| Submitted by: Mark R. LeeperUnited States |
| Submission Date: 15 February 2005 |
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It has certainly started gray and wet.
The James K. Polk Historical Museum is a fairly simple little museum to a President born locally. Polk was the 11th President of the united States, born in Mecklenburg County just a few feet from the museum.
A stone pyramid marks the spot.
Polk was born in 1795 on a 250-acre farm. His parents were of Presbyterian stock but somewhat
free-thinkers. At his baptism the minister required a profession of faith from Polk's father. The minister did not get it and Polk went un-baptized until near his death when he was baptized Methodist. His grandfather hated Methodists, incidentally and in his epitaph the grandfather claimed to foresee
'that church and state will join their pow'r
and mis'ry on this country show'r
and Methodist with their camp bawling
will be the cause of this down falling.'
At age eleven he moved to Tennessee, attended academies, went to university back in North Carolina then set up a law practice in Tennessee. He went from law to politics.
Major events of interest in his career (and this ties into Houston and San Jacinto):
admitted Texas to United States, 1845
declared war on Mexico 1846
signed treaty with Mexico 1948, in which Mexico agrees to sell California and New Mexico for $15M.
He also negotiated land from the British for the state of Oregon. Here he compromised rather than insisting on the land of his campaign slogan 'Fifty-Four Forty or Fight' (insisting on land up to the parallel at 54 degrees, 40 minutes).
They have a dull little film telling the biography of Polk. They don't want to show anything inaccurate to history so they avoid showing you the actors. To show life in this area when he was growing up you hear offstage sounds of trees being felled and just see branches thrown in a pile. Perhaps they show you a hand wielding an ax or a bare foot on a stair. When they get to Polk as an adult they have paintings to show. When they talk about the Texas war they just show you a single red star.
Polk got his party's nomination because Van Buren would not take a stand positive on the annexation of Texas. (It didn't matter much since Texas was annexed the day before his inauguration.) He was very much a compromise candidate. They called him Young Hickory since he idolized Andrew 'Old Hickory' Jackson. His big contribution was to handle the Mexican crisis that resulted from annexation. That involved war and the settlement. In 1849 he gave up office and died four months out of office a his home in Nashville, Tennessee.'
While they have not preserved Polk's home they did preserve a home of the period. This was from a family somewhat richer than he was and had four rooms in the main house, two upstairs. It looks tiny and Spartan, but of course those were the times. There is a separate building with a kitchen to lessen the probability of fire. Today there were four women there, learning to cook in he colonial style. The teacher was from New Jersey and had taught on the Monmouth Battlefield. We did not want to disturb them and left for Greensboro. The rainy day the locals wanted has fizzled toward noon.
We have arranged that we would get together tonight with Peter and Joan Lux. Peter and I and Lester Meyers were some of the stranger kids of Longmeadow Junior High School and later of Longmeadow High School, Longmeadow, Massachusetts. There is a Frank Zappa song about 'Let's Make the Water Turn Black.' That always reminds me of Lux. He was the weird science guy of Longmeadow and I was the weird math guy. (Lester was just weird.) Pete used to put alcohol into a syringe and shoot it through a Bunsen burner at plastic soldiers to make a very realistic looking War of the Worlds death ray. I forget what he did in his garage once but all the spider webs turned black.
I was already a fan of Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine, but he introduced me to Castle of Frankenstein which was on a much higher level. We really liked science fiction and horror films. One of the most memorable days of my youth was July 4, 1964, when I spent the afternoon at Pete's place bopping caps with a hammer. Then we went to Forest Park to see real fireworks. Then we went separately home to watch for the first time on the late show the 1943 Claude Raines version of The Phantom of the Opera. That was a Saturday night. Saturday, July 4, 1992, was the 28th anniversary (calendars are on a 28-year cycle when not screwed up by the end of a century), and I watched the film on tape to celebrate twenty-eight years.
And there was another memorable day. Pete, Lester, and I went into Springfield to the Capital Theater to see the double feature of The Curse of Frankenstein and The Horror of Dracula. That was the first time I was aware that there was a Hammer Studios in Britain making horror films, especially with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. In the years to come that studio and its output would be almost an obsession with me.
