What Is In a Border

From the partitions of 80s Germany to the seamless road trips from Colchester, England to Prackhow, Poland, in the 90s,  I draw a bit of energy from borders. I found this energy somewhat characterized by books like House on the Border Lands and Clive Barker's Weave World which I read in the 80s. Travel is how I look to find that energy these days, sometimes stumbling into a border every now and then.

On borders, the locals have more in common with their neighbors than the border makers off in the center of that particular namesake's capital. As the consummate outsider, I look for things like traffic patterns on Sunday because of local liquor laws in places in Toledo, Ohio, Point Pleasant West Virginia, and northwestern Arkansas. Sort of like "On the Seventh Day, they rested. That is unless they crossed the river where hooch was still legal." Back in the day in Europe, every day was Sunday east of Darmstadt so to speak. Jeans could indeed get a person a slightly used, about a hundred thousand miles, car if you had the right passport just as a Levi's ad in the 80s on TV advertised. Really adds to a visitor's experience to witness people working around arbitrary restrictions on this or that. For the locals, it was any given week of the year while knowing that some things outsiders just wouldn't understand, because of say State Sales taxes or international import restrictions.

This has resulted in my two worlds, reality and the fantastic spilling over into the other. Role-playing creations having a lot of detail, which I won't call realism, that are more prose than poem in the tradition of fantasy. It can also give some head-in-the-clouds whimsy while making my way through the real world which has me looking deeply into every thing I see a local person do or say-- this can be helpful as well as harmful on any given day. But for writing RPG material it always works.

When it comes to this trip there are many convergences. Not only do two states, of the American United States, meet; Columbus meets Charleston (WV); Detroit meets "the Old South;" and folklore meets pranksters speaking in terms of differing worlds. While it's all fun and games until a bridge collapses, a sense of humor is prevalent. Ins the right mindset, one can step from a mindset of strong, down to Earth industrial-mindedness into the other-worldly just by driving down a couple off-highway local roads.

This trip to east Ohio and northwest West Virginia has been anticipated since about 'o7. We just never made the time. Heck it took GenCon shutting its doors because of the arrival of the first Horseman marking the start of the End of Times, even, before my gaming clique got serious about coming here. Now in Point Pleasant, err Gallipolis, the gang is hearkening back to Middle Earth where the Shire ends blends into Bree-Land. We're even sneaking like a bunch little beings, goblins more so than hobbits, using too many "u"s and hyphens in our written language to be accepted as locals.