So, late as usual, I’m finally diving into the realm of Twitter! Look over at the sidebar and you’ll see. –>
Anyone who knows me, or reads this blog frequently, understands that brevity is not my strong suit :-P. But we’ll give it a go, see how it works out.
So was that 140 characters??? Aww, epic fail!!
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Feel the Love
I went to Baltimore on business in 1992, early in my National Park quest. That was in that tremendously warm-and-fluffy, “the world is SAVED!!!” time in the years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was such a great time for this country: the end of Soviet communism, the liberation of eastern Europe, the first time since WWII that America had actually won! We had just kicked Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait in a great victory. Our economy was in good shape, we were the biggest dogs in the neighborhood, and finally, after all those decades, the fear of nuclear annihilation was gone.
It felt everything was going our way. It was great! Now, of course, our country is well, kind of a mess (when crabbyolbastard and I are out for a couple of beers nowadays, the words “it’s all a bag of ass!” cross our lips quite often). But back then, it was a great time to visit America’s Shrine.
Fort McHenry was the spot of inspiration that enabled Francis Scott Key to pen the poem that would become the Star Spangled Banner, our national anthem. Fort McHenry is the only spot in the NPS called a “shrine”, and rightly so. And I have to say, if you’re as “into” this country as I was at that particular time, then McHenry is the place to go. I was downright gooey with patriotic love (um, ewwww!) when I was there. It was terrific. It’s a beautiful spot, right on the bay, great views, stiff ocean breeze, big Stars & Stripes fluttering from a big mast, absolutely marvelous! I need to stop by again next time I drive down I-95.
I want to give a little shout-out to Baltimore. I don’t know what downtown Baltimore is like today, but I was there at what seemed like a great time for the city. Camden Yards was just finished, there were all these great restaurants and pubs (and, even better, brewpubs!) around the harbor. I don’t have any specific memories of my short time there, but the general ones I have are fond. I’d love to hear from Baltimoreans (Baltimorites??) today. What’s the city like? How’s the downtown and the harbor doing? And just how is good, old Fort McHenry?
[I didn’t own a digital camera when I visited Fort McHenry. Heck, digital cameras weren’t even invented yet! Pics are public domain stuff scraped from the National Park Service website.]
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Links
Fort McHenry National Monument and Historic Shrine
The Fall of Communism in Eastern Europe
Posted in Maryland | Tagged Baltimore, Fort McHenry, history, Maryland, National Parks, travel | Leave a Comment »
Peace, Quiet and Thought
I’ve said this before, but I love visiting the Great Plains. There’s something about the vast open spaces, the capacity to see for miles and miles, that frees my mind from the cluttered inanity of the world. Having a broad field of vision in the physical world leads to having a broad field of vision in the metaphysical world. OK, fine, that last sentence was a bit over the top. I’m just fishing for fancy ways of saying “open spaces make me feel better”.
New England, much as I love it, tends to be a bit claustrophobic. The hills, mountains and forests restricts field of vision; the constant clamor of a high population density clutters the mind with noise. There ends up being so much noise, so much distraction, it’s hard to stay focused on a task, think through life’s bigger challenges, or simply sit and listen and appreciate a moment in time. Clarity and depth of thought requires personal space and lots of it; the lack of such space clutters the mind like the spare room of a chronic hoarder.
Eastern Wyoming (where Fort Laramie sits) is vast, open, and sparsely populated. It’s so easy to find peace and quiet, to be alone with one’s thoughts. This lends itself to observation, contemplation, and (yes, I’ll say it) spiritual reflection. Even the chronic prevailing winds of the western plains assist. A good, stiff wind in your face cleanses the soul like a sand-blaster cleans painted brick. Wide open spaces and weather: these are a few of my favorite things.
Add in historic Fort Laramie, with its crumbling brick facades, you find yourself reflecting on the past. Like most historic sites west of the Mississippi, Fort Laramie is part and parcel of Native American history, in this case the history of Indian suppression. A visit there makes one specifically reflect on that part of America’s past.