Peter introduced me to the sublimely cynical Maxims of La Rochefoucauld. We used to write our own cynical maxims. Pete would write ones like 'Sometimes I wish I were a tree. Did you ever see one tree betray another?' Not that Peter ever had that much trouble with people betraying him, but I think he wanted to be philosophically ready in case it ever happened. Mine would be more like 'Good always triumphs over evil since it is the prerogative of the victor to define his side as good.'
I went to the same college as Lester, though I saw him infrequently. Peter the last I had heard had moved to Greensboro when his father was transferred there. When I was twenty-eight or so I decided I might want to track down Lester and Peter. I failed with Lester. Peter on the other hand turned out to be living in Greensboro and took about five minutes to track down. We got together maybe three times. Twice AT&T sent me to Greensboro on business, once Peter came to New York. Last year when the Internet made things a little easier I tracked down and talked to both Peter and Lester. Individually on the phone, anyway.
Well, this is supposed to be the All-American city by its own admission. I see they are advertising a 'Gentlemen's Club and Exotic Car Wash.' Yup, that's All-American.
We checked into a Motel 6 and went to a Steak 'n Shake. I got a steak sandwich with sides of chili and a salad. The salad and chili were better than the steak-burger. Evelyn was not as keen on her side orders.
She got baked beans which were a lot like Heinz with sugar and onion added. About as hearty as a Tootsie Roll. She also got onion rings and they were breaded.
At the next table there is a discussion of 'Cow Tipping.' A woman was saying 'Now he doesn't believe in cow tipping.' Now I believe in cow tipping, but only if she was really good.
The Greensboro History Museum is the guardian of exhibits on local history. Perhaps the most interesting is an exhibit on the life of William Sidney Porter. Porter was born on Polecat Creek in Guilford County. At age nineteen he moved to Texas where he became a teller at the First National Bank of Austin. At that time he did a little writing, some of which he sold. When it was discovered there were funds missing from he bank he fled first to New Orleans and then Honduras. He returned when his wife became ill and died. He was sentenced to five years in prison. He had jobs that left him spare time in prison so he returned to writing under a pen name. He wrote under several, but finally decided he liked best to call himself O. Henry. He moved to New York for material, but wrote about all the places he had been. He would publish two collections of stories a year. He lived just eight years in New York before he died. But the stories of O. Henry have remained popular.
They have a room on the ethnic mix in Greensboro including the Scotch-Irish, the Jewish, and blacks including a re-creation of the famous lunch counter sit-in. Another room recounts the history of Dolley adison.
The Military History Section has pistols and sword of wars from the Revolution through World War II. I noticed a cheaply made sword that got its strength from being bent Along its length so it liked in cross section like a '<'. I think the Japanese Samurai sword-makers have little to worry about. They had guns of the Mexican war and Civil Wars, a bust of Stephen Douglas, some Civil War letters, and some Confederate spears. Always of some interest were the propaganda posters from the two World Wars. One shows a women carrying shopping bags and thinking of soldiers carrying pack and saying 'I'll carry mine too.' It says 'Trucks and tires must last.' She is such a noble and good example. So what is she doing with these bags so full of stuff she bought? Doesn't she know there's a war on?
Then there is a hall of transportation that has four antique cars: two Model Ts, a Cadillac, and an Olds. They also have a diorama with a Conestoga Wagon.
Upstairs they have recreation of buildings that would have been in town late last century.
From there we went to the Witherspoon Gallery. This is the local art gallery. This is not like art museums in Texas. Although they have a nice room with a collection of Matisses, most of the other artists are lesser known including whole rooms of Petah Coyne, Marsden Hartley, Suzanne McClelland, and Tobi Kajn. These are modern artists and it is not always easy to tell what they are saying.
By then it was nearly 5 PM. We went back to the room to freshen up and I brought my log up to date since I was going out in the evening and would not get a later chance.
At 7 PM we went to the airport to pick up Lux who is returning from a business trip. I almost hated to leave the car. They were talking about L. A. Confidential.
We went in an Peter's plane was even a few minutes early. We talked about what we each were doing and about old times. We met Joan Lux at a restaurant called Lucky 32. We had a very nice dinner. I had soft-shell crabs. Good, but they had a garlic flavor here I was not used to. After dinner we dropped over to his house. Even though it was about 10:30 PM we called Lester. Peter and Lester had not spoken for almost twenty years so that was something of an occasion. We talked for a half hour on the phone. One thing we talked about was getting back together at some point, possibly in Washington. We stayed at the Lux's till about midnight, then headed back to the motel.
