A typical haunted schoolhouse in rural Ohio, where every night is Halloween.

I won’t try to sugarcoat it — the journey hasn’t been carefree every mile of the way. There’ve been a few moments. Deer darting onto the highway in Idaho and Wyoming. That stand-off with the buffalo in Yellowstone. Maybe the lightning bolt in Montana. There were even a few cracked twigs in the night in grizzly country in the Tetons (where brown bears are still trying their best to fatten up).

A grizzly I spotted near the park road in Yellowstone, feeding on a large unidentified carcass.

But nothing really prepared me for Ohio. Shortly before I arrived there, the 62-year-old owner of a wild animal farm in a place called Zanesville released dozens of animals from their enclosures and then pulled out a revolver and shot himself dead. This wasn’t like someone at the Alaska Zoo in Anchorage suddenly losing it and deciding to throw open the gates to the raccoon cage and suffer the consequences. These were large animals — all carnivores — and there were lots of them. Released near the highway that runs through Zanesville were (count them) 18 tigers, 17 lions, 6 black bears, 3 grizzlies,  3 leopards, 3 cougars, 3 wolves and one monkey.

This got my attention.

I wondered, first of all: Where’s Zanesville? Wikipedia describes it as a town of about 25,000 people in central Ohio that was named after Ebenezer Zane, who blazed Ohio’s very first road — “Zane’s Trace” — about five years before Lewis & Clark even got started. His path would later become part of America’s transcontinental Route 40.

The good news was: Harley and I weren’t traveling on Route 40. We were up north of there. The bad news was: Bears can travel a hundred miles a day, let alone lions and tigers and cougars eager to stretch their legs.

Unfortunately for the animals, the whole story concluded fairly quickly, as local police captured the three leopards and one of the grizzlies and shot and killed all the rest — with the exception of the monkey, who’s still on the run.

I was thinking he might feel right at home in Maumee Bay State Park, where I’d pitched my tent in the dark that first night in Ohio in a near-empty campground. I’d picked up a flyer about the park at the registration gate. Once I’d wiggled inside my sleeping bag and had a bite to eat, I pulled it out to read up on Maumee Bay.

Located a few miles outside of Toledo where the Maumee River flows into the southwest corner of Lake Erie, the park today is half meadow, half wetlands — and used to be all wetlands before white settlers drained the swamps to establish farms. Scientists say it’s part of the Great Black Swamp that used to stretch 40 miles inland along nearly the whole southern shore of Lake Erie.

Wetlands, of course, contain more species of wildlife than any other habitat type. Naturalists have counted more than 300 species of birds in Maumee Bay, which serves as an important refuge for the great blue heron with its six-foot wingspan. But other critters abound there as well, including frogs, turtles, water snakes, spiders, mice and all sorts of bugs. As I snuggled in, an uninvited spider walked across the top of my bag. Outside the tent, thousands of crickets made a racket that nearly thundered. A very active biomass indeed.

Awaking to a cacophany of bird song, I thought: Good morning, Great Black Swamp. Nothing frightening here. Just a lot of living things trying to keep on living.

But the rest of Ohio that day seemed a little bit fixated on death. Or was it Halloween? I passed countless homes with pretend gravestones in their yards.  I passed a derelict public schoolhouse in Vermillon with a sign outside that described it as haunted. I passed a cornfield maze guaranteed to scare young children who panic when they’re lost. And I passed a farming area with its own nuclear reactor.

When the rain began to fall hard all the next day, I had to forego a few promising Ohio destinations a friend had suggested and make a strategic run for Buffalo, New York — which I reached late in the evening a little bit wet and thought: Good night, Ohio. And good luck, little monkey. May the swamp be with you.

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