But there was something eerie about Yellow Springs itself. The village and its sixties values were like a shadow I kept seeing out of the corner of my eye, something immense passing in front of the sun. Maybe it was the dying college across the street, but all week the village had a strange unreality about it. It was as if an event—a movement even—of importance had once happened there. But whatever that event was, it was in the past now, and time outside the village limits had kept going.

I mentioned this feeling to another instructor, an urban black man who had written a true crime book like In Cold Blood. He agreed, said the whole village felt like The Truman Show to him. He said he’d been walking the bike path alone that morning and a woman came by riding one of those recombinant bicycles with the pedals out front. “She said, ‘Looking good,’ as she passed. Scared the shit out of me. I’m from Detroit. ‘Looking good?’ What the fuck does that mean?”

***

Each day we were assigned a different venue for lunch in the village. During my first lunch, I began to get the feeling many of the participants were still juiced on the experiences they’d had forty years in the past. A woman told me of taking a train to Antioch College in 1965, getting kidnapped at a rest stop along the way, and arriving as a freshman with nothing but the clothes on her back. Nothing, it seemed, had been the same since that sixties experience. Another woman confessed she’d left southern Ohio at eighteen to marry Black Panther Huey Newton. She was convinced they would make “beautiful babies” together, so off she went. She never found Newton, but her radical odyssey led her to Canada, and she only returned to Ohio in her late fifties to write and work on a farm. If these two women were still walking the road to Woodstock, it was well disguised.  It was only in their eyes where you could see loyalty to the cause. As aging adults they were at AWW to learn about the skill of writing, to commune with the muse.

There was excitement at lunch that second day because the comedian Dave Chappelle was hanging outside on the street, talking with locals, and the chances were good that we would see him as we walked back after lunch. I’d never heard of Dave Chappelle. I could tell you all about Huey Newton, but I drew a blank on Dave Chappelle. “Who is Dave Chappelle?” I asked.

They chimed in with enough biographical information on the comedian to fill a Wikipedia entry: how he was born in Yellow Springs where his father was a professor at Antioch College, how he was once at the top of the stand-up game and was known for parodying aspects of American culture including racial stereotyping, how he dropped out and now lives with his wife and two sons outside of Yellow Springs on sixty-five acres he calls, “Fuck You Hollywood Farm.”

***

After a week of talking about writing in Yellow Springs, I needed to take a hike. I arranged for a writers workshop board member to drop me five miles north at the head of Clifton Gorge, what a guidebook calls a “post-glacial canyon” three miles long, carved in dolomite bedrock by a run-off channel for the last retreating Wisconsin glacier thirteen thousand years ago.