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09/19/97--Greensboro and Outer Banks, North Carolina:
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We were on the road to Raleigh by about 8:20 AM. No breakfast, but then we ate very well the night before.
The weather was supposed to not be cooperating at this point by earlier reports and it is a foggy morning, but it is supposed to burn off. We have had just a bit of rain, but not enough to hurt anything really.
Evelyn is driving and I pull out the book of O. Henry stories.
The museum was selling a Dover Thrift Edition of 'The Gift of the Magi' and other stories. Apparently we don't have any O. Henry at home, as strange as that sounds. It is some oversight but our catalog does not list any O. Henry. So we get a collection of sixteen stories on acid-free paper for one dollar. This is certainly a bargain. As it happens, I am a great fan of Dover Books. This is a purely unsolicited testimonial, but more wonderful books come from Dover than any other publisher. Sometimes they re-typeset, sometime they use photographic offset hard to find books, they publish them on acid-free paper with superior bindings and sell them for a price somewhere in the range from cheap to reasonable. I got enthusiastic about Dover when I was in Junior High when my birthday gift was a bunch of books and I discovered I could get more books and more interesting ones if I got Dover since they were less expensive. The one book I most wanted when I was in Junior High was Seven Science Fiction Novels by H. G. Wells. I got tired of borrowing it from the library. It turned out to be fairly affordable in a Dover edition. These days obscure historical books like Sir Richard Francis Burton's accounts of his searches for the origins of the Nile, The Lake Regions of Central Africa, a great tale of adventure, but it would be out of print if there wasn't an inexpensive, high-quality Dover edition. (Let's see, that's Toyotas, HP Palmtops, and now Dover Books. All testimonials unsolicited.) Anyway, I cannot claim that O. Henry has decent plots. He tells little five-page stories that end up with an ironic ending. These are what a friend called 'tomato surprise' stories. You get to the end and you find a piece of irony. His best known story is 'The Gift of the Magi' in which a young couple is so much in love and so poor that each has to sacrifice the thing he most values to buy a gift for the other, then it turns out the gift is useless since the other has made just the wrong sacrifice. In this case it is a story of bitter irony. Most of his stories have happier endings. His stories are simple and easy to understand and his writing style is very picturesque. Today he would probably not find a market but he captured turn-of-the-century New York very well. There is room for obscure art, but there is also room for art for the masses, and that is what O. Henry created.
The North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh is the State museum and it has a fairly good collection. It is three floors, though you come in on the top floor. You work your way down from there. The top floor is 20th Century art. Twentieth Century art like twentieth century classical music has been experimental and intended to appeal to experts with virtues new to this century rather than ones obvious to the uninitiated.
Some of the art was interesting. A lot was, well, obscure. A reasonably okay nude self-portrait of an artist supposedly gets a special meaning by being hung upside-down. It sounds like sham to me. Of course, they do have examples of Andrew Wyeth, Georgia O'Keeffe and Thomas Hart Benton. There was actually a piece of some scientific interest. This is a matrix of vertical wires something like thirty inches long. By setting one vibrating you see waves go through the sculpture and hear it make odd noises. This is a sculpture by Harriet Bertoia. They have a Calder mobile.
One problem I did have was that it is a hard museum to see all without retracing your steps. Perhaps we should have planned better using the floor-plan.
The main floor has mostly artists who were unfamiliar to me, unlike the museum at Fort Worth. But they still had some familiar artists including Jan Brueghel the Elder with a harbor scene. Also represented were Monet, Botticelli, and Rubens. The also had sections on ancient art and of Judaica.
The lowest level had a temporary exhibit of rock and roll related art. Personally I am not a big fan of most rock and roll, but they had things like psychedelic dioramas, enlarged album covers. Some of the pieces did not convey a lot to me, but I doubt if it was because I did not know rock and roll.
We took the elevator back up to the entrance level. Even that was an experience since it is an external elevator and gives you a nice view of an external sculpture garden.
From there we headed out for lunch. Somehow we had a hard time finding places to eat. We went quite a distance before finding a Golden Corral. This was a good choice. I had a small lunch steak and it was very good. The service was quite good and most everything we ate was good. I had not heard of the chain before, but I would look for it again. I should have known it was good because they had a big parking lot and it was still hard to find an empty space.
