Weblog 243

October 10, 2010~ 12:00 am
After a week of scrambling to get things back in order, having returned from Gettysburg on Monday evening, work was my first priority in trying to get caught up. I hustled so fast and so furiously, I knew I wouldn't have the energy to add to my dear old blog till this weekend.

I have 56 pictures on my camera from our 'Image Of War' seminar trip, and certainly I wanted to share some of that.... but on impulse, Wayne and I headed for the hills on Saturday (the Laurel Highlands, that is) and made a 'seeing the leaves, dipping into history' day trip to Fort Necessity.



How's that for scary? That's an Odawa Indian, a Michigan warring tribe who traveled toward this region, and became involved in the local French and Indian skirmishes of that time.



The Fort added this exhibit just this year because some Odawa natives had visited and told the National Park Service, "We were here too!"-- and we found it fascinating. (As well as scary. LOL!!! Since I've been a little kid, the idea of indians scalping and whooping toward me through the trees is a frightening one -- the Odawa were known to be fierce warriors) so they added quite a formidable dimension to that French and Indian conflict; the image above of an Odawa decked out for battle, prompted this poem when I got back home.


Zhimaagnishak Miikaanhs
(Warriors' Journey)

We stood
in shivery disquiet, the mannequin
indian white
faced
with war paint, his sly eye
slipped to the side
of the eye
hole,
watching us. In the glass case,
hatchet
and tomahawk, silent, deadly remembrance
of a threat now gone
from
these
woods, but locked, lost in time, in the secret eyes
of
the
Odawa warrior, who
even now, even in plaster halt
and frozen
stance, would love to drink
blood
from
our sawed skull caps,
facing a murderous sun, emitting a war cry
ringing
off rock.


What a face! It was a day for admiring nature, swooning over the look of trees just becoming decked in fall



and the wonderful, fresh smell of woods.

I think I overdid the travel/sightseeing over the last week. After finishing our grocery shopping, we called it a night --and I was sure I was coming down with a cold. No energy. Tired and weak as a kitten. (Strangely I did get a second wind and downloaded my pictures to begin this week's entry.) I was certain I would be headed off to bed as soon as the groceries were put away, but I started to enjoy myself, glad I had the energy to stay up.

"What of the Gettysburg trip?" -you may ask. In two words.......brutally tiring. The only thing we had to compare it to was a seminar on Civil War photography that we'd enjoyed back in 1996 (also with Bill Frassanito) where there were fifty participants. This time we had one HUNDRED and fifty! And herded about, trying to keep up, two big busloads of folks, a schedule that broke us totally. There was TOO MUCH STUFF jammed into days that were scheduled from early morning till 9 in the evening. (Much of the field work we's already studied on our own over the many, many years of traveling there and reading, walking the ground: being so bone-tired and finding oneself in something repetitive is wearying.) All I can say is... IT WAS OVER-BOOKED ... and too jammed with too much stuff, affording very little time to assimilate what was being shown, and never enough time to relax and restore the middle-aged bodies we were now toting with us. LOL!!! However........

we GOT TO CLIMB UP INTO THE CUPOLA of 'Old Dorm'- the iconic open-aired dome on top of the Lutheran Seminary



and that never happens. It's off limits to tourists, and the privilege of seeing the ground from that altitude, in the same frame of reference as General John Buford when he called down to the just-arriving General Reynolds on the first day of battle, "There's the devil to pay!" to Reynolds' "How goes it, John?"......well, that was simply breathtaking. Here's the attic, just as you reach the rickety steps that ascend into the open air cupola itself



kind of creepy, right? The cupola had been struck by lightning some years back, and they had a fire, but rebuilt. And HERE is the aerie itself!



This part of the first day's tour was magnificent. Led by Wayne Motts, the Director of The Adams County Historical Society, and just a terrific guy! (Probably the most energetic, hyper-active fella I've ever met! His enthusiasm is kinetic, ever-moving in a funnel cloud of activity, and he's also generous with his time, and very, very friendly.) He took this picure of Wayne and me, happy as larks up there



hair as ravaged by the wind as possible, but HAPPY, OH MY, YES! No matter where one would look, beauty.......beauty.......beauty all around us.



on picture postcard days. (The weather was perfect. Once we arrived in Gettysburg. The trip down was a nightmare of the worst, driving rainstorm I'd ever driven in. We saw three hydroplaning BAD accidents, and to tell you the truth, I was stiff with tension the whole way.) We ventured out to the famous Rose Farm....



