A car crash, the Sandusky River and a book named Barbara

Over the past four years, Jay Gamertsfelder has taken more than 14,000 photographs of the Sandusky River. Gamertsfelder has spent most of his life in the area surrounding the river, now residing in Fremont after growing up in Old Fort. He graduated from Old Fort High School in 1995, then pursued a business management degree at Ohio State. Shortly after graduating, Gamertsfelder's life changed forever. While driving home from work at the old Cooper Stadium in Columbus, he was rear-ended by a drunk driver and left with a broken spine. The first surgery was a spinal fusion in 2003, which failed ten weeks after its completion. Gamertsfelder was left with Failed Back Surgery Syndrome. Over the next decade, he had three more unsuccessful surgeries that tried to fix what the original had done. The third surgery almost killed him. He spent 12 years on the opioid Fentanyl. "I was pretty much preparing to die," Gamertsfelder said. "But in December 2015, I had a spinal cord stimulator installed in me, and it saved my life." It took four months to wean himself off of the opiates. He burnt his last Fentanyl patch over his birthday candles on his 39th birthday in April 2016. "All along this painful journey, I have been both blessed and cursed with many thousands of hours flat on my back," Gamertsfelder said. "One of the things I found comfort in is books." Between August 2001 and today, Gamertsfelder says he's read well over 300 books. He focused mostly on history, politics and literature, delving deep into Churchill, Dostoevsky and Kerouac. He was on a mission to become as smart as possible before returning to work — that ended up being many years later. In 2009, Gamertsfelder was talking to his grandmother about a book called "The Frontiersman" by Allan Eckart. She mentioned a similar book that was about the Sandusky River. The book was more than a century old. Titled "Barbara: A romance of the Sandusky River Valley and a Tale of the War of 1812 and 1813," the book only had six known copies in the country. Gamertsfelder searched for it at the Birchard Public Library and found two copies in the reference section. He read the whole book overnight. It became his favorite story of all time. Now, Gamertsfelder refers to the book just as "Barbara," as though it is an old friend. "The next day I noticed that, as I was returning the book to the library and driving along the river, the air smelled different," he said. "I can't tell you exactly how, but it just seemed thicker, like I was experiencing the river and its history together for the first time." As it turned out, his grandma had the third copy of the book — an original from 1901. It was dilapidated and nearly illegible. "At that time, Barbara and I were both in grave condition," Gamertsfelder said. "We both had broken spines and we were both essentially waiting to die. As my condition continued to deteriorate, I would look over at the shelf and think, 'man, if I die … Barbara is going to die, too.' And that upset me a great deal." After the spinal cord stimulator installation in 2016, Gamertsfelder's condition began to improve. He felt well enough to venture back to Columbus to get Barbara a spine transplant at a local bookbinder. She was readable again. "And so, desperately needing something to do, one night in November 2016, I decided that I was going to retype Barbara." It took him 20 minutes to type the first paragraph. The accident and surgeries left him with limited mobility. Still, a year later in November 2017, the retype was finished. He wanted to share the story with his friends in Old Fort. Though the project was complete, Gamertsfelder wasn't fulfilled. He was angry. "When I got done, I was extremely … angry," he said. "I was just starting to realize that my nagging injuries would be with me forever, and that they were triggering something called PTSD, and people were afraid of me. And I was really mad." Republishing Barbara and eventually photographing the river helped ease some of that pain. A friend of Gamertsfelder gave him enough money to make a bootleg copy of the book and pursue the copyrights for the story. But because it was published before 1923, the copyright had expired: the story was public domain. The bad news was that Gamertsfelder couldn't purchase or own the story. The good news was that he could republish as many copies as he wanted. Eventually, he turned the seed money into a truck full of Barbaras, which were released in August 2018 at the Birchard Public Library. They sold more books that day than any other in Birchard's history. Barbara inspired Gamertsfelder's passion for the Sandusky River. He's traveled up and down the shores from Leesville to Sandusky Bay over and over, finding new intricacies every time. "My love for Barbara blossomed into a love affair with the river and its history," he said. "Thanks to Barbara, the Sandusky River has become my muse. It helps sustain me. And even though I've been disabled for a long time, with the inspiration from Barbara and the support of a few wonderful people, I am somehow still able enough to turn a bizarre tragedy into a uniquely personal triumph."