Geography

Gratitude 4/13/2026

I am grateful for the gift of a new day.
My heart is filled with gratitude for the many blessings I have.
I will appreciate the small joys and express my thanks in all circumstances.
Let my attitude of gratitude bring joy to others.

I am grateful to have a small understanding of the importance of geography on our daily lives.

I’m embarrassed to admit that I was in my 40s working on an elementary school geography supplemental program before I realized how much geography affected human existance.

My parents had taken our family on many vacations. We camped in the Blue Ridge Mountains and at the Chesapeake Bay. We swam in the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean. When I was in 5th grade, we took a month to drive across the United States. We camped almost the whole way. We saw mountains, deserts, the plains, geysers, the Petrified Forest, the Grand Canyon…

But there is nothing like having to TEACH someone else, before something chrystallizes and becomes real and understandable. I can remember the moment when I understood why so many cities had been built near rivers or other bodies of water. I was talking to the author of our little geography program. It was incredibly humbling. Oh, people need water to drink and to wash with. Animals need water to survive. People need water to move ourselves, supplies, produce… from place to place. Water was incredibly inportant for transportation before airplanes and trains and trucking. It was the only way to transport goods.

I had noticed but never understood that there are often a lot of hills, even mountains on either side of a major river. A road descends until you hit that bridge across a river, and then rises on the other side. I had traveled over the Ohio River through Wheeling, West Virginia hundreds of times traveling back and forth from Ohio to Virginia and had never thought of that.

In 2003 I took my Girl Scout Troop on a Civil War Battlefield’s tour. We made an early stop at Harper’s Ferry where the Potomac and the Shenandoah Rivers come together. George Washington, as a surveyor, had identified this spot as a significant location BECAUSE of the geography. Lewis and Clark disembarked from here. And because of the waterways, there was a munitions factory established here. That’s where John Brown was captured when he tried to incite a slave rebellion before the Civil War. Both Robert E. Lee and George Custer were involved in arresting John Brown.

On another trip in 2006 I took my Girl Scout troop to Portsmouth, Ohio where we saw the Beautiful Ohio that formed the southern boundary of Ohio separating the North from the South. Fugitive slaves travelled across the Ohio to get to a Free State. On the day we were there, we saw some huge ships moving cargo to the Mississippi.

In 2013 my stepmother and I took a bus trip to Pittsburgh, PA. Pittsburgh is the home of Three Rivers Stadium. There the Allegheny, Monongahela, and Ohio Rivers merge together. That Ohio River separates Ohio from West Virginia and Kentucky. Pittsburgh is the city of bridges!

We need water for POWER! Before electricity, water wheels that used the constant power of rivers and streams were a major power source for grinding grain, for all kinds of things. Later hydropower plants and damns harnessed the power of water to supply energy all over the world.

Lewis and Clark were looking for a water route across North America. The Missisippi River from Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico with all its tributaries has been an incredible transportation avenue. Canals, including the Erie Canal, the Panama Canal, the Chesapeake and Ohio, all over the world have linked waterways to each other to move people and goods from place to place.

Even right here where I live, in rural Ohio, the Big Walnut Creek runs through Sunbury. The southeast portion of our farm has a small creek, Culver Creek running through it. It flows into Big Walnut Creek. My grandparents who raised milk cows, had them drink down there. There was a well worn path to that little section. There were communities started in different locations but they were abandoned because there was NO water.

It is really easy to ignore all the bridges that have been built so people and cars can travel over bodies of water. There are three bridges on my little section of Porter Central Road. There have been a few times in the 50 years we have lived on this farm that the water has flooded out a bridge and we’ve had to detour. It never occurred to me how much I relied on all those bridges to travel to work or to the store.

Wars have been waged over control of waterways. So many battles including Revolutionary and Civil War battles involved control of waterways. I think of Washington crossing the Delaware River and Grant in Vicksburg fighting over the Mississippi.

I’m so grateful to finally learn enough to appreciate geography!