We continued on to Kitty Hawk and the Outer Banks area. There is no interstate as we have come to know it, just one-lane each direction roads. The state apparently plants colorful wildflowers in stretches along the road. That's a pretty cheap way to beautify. I am surprised more states don't do the same thing. A lot of this driving seems to be right through forests. At least there are a line of trees on each side of the row and it is hard to tell if it is just a strip of trees or the edge of a large forest. The Carolinas do not seem to be the Bible Belt. There are far fewer Jesus messages on the road.
About 5:15 PM we got to the Outer Banks near Kitty Hawk. There are a series of islands connected by bridges. This is clearly a ritzier part of North Carolina than what we have seen before. The houses look nicer, the roads are white and clean. It is sort of a resort area. It reminded me a lot of Long Beach Island in New Jersey. Beach houses and expensive seafood restaurants.
Evelyn chose a place that had only five rooms from the AAA listing. I rather expected that there would be no room. I was right. The first place did not have vacancies but recommended a place called The Buccaneer. It was about $55 and gave us a suite with two rooms and four beds. It was right across the street from a sand dune and beyond the dune was a stretch of beach. Beyond the beach was the vast Atlantic. Still, the toilet does not flush very well. We establish ourselves in the room, then go out.
We walk over to the beach. The sun is just getting ready to set over our left shoulder as we face the water. Small birds-at a guess sandpipers-are picking up food, perhaps something like shrimp, being washed up by the water. They play tag with the edge of the water. As the wave goes out they peck up food from the smooth beach that the water has just receded from. Then the next wave comes and they flee from it, maybe an inch or so ahead of the wave. Here and there are people fishing in the waters. Then there are the beach houses in which the residents seem to be having laid back sorts of parties.
One thing the bird may be looking for is small crabs. You see them. Just slightly the pink side of white. They look like little white spiders, and if truth be known are close relatives of little white spiders. You see them scuttling across the sand. (Does any animal but a crab move by scuttling?) They look like something the wind has picked up.
After about an hour on the beach we return to the room. The room gets the Sci-Fi Channel so I work on my log and watch 'Kolchak. '
At 8 PM we go out for dinner and I try something I have never ordered by themselves before, fried oysters. I have always thought that I didn't like oysters. They were always the unwelcome part of a fried combination platter. In fact they are the part that seems to have the fewest fans. When I grew up my brother was allergic to oysters and they always seemed unwholesome to me. They are sort of the licorice of seafood. I had some oyster stew earlier and sort of liked the oyster part. I guess I sort of find them a delicacy now and they are the flavor of the month. Even Evelyn who taught me to like avocado and to like lobster is not ready for oysters. But I am hooked. You have a choice of side dishes and I got baked apple and a salad. Both are quite good. Evelyn got the more expensive meal with Crab Imperial. She asked the waiter what it was and he said 'Crab with imperial sorts of things.' It turned out to be a cream sauce, but my fried oysters were better. The baked apple side turned out to be pie filling but it had a lot of cinnamon.
The History Channel had the Yul Brynner in The Buccaneer. Appropriate to be watching The Buccaneer at the Buccaneer. The problem is that we did not get the station on the cable so we got the picture scrambled. We got the sound but not the picture. Luckily, we could listen to the sound and know what was happening. Unfortunately, this is a good way to fall asleep. I did but awoke in time to hear the historians discuss the accuracy. They disagreed with the Park Ranger who had told us about the battle. They thought that Laffitte's men were important in the battle itself. The ranger thought that they were only important for the munitions they brought.
It is funny how we keep having things tying into other things. This movie ties into the visit to New Orleans. We saw a TV documentary on the Scopes Trial after having visited Dayton, Tennessee. We saw a documentary on the V-2 on TV which ties into Von Braun and the visit to Huntsville. One thing after another seems to be tying together. The Polk Museum ties into the museum at San Jacinto. There seems to be a sort of synchronicity and a set of odd coincidences.
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09/20/97--Kitty Hawk, North Carolina: The Wright Brothers Memorial; Newport News, Virginia: The Mariners' Museum:
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I was up early, worked on my log a little in another room, then returned to bed. Sometime around 7 AM we were both up and I suggested that we take advantage of the early morning beach. Evelyn was skeptical that it would be warm enough, but when I said that I was going she said she would come. There were already people out on the beach. The water was a bit cold, maybe about like we had it in the pool a week before, but since the air was not cold, I decided it would be unlikely that I could get Evelyn in. We stood and talked for a while wading a bit, then headed back. Breakfast was handfuls of cereal in the room. That was about all we wanted after the big meal the night before. Then we headed for the site that had brought us to Kitty Hawk, the Wright Brothers Memorial.
