The battlefield pervades Gettysburg College and a gripping certainty of anguish hovers over the place. When asked, every history researcher that I came upon was more than happy to share interesting facts. Five thousand folks lived there during the war and 20,000 wounded from both sides were left in the town.
Recently, a new walkway and fountain was added behind an existing structure and thousands of leg and arm bones were recovered from the excavation. The structure had been used as a hospital.
My roommate, a young woman from northeastern Pa, was scrambling about in the boulder field called Devil's Den below Little Round Top and was so overcome with dread and fear that she started to cry in her compulsion to leave the place. I had a similar experience. Now, I am not a crier! My mother modeled to me that crying is a weak woman's weapon and whether her belief is true or false, I seldom cry.
In the middle of a breathless hot, still afternoon I walked from my dorm up to the hill where the battle was joined. The grass was grizzled dry and poked my feet through my sandals. Cars lurched on the roads, stopping to disgorge individuals and families, the better to read and see information posted along the route. I swept my eyes from the railroad ditch, across the mowed field to the ridge above, condeming my poor planning for leaving a bottle of water on my desk when I was overcome ... by what? My throat closed and choked and I started to cry. I stood alone on the bottom of that ridge gasping and shaking.
The older I get the less I understand. The only reality is my own experience and the experience told me that time is a wispy thing, and unexpectedly, its frailty allowed me to intrude elsewhere.
(correlates: Comments on Bull Run Run 2008, GettysburgCoordinates, SurvivalFactors, ...)