the railing and into the muskingham.
we walked, then, not in silence, but in whispers: aware, and in awe, but not quite frightened. we did walk almost frighteningly close to the birds in the treetops that were closest to the bridge, but none of them moved and no one fell. then we were on the other side of the river -- moved maybe, but thankfully not fallen -- and we turned right off of aiden (which actually doesn't turn into 146 until 60 turns right at maple) and onto linden. that's where the internet said the bars were, and those bars was where we were headed because the internet hadn't had anything to say about things that might be happening downtown at close to midnight. we passed the first two of them and passed on both. the third looked okay, but we passed on that one too because we wanted the first place we went to have, if possible, more people. surely zanesville must go out to bars...but maybe it didn't go out to the ones on linden on valentine's day? and that's how we ended up at the blue front cafe. it's just a half a block up and across the street from the third place we'd passed, and at least (our thinking went as we passed the window next to the door) it was crowded.
at the blue front cafe we ordered a couple of bud lights, and we might not have stayed for more than those first ones if we hadn't met lisa. lisa was with a friend at the jukebox. the kj (lisa told us later that there was karaoke at the blue front on thursdays) had stopped playing dj, and a man who had been sitting among some patrons at the bar when we came in was now behind it and was yelling for people to play some music, buy some drinks and have some fucking fun. i don't know if we spent enough time with lisa to decided if she was fun. she was definitely something else. and she was definitely looking for fun (although her friend, who was just as conspicuously stuffed into what little she had on in addition to her scanties, was apparently just looking for songs). but when lisa found out that we were into art and stuff our conversation (which up until that point had only been between lisa and the artist) changed course. our beers were almost gone and lisa wanted to buy us more. it was our choice, she said (chirpy baby voice), we could leave if we wanted. we didn't necessarily want to leave, but we didn't feel comfortable taking lisa's money. we did, though (take the money, that is), although we didn't end up feeling bad about it because lisa helped herself to a couple of bottles from the crate on the bar when the bartender had taken a couple of bottles himself and had ducked below the bar to restock a cooler. she put them up on a ledge on the wall where we were standing near the jukebox and only needed to ask us once, indicating the ones on the ledge (sideways, chirpy...drawl?), if she could have one of our beers.
that night at the blue front lisa was wearing a giant red bow in her hair that either did or did not perfectly match the intersection of the persona she was presenting and the one that we presumed upon her. otherwise she was wearing stretch pants and a zane state t-shirt. she's a student, and despite or because of her age she assumes that everyone else she meets is a student too (although maybe, to give her the benefit of a probably unreasonable doubt, that's only at twelve thirty on a thursday night). lisa is forty-seven years old, and she'd never stopped liking art (and stuff). she got her associate's degree from the art institute of pittsburgh in 1985 and then moved to columbus, where she stripped. then lisa probably stole the tv. now she's back in zanesville and back in school. she's going to transfer to franklin, and she's going to be your therapist. she just moved her painting studio into her bedroom so that she can wake up and just be, like, fwaaaahhhhh! but in zanesville you can only really make money doing commissions, she says (and does the artist know what those are?). someone asks you to draw their dog, and you're like, how do you want your dog drawn, you know? that's why she's going back to columbus. and she just moved her painting studio into her bedroom so that she can wake up and just be, like, fwaaaahhhhh! you know? she was incredulous that we would have come to zanesville just to see zanesville. we asked her what there was to do, and she told us to check out the mall.
she also told us that if we were looking for fun that night we should hang out with her friend, because her friend knew how to have fun. at the blue front i thought that she'd said his name was trevor, but when he shook our hands at the goat (across the street, the third bar from before), he introduced himself as matt. he wondered what we were doing in zanesville, and he was incredulous. he wondered where we were staying, and we told him the econo lodge downtown. he told us that he lived downtown, and we asked him what was happening there. everything happening downtown happened at the econo lodge, he said. but it turned out that he wasn't just a motel whore. the bar there was apparently where they did all the live music in town. neil patel had suggested it when he was checking us in, but we hadn't gone because we wanted to make it further than there before there was nowhere else to go. it was half an hour before last call when matt suggested that we join him et al. back at his place. nothing weird, he said. (but he said it really weird.) we asked him about the crows, and he told us that zanesville is just where the crows came home to roost. it's probably difficult being the only one in the village, but matt didn't make it too easy for us to want to follow him anywhere (and i should underscore that sentiment by saying that at that point we wondered if matt or someone else from the blue front might follow us if we walked back downtown alone).
but we walked back downtown alone. we passed the other two bars that we had passed on before, and then we passed through the intersection of linden and adair without turning, which took us past two other bars. we decided that the lone woman playing keno inside the first one must have had an in and kept walk. terry's was obviously already closed. we kept making our way, crisscrossing linden to make sure we kept walking on a sidewalk. the factory at the end of the avenue (an old grain mill?) didn't appear to be operational. the light on in the basement storage (?) room lit up piles of trash and detritus. the artist counseled me against kicking the charity of out potential horror story too hard in the mouth by going inside. so we just let the world famous y-bridge ease us over the confluence of the licking and the muskingham, past the canal -- where we didn't press the flashing green button that was begging us to push it -- and onto main street, where the sheriff was doing laps. romance.