Curiously enough there are two different sites from which the first flight took place. The memorial is on the hill from which the Wrights did their experiments, but it actually is at some distance from where the flight took place. Before memorial could be built the hill had to be stabilized. The wind had moved it 450 feet southwest of where it stood in 1903. This really was in those days mostly sand with little vegetation.
The hill, really a sandpile, was at the mercy of the winds. The strong wind that brought the Wrights to Kitty Hawk had in the course of a few years moved the hill 450 feet. The corps of engineers first had to grow grass on the hill so that it would not blow away before they built a memorial. The memorial stands on the hill and in cross-section is sort of a narrow trapezoid so that two sides show bird wings sweeping back from the front of the monument. At the front their are statues of Orville and Wilbur. There is a door to go in, but it is currently closed. I was wearing my broad-brimmed hat and the wind did pick it up a bit, though from the base of the hill there was not so much wind. Of course, the Wrights chose Kitty Hawk after they had asked weather stations all over the country where there were the most reliable winds and had gotten a response that wind was pretty much a constant at Kitty Hawk.
We drove down to the Visitors Center. There they had an exhibit on the history of the Wright Brothers and of their flight. The original flight was 120 feet and 12 seconds in the air. That flight became important in retrospect, they wanted a flight of 300 feet or more before they would allow themselves to go home for Christmas. The flights they achieved that morning were 120 feet, then two at 150 feet and 175 feet. With one last try they hit one about 970 feet. That fulfilled their goal nicely.
There is a recreation of the shack they lived in, and the hangar where they re-built their plane. There is also a track showing where flights started from and landed. We walked from the starting point to the three landing points.
Our final event at the Memorial was a talk on the Wrights. Now there has never been a feature film that I know of about the invention of the airplane. And I think it is for good reason. It is not a really dramatic story. It was hard work and perspiration. Then the plane was up in the air for twelve seconds. I watched an AMERICAN EXPERIENCE on the Wright Brothers and it was dull. It isn't easy to make the story exciting. You just have to keep in mind that this changed everything. There were a lot of problems standing between people and powered flight. The Wrights worked out the last bunch of the problems and flew. Even when they were doing it looked like a box kite with the gimmick of a motor. They didn't mention it here but the local newspaper editor supposedly knew all about the experiments and never wrote a story about it. He thought he had more important things to write about. Years later when asked why he considered these experiments so unimportant he just said 'I was stupid.'
Wilbur born in 1867; Orville was born in 1871. Their father would give them kites as toys and they would make their own and sell them to schoolmates. They liked hi-tech playthings. They had hobbies like photography and the new safety bicycles. (As opposed to penny-farthing bicycles. Penny-farthing bicycles had a big wheel and a small wheel; safety bicycles had two wheels of equal size.)
They read about glider experiments in Europe and thought that flexing the wing and shaping it in certain ways could give them more control and more natural control. They did endless experimentation and decided for control they had to flex both the wing and the tail at the same time. Late summer of 1900 they came to Kitty Hawk to experiment. They got to the point where they had a thousand successful glider flights in two months. They needed an engine that was light and powerful enough to be useable and none of the engine manufacturers would take it on. Finally their own associate Charlie Taylor built an engine for them himself. They also had to do experiments on the shape of propeller. With all this working they tried a flight. They asked a passerby if he would snap a picture, if the plane flew. Jack Daniels agreed taking picture, though afterward he said he had gotten so excited that he did not remember if he took the picture or not. His picture, however, has gone down in history.
Well, so much for that, on to Newport News. We hit the road. I noticed a miniature golf range with large cascades of water. I guess they were taking advantage of the nearby ocean, but it did look unusual.