(the Rose Farm holds title to some of the bloodiest acreage in American history ... dead everywhere, even down the Rose's well, poisoning their water.) It was a scene covered in gore and anguish, horrifying to witnesses after the battle. Our tour arranged for a volunteer dressed in period clothing to pose as one of the dead rebels, positioned in a way identical to Alexander Gardner's famous wetplate field photograph taken just days after the battle.



Everyone was snapping away, feeling like we'd stepped through some portal into the past. We were out there on a crystal clear day, amid the cows (and the cowpies) -but walking where those boys had suffered and died, then lay untended and unburied. It's a moving- even spiritual experience, to be sure.

Meeting up for our tour that first day, we gathered at the Gettysburg Hotel, on the 'diamond' in the middle of town. I ducked into the hotel to use their bathroom- (bathrooms were at a premium, let me tell you!) -and there was Mr. Getty himself



decked out in his 'Abe get up', posing for pictures. I took the opportunity to snap one myself. He's an affable fella, very sweet. (As much as I enjoyed sneaking a picture for myself, the bathroom break was absolute heaven.) So much of our day and a half experience was fraught with rushing about, not enough time for meals, worrying about 'bowel and bladder functions' and just being plain......drag-ass exhausted.....we bailed out on the afternoon of the second day. We didn't show up for the final banquet at the Dobbin House...we missed the raffle and the wrapping up. And we didn't show for our 'extra tour' set for Sunday. We'd simply 'had it.' We caved.

On Saturday, after an extended time in the full sun being blinded on Little Round Top, hearing information we'd heard so many times before (this wouldn't be true for everyone, but after 19 years of Gettysburg touring, it was certainly true of us) we had no desire to remain with the group. When they asked for a show of hands to determine who might be finding the day a 'bit too rigorous'......Wayne's hand and my own shot up like rockets! LOL!! They piled a very small group of us into a van and returned us to the hotel. We decided to enjoy our remaining time in self-determined adventures and yes, we thoroughly loved our day on Sunday, and Monday morning on our own.... NO MORE PROGRAMMED TOURS.... not for us. It's a bad fit. (At least, GIVE US A DECENT BATHROOM BREAK, for crump's sake!)





Sunday evening just before dusk, we decided to drive out to East Cavalry field, where Custer fought near the Rummel Farm with his charging 'wolverines' during the third day's fighting just as the rest of the Union line was being pounded by the famous Confederate cannonade before Pickett's ill-fated charge.

Hardly anyone visits East Cavalry field ... which is why we like it. It's peaceful... with HUGE stretches of sky, and that mournful feeling of a place forgotten. It's fields of corn... and the sound of dried husks restlessly moving. In its middle, stands a tall, tall monument to the horsemen in blue.



There's Wayne, walking alone in the gathering dusk, both of us thinking of how peaceful that place seemed, for all the clamor and terror it once held. Wayne asked me to pose so he could get a picture of me too. I sat on the stone pedestal and thought nothing much would be visible because the flash hadn't gone off and the darkness was collecting, but LOOK



someone had joined me. (No, I don't put a lot of stock in 'orbs'........but CRIMINEY! LOOK at that, will ya? ) Perfect... bright... not a 'water spot', not dust, the only anomaly on 56 photos. Before I'd even looked at the pictures on my camera back in our hotel room, I said to Wayne as we walked back to the car, "You know, if I were Custer, I wouldn't haunt Little Big Horn, where I'd failed and died, I'd come here, where I'd been victorious." Who's to say what mysteries surround us at any given moment. Who is to say?

Certainly not the arrogance in the oft-repeated refrain I heard- albeit for 'comic effect' during the day and a half we did stick to the group: "There are NO GHOSTS IN GETTYSBURG!"

If you're talking about 'the blue boy' or some of the other repeated scary tales, or you're talking about gullible groups of tourists flocking behind guides with lanterns and wearing Civil War attire, and spooking the eager and the credulous, I agree...that's sheer tourism dollars, and a sham to boot.

But......are their spirits? Does something remain? Is there a palpable and mournful residue of the lives that were lost there almost a hundred and fifty years ago... and can we sense it, sometimes be graced to see a manifestation of a spiritual presence?