I feel like I could type forever, spewing forth my thoughts about the tragic conflict between the tribes of the Americas and the white settlers. I’d make a blog post so massive and unreadable it’d go down in the annals of bad web content forever. Instead, let me just give a short list of some observations I made at Fort Laramie and similar sites across the country:
Did you ever notice that great swaths of the Plains cleared of Indians by the U.S. Army are still pretty empty?It’s been well over a hundred years since the government’s longstanding programs effectively nullified the Indians as a resistance movement and nearly eradicated tribal culture completely. But now, after all this time, I think the question needs to be asked: was it really worth the price?
Playing “what if” games is rarely productive. Nothing can undo what was done, and Monday-morning quarterbacking has as much value as Monopoly money. But maybe, hopefully, we can take the lessons we learned and teach them to others who sit along a similar precipice we sat upon in our expansionist phase. You don’t need to extinguish a competing culture or civilization to succeed and grow. In fact, it’s quite likely it leads to an opposite result.
[The pictures on this blog entry are mine and copyrighted thusly. More are here.]
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Links:
Fort Laramie National Historic Site
Change of Heartland: The Great Plains
Holy Cow: The Wide Impact of Eating Red Meat
Just for the heck of it, I added a picture of a bunny….
Posted in Wyoming | Tagged Great Plains, history, Indians, National Parks, Native Americans, travel, Wyoming | Leave a Comment »
A Touch of Imagination
The traveler scrambled down the banks of Siphon Canyon. It wasn’t much of a canyon, really, more like a gully. It was the end of the dry season, but the creek still meandered between its banks. The traveler headed into that gully for a reason: it was far cooler in the shade of the ash, willow & mesquite trees fed by the perpetual, life-giving waters of the spring at the head of the creek.
It was that famed spring the traveler sought. Once he reached that spot, he would head east towards his destination. But a shadow in the trees moved in the wrong direction. There was something up ahead, blocking the path. Small eyes stared past a broad snout, straight at the traveler. The two, the wild boar who belonged, and the unarmed man who did not, locked gazes. One would react with instinct, the other needed to react with thought or risk being gored. This far from civilization, that would not be a good outcome.
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It was dry up on the knoll, far to the east of the creek and spring. That’s where they built these forts back in the day: the inevitable filth from dusty soldiers couldn’t pollute the only reliable water supply. Despite the dry, hot air, there seemed to be a mist, a spectral haze, hovering over the ruins. The entire place was eerie. The air was still, not a leaf was blowing. There was no sound beyond the traveler’s own breathing. No squirrels were shuffling leaves in the woods, no birds were twittering in the trees. Even the ground was heavy, the traveler barely kicked up any dust as he wandered through the ruins.
The ruins themselves were downright ghostly. The remnants of adobe walls, white and rounded from decades of wind and monsoons, dotted the area like mournful apparitions. Nothing of substance grew on the pathways. Life, it seemed, wanted nothing to do with this place. This was a place of evil, a staging area for mayhem, conflict, abuse, and genocide. This was a place used by one people for the subjugation of another, used by the powerful to forcibly take the land and lifestyle from another. Now, the very place murmurs out a mournful “why?”, but of course, there’s no one to listen. No one but a lone traveler who briefly bows his head and continues on to his next destination.
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I’m a firm believer in imagination, and in my view, there’s no better place to exercise one’s imagination than in the varied sites of the National Park System. Let’s face it, some of the sites are pretty lame: a four-room loft in a Philadelphia townhouse, an old steel foundry in a sleepy Massachusetts suburb, a forgotten fort in an unspectacular chunk of Arizona. A little imagination goes a long way in such places.
One can imagine the past and try to reconstruct how people lived and thought in days gone by. One can imagine the future by applying old lessons to today’s situations. Fort Bowie’s remoteness and appearance encourages imagination, perhaps the plot for some third-rate fantasy novel or Peter Jackson film project. Because of this, Fort Bowie is one of my favorite National Historic Sites.
Imagination is good. Exercise it from time to time. And take a trip out to remote Fort Bowie.
[Sadly, I didn’t own a digital camera when I visited Fort Bowie. Pics are public domain from the University of Arizona and a neat site I stumbled upon: Fort Wiki.]
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Links:
Posted in Arizona | Tagged Arizona, forts, history, National Parks, Native Americans, wild boars | 5 Comments »
America In Context 