It was now past 11 AM and we really did not have breakfast so we stopped at a restaurant with the provocative name Thai Cuisine. We had a yellow curried chicken and Pad Thai noodles. The place offered Thai, Chinese and American food. I would not have expected much from their Chinese and American, but they were clearly Thai-owned and that was great. A lot of ethnic restaurateurs come to this country, set up shop, then get frustrated when Americans don't appreciate their best stuff. When we lived in Detroit there was a Chinese restaurant where the owner loved to see us come in. She wanted us to try all kinds of terrific Chinese dishes. When anyone else came in the adults ordered Chop Suey and the kids would get hamburgers and hot dogs. She could make a living that way, but she wanted people to know good Chinese food. In some of the big cities people are more cosmopolitan. Not so Detroit. At least not in those days.
We passed through the town of Coinjock. I kid you not.
It was a drive of maybe ninety minutes to Newport News, Virginia and The Mariners' Museum, supposedly the largest maritime museum in the United States. It isn't a patch on The National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, England. But England has a lot of really interesting naval history to show off. Some of the exhibits seem a little arcane. For example they have a room devoted to ships designed by William Francis Gibbs. He designed six thousand Naval ships. That does not make them particularly interesting.
Exhibits of interest include:
Age of Exploration: Videos on Columbus, Magellan, navigation instruments, books on navigation, weapons, etc.
Maritime Art: mostly from World War II, but there are some from the classic days of the high-masted ships.
One room of paintings was by Montague Dawson.
Lighthouses and Lighthouse Keepers: now how interesting do you think they can make that? An exhibit on lighthouse keeping is about as interesting as one on light housekeeping.
Whaling: Why just have this be a kiddy hands-on exhibit? They did not have a whole lot of what they could have had. It was of minimal general interest.
Antique Motorboats: mostly an ad for Chris-Craft.
Hall of Steam: This had models of steam ships, moving mockups of the engines, paintings, etc. They had a supposed expert on the Monitor talking about the Monitor and the Virginia (formerly the Merrimack). He was dressed as and supposed to be a crew member of the Monitor but his sympathies were with the Virginia. His claim was that it is ridiculous to say that the battle was a draw, the Monitor left and (he claimed) the Virginia returned to destroying ships. This is a detail that most history books do not confirm. In fact I had never heard anybody make the assertion before. He insists the Monitor lost the battle. He detested the film Ironclads for even suggesting that the battle was a draw and hence agreeing with the history books. When I get home I will have to see what Shelby Foote has to say on this subject.
Ship Models: they have a good collection and they had a builder there to talk about how ship models were built. I asked his how he researched it he told me how he went over plans for the boat and looked for clues in what was written about the boat. I asked if he ever found out after the fact that his model was wrong. Just about every time. Now this is a guy with some credibility.
Their big new exhibit, three rooms, is on Piracy. They tell a little about the lives of the famous pirates of the Americas. They talk about the myths. Apparently only Edward Teach (a.k.a. Blackbeard) buried treasure. most pirates spent the money they got as fast as they stole it. They have a skull purported to have one time been inside Blackbeard's head. They have swords and other weapons. They have a skeleton in a gibbet. It is claimed by at least one staff member of the museum to be a real human skeleton, however the woman who was answering questions in the room itself said that it was not real. They also had a sub-exhibit of pirate films. The most common comment heard: 'Walter Matthau played a pirate?'
They also had a room of real boats off to the side in a separate building. They call it the small craft collection. Forty boats from five continents.
There is also a separate wing that is just devoted to marine history of the Chesapeake Bay with things like a giant Fresnel lighthouse lens. They have exhibits on fishing, etc.
We found a Motel 6 in town, our last motel of the trip. We set up, then went out for dinner. We passed a place called Bon Appetite which Evelyn remembered from the phone book had French and Vietnamese cuisine. What the heck. I got a dish with scallops and too much green pepper and onion for the price. I was not impressed, but they did have good bread. We ended up spending in the $30 range for a not too great dinner. Lunch was much better.
In the room we worked on logs and watched TV. The program was called 'Pretenders' and it was a lot like the film Scanners. Eventually it put me to sleep.
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09/21/97--First and Second Manassas:
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Sadly, even a vacation of thirty-seven days ends. As much as I like what I do for a living, the real acid test is, how do I feel at the end of a thirty-seven-day vacation? Do I feel better or worse than at the beginning? I have to admit that it is worse. Though I do not think I have the strength to keep up vacationing, either. As with many of these nights in motels the temperature range was uncomfortably large over night. I would wake up too cold and then wake up too hot.