in the morning, we woke up and then went back to sleep. we didn't make it to the econo lodge bar, and we weren't going to make it to breakfast. when we checked out at a minute before noon, neil patel (who lives in a suburb of columbus himself) asked us how we'd enjoyed our night. had we been to weasel boy? i'd told him the night before that after years of driving through it on interstate 70 and seeing the churches and the courthouse from the highway, i'd only ever thought to visit zanesville after finding out that the brewery there made a beer that i liked (after finding out that there was a brewery there, really). (it was a version of the truth.) excuses, excuses, and all of them welcome. i told neil that we hadn't really thought about going until today since the brewery would have been nearly closed by the time that we would have gotten there the night before. so we'd be going that day after it opened at four. and in the meantime we could enjoy the city, neil said, maybe go to the mall.
we went to muddy misers. it's on another bank of the muskingham, across the river to the southwest of downtown. the restaurant is zane grey themed. (the author wasn't the city's namesake, but he was descended from the zanes.) when heidi the waitress asked us where we were from and why we were visiting, we told her something of a mix between what we'd told lisa, matt and neil patel. she was incredulous. but weasel boy didn't open until four, she said, so maybe we could go to the mall.
we left muddy misers and went up the hill toward pioneer park instead. the view of the city from the very top of the hill was probably even better, but the one we got from where we couldn't drive the car any further wasn't bad. we thought that maybe the park was closed for the season, but then we saw that the pedestrian ingress to the side of the driveway was permanently fenced off. (maybe we would have had better luck staying on the other side of the river and trying putnam hill.) the flight of cement stairs that led up from the brick apartment building at the front of the hill ended in chain link. we three pointed around and went back down into town via the crumbling asphalt drive in front of the apartment building. halfway down i asked the artist to stop. it did look like the little pool of water might have been part of a decorative waterfall or a fountain at some point, but it didn't look like anyone had paid any attention to keeping it circulating for a while. someone had, however, put a dozen or so thumb sized gold koi into the two inches of water that had accumulated in the two foot indent that was still in the dirt. and someone must have put them there just that day? someone should have told us about that.
we drove the three miles of state route out to the mall, but neither of us wanted to go in, so we drove back into downtown.
it was good, though, that we went, because the way that we went back in took us right by the muskingham county welcome center. maybe someone there could tell us what to do with our next hour and a half. the snow that had started falling was rainy, and we weren't much for walking around and finding something for ourselves just then. unfortunately, the woman at the reception desk told us, most of the museums were closed. and the churches were hit or miss. they didn't have regular hours for tourists, and it wasn't really the season for going around and knocking on doors. we did, however, get a guide to downtown that briefly described the histories of each of them, and we got it because i asked about one church in particular. it's christopher columbus, the woman at the desk confirmed when i asked her about the facade of st. nicholas. and yes, he has his foot on that native american's neck. the church was much older than i'd thought, and it sounded like the ceramic tile mural had the inertia of history behind it. zanesville, after it was the state capital, came to be called the pottery capital of the world (until it wasn't), and there are big, painted urns all over town (some of whom look like women lurking behind entryway pillars and smoking as the sheriff passes by again in the middle of the night). the internet had also told us that downtown was home to an artists' colony, although neither i nor the artist knew exactly what that meant. but at the mention of it a man came out from a back office and gave us another guide, with a map. he'd just come from studio 202 and told us that the susans should still be there if we wanted to stop by.
when we got there, the one susan was down on the main floor talking to mike, and the other was up in the loft. we looked at the art. then mike left, but not before giving us directions to his old studio (he was in the process of moving) and telling us that he would put out his flag. the space at the rear of the building at 26 north 3rd street in downtown zanesville is beautiful, and the space at the front is being made into apartments. we got a tour. the late middle aged professional artists of the artists' colony are gradually taking over more and more of the unoccupied spaces downtown and turning them into places like studio 202. the city's first friday art event is getting more and more popular. they may not spend the night, but people from columbus (and maybe from pittsburgh) probably visit the city to shop the (expensive, pottery heavy) antique stores on main street all the time. it needs more than a little work, she had told us, but there's a four story building downtown on sale for twenty thousand -- in case we were looking to relocate. i wanted to know about the crows. but the susan working on that fiber art piece with the crow in the center of it didn't have anything in particular to say about them. the banks of the muskingham are, apparently, just where they come home to roost.
the snow had gotten snowier during our time in the studio, so we decided to make our visit to mike's brief. (but we should at least go to say goodbye, we figured, since he'd been nice enough to make a point of putting out a flag.) i was cautioned against taking photographs of his paintings when mike saw my phone in my hand, but i did get one picture of the old masonic temple across the street through a window of the studio and the snow. mike explained to us how he paints with asphalt. i learned, in many ways, about lability.
when we left mike's the snow was coming down even thicker and had accumulated even more, and downtown zanesville looked entirely different than the place into which we'd followed the y-bridge the night before. it was a few minutes past four o'clock, but we went to take another look at the muskingham county court house before we went back across the river to the brewery. it has public restrooms with outdoor access, and you only have to press the button to get out. the court house was the ohio capitol from the fall of 1810 until the spring of 1812, but against my experience of zanesville i prefer to imagine that its more interesting history has been the one that decided to take up matt on his invitation that night at the bar. maybe the sheriff has been involved too.
across the river at weasel boy we run into one of his friends from the night before. he says hello and pats me on the back. i have a growler filled of the bitter sable imperial black ipa. the view of downtown through the window of the taproom and the snow is dreamy, and we've decided to spend the first hour or so of happy hour there. the snow looks wet, and it will probably be easier to drive through on the highway after it's been driven over for a while. i think that we maybe should have tried harder to get to the mexican restaurant where lisa works, but i also think that maybe we shouldn't. then i think about what we'd done instead. the canal had been frozen when we'd driven across it last. those fish we'd seen on our way down from pioneer park had never had a chance.
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