Timeout for nerdery

 

I am miles away to the east this hazy morning, in my head. I am in the land of ghost tours and Mr. G's ice cream and the Fourscore Beer Co., and also rocky fields and naked hilltops and topographical features whose names now ring down the years. 

I'm in Gettysburg, Pa., in other words. That's because 160 years ago this morning, just about this time, Harry Heth collided with John Buford's cavalry just west of town, where the hills roll gently and mundane features with names like Willoughby Run and McPherson's farm were about to become notorious.

Day 1 at G'burg, 1863. And what is there to say about that except for the next three days American would slaughter American in unimagined numbers -- giving birth, in the inevitable American way, to both hallowed ground and one of our great tourist traps?

People come to Gettysburg notionless, because it's something you just do if you're an American even if you don't know why. And so a good many who come here know almost nothing about the Civil War. Among other things, this makes Gettysburg park rangers among the most patient men and women in the world.

The Civil War?

 Visitors to Gettysburg know Yankee fought Confederate here, and then some other stuff happened, and then Lee surrendered to Grant at Appendix. Or something like that.

Yet I go back as often as I can, despite the ghost tours and the gift shops where toy muskets and plastic swords and cheesy paper kepis, blue and gray, are prominently displayed. I go back because I'm a confirmed Civil War nerd, and also because Gettysburg speaks to me in a different voice every time I do.

And the wondrous thing about that?

I never know what voice I'm going to hear until I hear it.

One visit I may be drawn to the Wheatfield, thinking about Colonel Cross of New Hampshire and Samuel Zook, Union commanders whose lives ended there on July 2. Once I tramped through the fields and marshes around the Trostle Farm and Plum Run, where a Mississippi politician named William Barksdale led a charge on the same day that nearly broke the Union line until he went down with five bullets in him just ahead of dusk.

I've smoked a cigar at the Indiana monument on Culp's Hill, where a Harvard man named Charles Mudge led a hopeless charge that left him lifeless somewhere in the fields around me. I've spent time alone at the remote spot where a gallant young cavalry officer, Elon Farnsworth, was killed late on July 3 in a senseless charge ordered by his commanding officer, the supremely boneheaded Judson Kilpatrick.

Mudge was just 23 when he died. Farnsworth, too. A Union artillery officer named Alonzo Cushing was 22 when, somewhere inside the wall on Cemetery Ridge where Pickett's charge was gasping its last, a bullet hit him in the mouth and killed him.

And at the other end of the battlefield, on a peaceful knoll where wildflowers blazed red and yellow the last time I was there, a 19-year-old lieutenant named Bayard Wilkeson was mortally wounded and a 29-year-old brigadier general named Francis Barlow grievously so as Confederates swarmed them from three sides.

So much youth. So much gone promise. So many bright lives still drawing breath on this morning 160 years ago, and turning black and horrible in the summer sun by the end of this day or the two days following.

Gettysburg spoke to me in that voice, that day on what's now known as Barlow's Knoll. It was late May and the sun was warm and I sat down next to a silent cannon, watching the breeze blow the wildflowers around and trying to imagine what it must have been like on this hilltop late on the afternoon of July 1, 1863.

I couldn't do it. There was simply too much peace and solitude here now, and so much sound and fury and singing menace in the air then.

It is that impossible leap, I suppose, that makes the Knoll one of my favorite spots on the battlefield. I come here whenever Gettysburg speaks to me in the voice of lost youth and sacrifice, which is often. I wish I were there now.

It's right about 9:30 in the morning, as I write this. Off to the south and west, Buford is hanging tough as Harry Heth piles in more and more troops and artillery. In a little while, John Reynolds and the First Corps will show up, and a Confederate sniper will draw a bead on Reynolds and kill him. A while after that, the fabled Union Iron Brigade -- boys from Michigan and Indiana and Wisconsin -- will plow ahead into the woods, and the Confederates will close in on three sides, and the Midwestern boys will sacrifice themselves to buy their army time.

Me, I'm back here in Indiana, drinking coffee. 

From an Iron Brigade mug, natch.