We were discussing over dinner if we want to just strike out for home or try to split up the trip with stopping and seeing things along the way. At least in the morning I think we should get as much mileage out of the way as possible. Along the way we should see if there is something worth visiting if we get tired of driving, but it is about a seven-hour drive.
I should be concentrating on what it will be good to get back to. It will be good to get back to sane thermostats and toilets. The one which flushed okay last night does not seem to want to this morning.
The other nice thing will be knowing without thinking twice what town I am in. Is it Raleigh? No, that was yesterday. No, I guess it is Newport, News. That would make this Virginia. That would make CNN and Atlanta a week ago. I guess that seems like a long time ago. Two weeks ago would be Beauvoir.
We stopped for breakfast at a place called Belgian Waffles. Their menu listed 'Our Famous Belgian Waffles.' We have seen a lot of restaurants claiming their famous this and famous that. I want to know where are they getting all this fame? With whom are they famous? I mean it is easy to claim you waffles are famous, but what does that mean? I guess it just means somebody knows about them. And since you are reading about them here I can talk about my famous good looks.
We drove and listened to Neil Simon's Rewrites, an autobiography read by the author. As we get further north we get thicker woods on each side of the roads. Evelyn was driving and then something happened that put a damper on things. A squirrel made a bad choice and dashed in front of our car. From the sound we can tell that he timed it wrong and probably did not survive. I think they intentionally take chances to demonstrate their prowess and this one got a little too cocky.
I was looking for a historical site to stop at. There are historical sites that are interesting and there are ones that just are not. We have a code word for the uninteresting ones. That word is 'settee.' The ones that are interesting are where things like guns got fired, rockets got detonated, bombs went off, that sort of thing. That is a first class historical site. One where major documents got signed are the second class.
Those are pretty good, but you don't want to see too many of them. The documents get confused. The third class are where somebody famous sat on a settee. Beauvoir is such a place. The first Confederate White House was another. Evelyn was thinking we should visit the Arlington House. This was where Robert E. Lee's wife lived and he eventually moved in. It has 'settees' written all over it. We were trying to decide if we wanted to cap off our vacation with a class 3 site or to go straight home. We passed the sign for Manassas. People got killed there. That was a battle. Actually there were two. We might not have time to do it justice, but what the heck, we could get in free with our Golden Eagle Pass. Even if we missed stuff, we will see as much as we have time for. And there were no settees.
Now that National Parks charge admission, some parks are better set up to charge admission. Manassas National Battlefield Park is in a really bad position to charge. It is almost entirely on the honor system. If you used the facilities of the visitor center without having paid, they might catch you and they might not.
Anything else in the park is purely the honor system. There are signs at each of the battle sites around the park reminding the visitor to pay admission at the Visitor Center, but there is no way to enforce it.
Manassas is of course only the Southern name for this battle. In the North it was called Bull Run. And perhaps the proper pronoun is 'they' rather than 'it.' Of course, you get two big battles for the price of one here since there were two battles on the same battleground. Of course, First Manassas was concentrated in a smaller area of ground. You can walk the First Manassas battlefield on foot fairly easily. It is a walk of about 1.4 miles. The Second Manassas battleground is a long walk, particularly on a hot day. And all the Civil War battlefields we visited seem to commemorate battles that took place on really hot days. It was kind of nice that we at last were visiting a battlefield on a day that wasn't witheringly hot.
As you pull up there is a Visitor Center it looks a bit like a Southern Mansion with columns out front. We saw over the hill that a ranger was giving a talk to visitors so we joined the group and hear a bit of his presentation.
The war was still fun at the battle of the First Manassas (a.k.a. Bull Run). It was kind of the spirit of a hotly contested football game. Two days before the battle General Irvin McDowell's army, 35,000 had been dispatched from Washington and went with the intention of capturing Richmond and ending the war.
The best first step to taking Richmond would be to get the railroad center at Manassas.
McDowell had complained to Lincoln that his men were green and Lincoln had responded that so were the men he would be fighting. It took two days to get to Bull Run with men whose minds were not entirely on serious fighting. 22,000 Confederate troops guarded Bull Run under the man who took Sumter, General Beauregard. The Union tried an abortive attack, then withdrew and reorganized for two days.
Beauregard knew he was outnumbered and got backup from General Joe Johnston who added 10,000 to the Confederate numbers.
