Saskia’s chemistry students at Cuyahoga Falls High School wrote a short class project on the physics of the bollard impact in October. The project ran twelve pages. The project calculated the kinetic energy of a 2022 Cadillac Escalade ESV at twenty-eight miles per hour as approximately one hundred sixty-nine thousand joules, compared with the structural yield strength of a schedule-80 twelve-inch steel pipe at forty-two thousand pounds per square inch. The students’ conclusion: the Escalade did not stand a chance. The project was submitted as part of their Ohio State physics competition. The project won second place in the regional round. Saskia framed the project’s title page and mailed it to me. The page hangs in the welding shop above the lathe. It reads, in twelve-point Times New Roman, typed by a Cuyahoga Falls sophomore named Astrid Buchard, The Physics of a Friday Morning: A Case Study in Roadside Property Protection.
Hazel and I attended Sloan’s release from the Trumbull County Correctional Institution in February, not in person, since the release was not a public event, but we noted the date on the small kitchen calendar we keep for events we want to remember at a distance. Sloan had served her full term. Her release came on the third of February. She did not return to Pinebrook Estates. The lot-fourteen sale had closed in November. The new family had moved in. Sloan moved to Westlake, Ohio, by Holmes County rumor. She has not, by any reliable account, been seen in Holmes County since. Holden Calhoun, by separate Holmes County rumor, moved to Florida after the divorce finalized in March. Their three children stayed in Wooster with Holden’s mother and stepfather. The children are, by Magnus Witford’s quiet checking through the new HOA’s community-welfare network, doing as well as can be expected. Magnus’s wife, Eldora, has taken the children out to lunch in Wooster three times since the move. Eldora is a retired Wooster pediatrician. She has the kind of hand-on-the-shoulder bedside manner that small communities use to take care of their displaced children. The kindness has, by every measure I can see, been the right kind. Holmes County has its quiet ways of taking care of children who did not choose their parents. The county has been taking care of such children since 1837. The county will keep taking care of them.
The bollard at the road is the smallest piece of the long Holmes County practice. The children at lot fourteen, walking their dog past the bollard every evening, are the most important part. The bollard is the past. The dog walking is the future. The Friday mornings on Township Road 167 are quiet again. The trash collection runs at 9:15. The county trash can goes out. The county trash can comes back in. The Galloways are home. The shop is running. The students are coming on Saturdays. The granddaughters are learning to read. The cardinals are back at the dogwood. Hazel is starting her second children’s book this winter. The working title is The Quiet Welder of Holmes County. I have offered to be the technical reviewer. She has accepted. I will not let her quote me reading like a welding instructor. She has promised. She will quote me anyway. I will not mind. The book will sell at the Holmes County Antique Festival in October. We will read together at the children’s tent. Hazel will hold my hand. That is the story of Township Road 167.