A couple weeks ago, I revisited Gettysburg, PA (see link below). I had last been there a lifetime ago, when I was around 7. I had been a huge Civil War buff as a kid, had my room done up in blue and gray. My parents had done outstanding work in outfitting the place. Maps, pictures, and a battle flag adorned my wall. Bruce Catton and other authors filled my book cases. Cap guns and muskets were stored in closets. I was very into all things Civil War. Knew all the battlefields and campaigns and wasn’t shy about displaying about my knowledge, neither. I was utterly fascinated by that period.
And the years charge by.
I never thought I’d ever find myself again walking these hallowed grounds...Devil’s Den, Little Round Top, Oak Ridge...the Eternal Light Peace Memorial (don’t really remember if that was around when I was last there), but one weekend in September, I find myself driving to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania on a sunny-turned-drizzly day. I am awash with memories and emotion. Of the last time our entire family made this trip in the late sixties. Snippets of memory flash through my mind. Of a sleepy town...of us at some fast food joint. Us buying our replica cap-fired muskets and Kepi caps. Walking vast fields...towering monuments....
But to be back there, now, as an adult tempered by life experience...to imagine what actually went on here—and all the other battlefields on this planet...was and continues to be humbling and galvanizingly affecting. I’ve visited other battlefields and skirmish sites, mostly Civil War related...Bull Run, Ball’s Bluff, Antietam, I believe New Market...Camp Lawton, a Georgia prison camp that is now Magnolia Springs State Park (and here’s a mind-trip; a once heinous-condition location is now this beautiful state park!), but what moves me the most about these places is the emotion, the raw fervor, dedication, and inhumanity that had taken place at places like this. That humans had—and continue to do so—willingly line up and CHOOSE to be fired upon and fire upon each other. At places like Little Round Top, even bayonet each other into oblivion. Blood flowed so freely there it pooled on rocks. POOLED.
Geeze, THINK about that, will ya?
Yes, I know, it was all done because people held strongly certain beliefs and were willing to fight for them, but the fact of the matter is, for whatever reason any violence is performed, violence was and is performed. People fight and die, and the fact that we can’t seem to get around this, that we feel that—at some point—negotiation eventually breaks down, and violence is the only way to peace...is sad.
There has to be a better way.
So there I was...retracing my younger self’s footprints (and who knows, maybe even my FORMER self’s activities...), amazed at all the energy and emotion expended in these fields, these rocks, these trees. Areas that now know no blood and battle, but breezes and birds and sun.
Wandering tourists.
But if we—those wandering and mesmerized tourists—could happen to slip through time and experience all that bloodshed for just a moment...how would it color our living? Our thinking? Is that what the terrain remembers? What it perhaps still SEES? I’ve read that trees see fifty years into the past and future. Granted, it’s longer than that for Gettysburg—but might they also have a memory? And if a memory—trees or rocks, or soil—does that not mean that these old ghosts are still at it? That Gettysburg—or Bull Run or Antietam—are still being fought in some Twilight Zone time continuum?
And if we all realized this, would we not, perhaps, decide to think twice or better about our actions...that any act of violence, however well intentioned, might still be going on long after we’d intended it, thought we’d put an end to it?
Well, thoughts like these went through my head as I toured Gettysburg last month, and they still do. So, I wonder...maybe there really is something to revisiting “old ghosts.” I don’t think ghosts ever really die...or fade away. They remain to remind us of our actions.
