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Fort McHenry National Monument and Historic Shrine, Baltimore, Maryland

Posted in Maryland, tagged , , , , , on January 7, 2010| Leave a Comment »

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

Baltimore’s Inner Harbor Neighborhood

Google map to Fort McHenry

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Fort Laramie National Historic Site, Fort Laramie, Wyoming

Posted in Wyoming, tagged , , , , , , on January 4, 2010| 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?
  • Did you notice that people are actually moving out of rural areas in the midwest? Depopulation of the plains has been going on for some time now.
  • Did you know that much of the land taken from tribes was given to cattle ranching? Did you notice that overconsumption of beef is now deemed a health hazard, and current factory-style, corn-fed beef production is considered bad for the environment?
  • Did you notice that family farms, another beneficiary of U.S. Indian relocation policies, are dying out and being replaced by corporate farming concerns that no one seems to like?
  • Have you noticed that California, the “promised land” for wagon trains and railroads, is, well, kind of a mess right now?

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

Google map to Fort Laramie

Just for the heck of it, I added a picture of a bunny….

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Fort Bowie National Historic Site, near Wilcox, Arizona

Posted in Arizona, tagged , , , , , on December 13, 2009| 5 Comments »

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:

Fort Bowie National Historic Site

Fort Wiki

The Capture of Geronimo

Google map to Fort Bowie

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Ford’s Theater National Historic Site, Washington, DC

Posted in Washington DC, tagged , , , , , , on August 26, 2009| Leave a Comment »

Premonitions

Ford’s Theater is one of those few true “shrines” in our country. It marks a spot of such profound tragedy in our nation’s history, it stands in an august group with Gettysburg, Pearl Harbor, and Ground Zero.

When I think of Ford’s Theater, what comes to my mind isn’t the figurative or literal theatrics of Lincoln’s assassination, but of the premonitions Lincoln himself had of his own death. Now I don’t believe in supernatural precognition (folks like Nostradamus, Edgar Cayce, Jeanne Dixon, and that freakish Jamaican hag from late-night TV make me want to vomit with force and intent), but I do believe folks who are trying to make a significant impact on the world know full well that someone, somewhere, is out to kill them for it.

Lincoln by Saint-Gaudens“About ten days ago, I retired very late. I had been up waiting for important dispatches from the front. I could not have been long in bed when I fell into a slumber, for I was weary. I soon began to dream. There seemed to be a death-like stillness about me. Then I heard subdued sobs, as if a number of people were weeping. I thought I left my bed and wandered downstairs. There the silence was broken by the same pitiful sobbing, but the mourners were invisible. I went from room to room; no living person was in sight, but the same mournful sounds of distress met me as I passed along. I saw light in all the rooms; every object was familiar to me; but where were all the people who were grieving as if their hearts would break? I was puzzled and alarmed. What could be the meaning of all this? Determined to find the cause of a state of things so mysterious and so shocking, I kept on until I arrived at the East Room, which I entered. There I met with a sickening surprise. Before me was a catafalque, on which rested a corpse wrapped in funeral vestments. Around it were stationed soldiers who were acting as guards; and there was a throng of people, gazing mournfully upon the corpse, whose face was covered, others weeping pitifully. ‘Who is dead in the White House?’ I demanded of one of the soldiers, ‘The President,’ was his answer; ‘he was killed by an assassin.’ Then came a loud burst of grief from the crowd, which woke me from my dream. I slept no more that night; and although it was only a dream, I have been strangely annoyed by it ever since.” — A. Lincoln

Now this is, indeed, creepy, but it’s not evidence of the paranormal. Lincoln knew full well that he was waging a war against fellow Americans, a war that not everyone in what remained of the Union supported. He knew that he was violating folks’ rights, that Sherman was burning great swaths of farmland in Georgia and the Carolinas, that hundreds of thousands of draftees were laying dead on the fields from Monocacy to Vicksburg. And he knew that someone, or many someones, wanted him dead. Even though he was doing the right thing, he was stomping on somebody, and that somebody would kill him. How sadly accurate his premonition turned out to be.

Lincoln Funeral in Ohio

A while ago, I listened to an interview of comedian Chris Rock, of Saturday Night Live fame. He’s a brilliant comic. Rough-edged and provocative, to be sure, but brilliant nonetheless (or, perhaps, because of). He clearly rattles cages, but he also makes people think about race, and class, and stupidity, and of other topics equally truthful but irritating. He told the interviewer (and I’ll paraphrase): “when I became famous, I figured I’d be dead.” Not because of drug overdose like other SNL alums like John Belushi or Chris Farley, but because someone would shoot him.

Isn’t that terrible? And I’m sure he’s not the only famous entertainer or politican who thinks that. How many duly-elected Representatives or Senators actually wondered “will I get shot today” when they went to all those raucous “health care town hall” meetings? I would question the sanity of any of them who didn’t think that. And why would they be shot? For trying to give more people health insurance? For being the target of an astro-turf uprising orchestrated by talk radio and billionaire media moguls with their own, selfish, ratings-raising axe to grind?

assault weapon (2)

It’s a sad state of affairs in this country that folks of vision (whether philosophical or political or economic or medical or scientific) can be intimidated into submission or silence not by the power of persuasion or debate or fact-driven decision making, but through threats — real or imagined — of force from the very populace they’re trying to reach. Is this what we have become? Is this what the great democratic experiment has wrought? A society where thoughts and efforts to improve the lot of the nation is met with violence? Are the recent events simply a blip, a blemish on the soul of the country, or are we heading down a steep slope to Somalian anarchy?

Lincoln, of course, didn’t back down. He continued on a path he knew was right. He paid the ultimate price for it. But although the aftermath was rocky, the nation reunited, got on its feet, and became the most powerful nation the world has ever seen.

But now, I wonder. Was it really worth it?

America??

[I don’t have many good pics of Ford’s Theater, so I didn’t post any. All of these are from public domain sources.]

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Links:

Ford’s Theater National Historic Site

Editorial

Best YouTube Video Ever!

Google map to Ford’s Theater

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