On July 21, spectators had come from Washington to watch the game, though few got an actual view of the battle. McDowell was not yet aware that Beauregard had been reinforced. McDowell tried to go around the Confederate left with speed and surprise, but his men were too green to pull it off. General Thomas Jackson's men stood against the attack, earning Jackson the nickname Stonewall. Complicating matters was the fact that troops were in a motley collection of uniforms. There were over two hundred different types of uniform on the field and nobody on the field was expert enough to know which uniforms went with which side. The confusion this caused became deadly as the Union's right flank came in contact with unrecognizably uniformed men in the woods. Ready to fire on the troops, the commander stopped them in a nick of time informing them that it was Union troops they were seeing. Shortly after that the troops in the woods answered the question of which side they were on when they opened fire and pretty much took out the Union right flank.
Instead of the Federals surrounding the Southern troops, Johnston surrounded the Northern troops and they fled the field in panic. Soldiers on both sides were stunned by the killing. The spectators were terrified by the sight of the wounded men leaving the battle but Jefferson Davis would not authorize the Southern army to go after the retreating Northerners. The lesson that both sides learned was that war is real and war is earnest. The Civil War would not be an academic exercise and it would not be a sporting event. They had an idea that it would be a nasty thing, but they were to find out that it would be a lot worse.
There is a museum in the visitors center and I got some of the statistics I was looking for. 622,000 Americans died in the Civil War. There were over a million casualties. For comparison's sake 116,000 died in the First World War and 400,000 in the second. The Civil war had as many American deaths as 10.7 Vietnams. There is a film telling the story of the two Manassas battles. After the museum we went out and walked the battlefield of First Manassas. It was a pleasant cool day for a change. The breeze was enjoyable as we walked the mown path and watch the locusts. You follow a large triangular path looking at the Union and Confederate lines.
Following that we drove the route to see the battlefield of the Second Manassas.
Okay, so what was this battle all about? Well, it was the culmination of a campaign of months from April into September, 1862. In April General McClellan moved his troops to Fort Monroe a hundred miles southeast of Richmond and started moving toward Richmond. By May he was within sight of the Confederate capitol. Lee saw the danger and took the command from Joe Johnston and gave it to Robert E. Lee. Lincoln gave command of scattered troops in the area to John Pope. The plan was that Pope would lead a second army to join McClellan. His supplies were at Manassas. Lee had Stonewall Jackson go around Pope, north and then east, and capture the supply depot a Manassas and burn it.
Pope turned around and went back north to Manassas to try to catch Jackson. He caught Jackson at Manassas. But by then Lee and Longstreet with his army were there also. Caught between the jaws of Longstreet and Jackson, Pope fought all day August 30, but could not maintain his position and was pushed back north, further separating him from McClellan. The Confederates lost about 9200, the Union lost about 16,000.
We finished the battlefield at about 2:40 PM. Evelyn wanted to try an Applebee's, a chain that had a ranch in town so that was where we went for lunch. Their lemonade they make with carbonated water. Blech! I got sirloin and riblet platter. The ribs were flattened somehow and cardboardy. The steak was pretty good, but it had been years since I had had one before this trip and I only had one twice on the trip.
We continued with the Neil Simon tape as we returned. The trees get thicker as we go north as if the land grows fur where it needs it.
We got home about 8:50 PM. It took us a while to unload the car, sort some things but by 9:30 PM we were watching Ken Burns documentary on the Civil War, now being able to visualize many of the battlefields, and wanting to see Burns's description.
We put about 6900 miles on the car, more than enough to cross the country twice. The trip had been exhausting, but then a vacation should be. For the next Week or so we watch Ken Burns documentary in the evenings and his account of the Civil War helped to put the various battle sites we had seen into perspective. One of the personalities made famous by this documentary was Shelby Foote who wrote a huge three-volume history of the Civil War. His charismatic visage shows up frequently in the series. His concluding comment for that great film was that the returning Southern troops had left boys and returned men. He said, however, that they knew they had a country. Before the war it had been a sort of theoretical thing, but they had walked its hills and now had seen it and could remember it. It was considerably easier for us, traveling by car. You don't see the ground the whole way from a plane. A car is better. You see the territory. Part of what we got from this trip is that the American South is no longer a theoretical thing to us. Perhaps the stereotypes have been somewhat countered, though we can not say we have really studied the South in any depth. But we know there is a South because we have driven through it. We have seen it.
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