I cannot help but think of the beautiful words of Joshua Chamberlain, who had this to say upon the dedication the Twentieth Maine memorial in 1889 at Gettysburg:

"In great deeds something abides. On great fields something stays. Forms change and pass; bodies disappear; but spirits linger, to consecrate ground for the vision-place of souls. And reverent men and women from afar, and generations that know us not and that we know not of, heart-drawn to see where and by whom great things were suffered and done for them, shall come to this deathless field, to ponder and dream; and lo! the shadow of a mighty presence shall wrap them in its bosom, and the power of the vision pass into their souls."

Such events are never truly gone.... nor the souls of those lost there. No, there may not be 'ghosts' but there is a spiritual quickening, a reaching across a wall not of stone, but of time and known dimension. To my mind, the unbelievers are the dead when they are conveyors merely of raw statistics and tactical battle maneuvers and only that, because Gettysburg is a place in the soul as much as a physical plot of ground, and many of its 'inhabitants'? Well.......



I do believe they may look something like this. As Hamlet says to Horatio: "There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy" --it's all mystery and beauty and tremendous sacrifice-- and I believe there are moments, some mystical moments... when it begs to be seen.




October 11, 2010~ 7:30 pm
Another Monday under my belt. Those are hurdles.......that seem to get higher with the passing years. My, yes.

When we were in Gettysburg (on our own schedule) we happened upon a gallery on Baltimore St. that practically made me shriek with joy! For years, I've been trying to remember the name of the female artist who paints Lincoln, over and over, in mesmerizing focus, her palette thick with bright colors and slashes of black...and there it stood! Her OWN gallery!

When Wayne and I walked inside, there was a lovely blonde behind a desk, who greeted us with a warm smile. "Are you 'Wendy'?" I asked. "Yes," she answered-- and so it was. Wendy Allen. Artist Extraordinare.

The walls were filled with purple Lincolns, blue Lincolns...... modern art, but with an exquisite sensitivity to the many, many layers of that fascinating man. We bought two 'mousepads', but when I got home, I simply couldn't conceive of using them as such-- so I framed them.



There they are (along with a postcard sized print of Abe himself) -right on my dining room wall. How I love to look at them. I told her that if a person were to choose one human face to paint repeatedly, it's fitting that it be his.

Everything is there...his intelligence, his suffering, his humor... his resoluteness, gentleness... his masculinity....... just an incredible face. To view Wendy Allen's gallery online, go to Lincoln Art- and be amazed.

(Now... from the sublime to the stuff that jiggles the funnybone.)

How about THIS



MORE 'Abe'.....lol......but this time it's 'Abe Books'. Click on that bookcover to be transported to the strangest, weirdest collection of books you're apt to find anywhere. It tickles me to death to read the titles. (Somehow, I think even 'THE Abe' would have laughed heartily at these. :) Enjoy!




October 14, 2010~ 7:45 pm
Today was our annual 'OKTOBERFEST' at work......enough food to feed a small country. We all eat till we pass out. It was WONDERFUL...lol. Desserts galore, 3 dozen fresh donuts, a mountain of bagels, beef barbecue, tortellini cheese soup, hot sausage on rolls, kielbasa, breakfast cassarole made with eggs, potatoes, cheese and ground sausage, broasted chicken, homemade iced pumpkin cake, chocolate gobs, cookies, deep dish apple and peach pies....everyone brings in a 'specialty', and we always have it on Thursdays so we can eat leftovers on Friday.

(I also put out a tin of Rolaids, having suffered terribly the first year we had the thing.) Couldn't control myself...I mean we eat ALL DAY. In the spirit of the day, I hung up picture of....



MR. CREOSOTE from the Monty Python movie, "The Meaning Of Life". A cheerful glutton who kept on eating as the waiter in a posh restaurant tempted him with, "JUST ONE MOOOOOORE LITTLE BIT! JUST A MINT, PERHAPS..." "Oh, no. I couldn't POSSIBLY. I'm going to EXPLOOOOOODE.." - (and of course, he does. LOL!!) And this one....



Herman! - the Giant German hare. All 22 lbs of him! I LOVE HERMAN!

Did this stop anyone from gorging himself? (Or herself.) Of course not! It was OKTOBERFEST! (And more for tomorrow. Yum!)





***

(Return To Weekly Archives)