We
are heading for Gettysburg next week, our annual trek to the site of the Civil
War’s most famous battle. I look forward to this trip all year every year and I
spend weeks making notes for locations I want to visit and photograph.
I
have battlefield map on which I make still more notes, draw arrows and track
the path of the sunlight.
I
could probably burn the notes in the fireplace as soon as I write them for all
the good they do me. Once I get to the battlefield, my mind goes to La La Land
and the carefully-prepared notes are forgotten. I start following the history, wherever
that leads me, and the carefully considered notes, which sit faithfully in the
rental car, are forgotten. Last year I accomplished two items on a checklist I
made for myself. The checklist was two pages long.
But I
don’t burn the notes. This is partially due to the fact that the landlord does
not allow us to burn stuff in the fireplace because it is a gas-fed fireplace.
My
pal Buck Weber asked me the other day whether I’m doing research or preparing
for an attack before each visit. I really didn’t have an answer for him.
The
first five days of this year’s visit will be spent attending the Civil War
Institute at Gettysburg College. I attended my first CWI last summer and
greatly enjoyed myself. I learned a great deal and I hope to do the same this
year.
Once
the institute is over, I’ll spend several days walking the battlefield. There
are several areas which I haven’t visited yet and I want to spend time in some
of those locations this year. I photograph the areas in order to help myself
understand what I’m reading when I study the battle, so I take fewer pix of
monuments and more of the battlefield’s vistas. My idea is to capture the views
the soldiers might have seen or at least the ground they covered on a given
day.
Part
of the CWI each year is a variety of walking lecture/tours of specific areas of
the Gettysburg battlefield. Attendees are given a list of tours and select
three favorites. They’ll likely be assigned one of the three favorites. Last
year I followed a tour of the areas where the Union sharpshooters worked, a
fantastic few hours of history. This year I’ve been lucky and have been
assigned a walking lecture following the Alabamians’ attack on Little Round
Top.
There were other lecture/tours that looked interesting
to me and it was difficult to pick just three favorites but I’m very happy with
this assignment. The Little Round Top area tugs at me every time I visit Gettysburg
and I’ll get some in-depth education on the fighting there with this
lecture/tour. It was an Alabama bunch that butted heads with the 20th
Maine on the left-most edge of LRT.
The
CWI also offers single-day field trips to other battlefields, but this year I
decided not to take a field trip. I’ll stay in Gettysburg and wander the
battlefield some more.
Amy
and I have come to enjoy the Gettysburg community so much that I took time off
from the battlefield and we drove around some of the neighborhoods to look at
real estate prices last year. The prices were reasonable but just a bit too
high for us. We’d still like to buy a condo there sometime so we could travel
frequently from our new home in Ohio and be free to spend all the time we want
at Gettysburg. But that will have to wait, if it happens at all.
On
our first visit to Gettysburg, I walked the area of the Confederate charge on
the battle’s final day. I reported back to my wife that I saw where Lee’s troops charged. I had no
idea how they did it and even less
idea why they did it. I ask myself
those three questions at every battlefield location: What happened here? How
did it go? Why did it happen that way?
I’ll
be asking those questions again next week.
Thanks for reading.
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