Normally, your loyal blogger
challenges himself to write without using the word ‘I.’
Most bloggers, it says here, have an ‘I’
problem because that seems to be their favorite word. Trying to be different
while also exercising those writing muscles is a piece of work but today this
blog will succumb to temptation in order to tell a story. It is a true story
and the laugh is on, well, you know.
First, the reader needs to understand
the rocky nature of the relationship between this writer and his cellphone,
specifically when the cellphone is dangerously positioned in a hip holster. The
techno-gadget would be safer teetering on the edge of a cliff during an
electrical storm. No cellphone is safe at my side.
What that means is this: Those
rascally phones love to leap away from me at the first opportunity. Once I was
walking down some stairs at Barber Motorsports Park in Alabama, one of the
finest racetracks in all of my experience. Just walking down the stairs, taking
in the view as high-powered sports cars prepared to race, I was a happy
observer.
Sure, there was an elevator. But the
elevator would have robbed me of the view and the sounds of racing that I so
enjoy. Down the stairs I started and, wouldn’t you know it, my phone took a
leap of faith off of my hip and down three stories through the center part of
the stairwell.
Remember the old Roadrunner cartoons where
Wile E. Coyote takes an unintentional header off a cliff? We look down and wait
until, splat, he lands and there is a puff of dust. That’s exactly what yours truly
did; helplessly watch the $300 cellphone fail its flight test and crash to the
ground. Smack, the parts shot in 360 different directions.
The phone did not work again, even
after I picked up all the pieces and jammed them together. The Humpty Dumpty of
phones.
So, you see, cellphones are elusive
when around me.
Please understand what can happen
while reading the primary subject of this edition of the blog.
Mrs. Leeway and I were in Gettysburg
one June. We love our annual trek to the city, for different reasons. One
evening I came back to the hotel with a huge load of images in my Nikon. It was
time to download and I was very excited to see what I had accomplished with
that session’s effort.
I love Gettysburg, I love photography.
I was a happy man, for a while.
Then it was learned that my cellphone
was no longer in its holster. It was not in the camera bag. It was not lost in
the hotel elevator nor located in the hotel’s Lost and Found collection. The
cellphone was not in our car, either.
Mrs. Leeway’s calm reasoning processes
combined with my intuition-based theorization and determined that there was
only one place the cellphone could possibly be: Somewhere on the Gettysburg
battlefield.
Now, you need to understand that this
reporter did not cover the entire twenty five square miles that make up the
battlefield on that particular day. Actually, just one area had my attention
between the last time the phone could be traced to my hand and the moment we
discovered it was missing.
Naturally, that location was Culp’s
Hill, the location on the battlefield most closely resembling a three-story
staircase. Steep, rocky slopes. Thick brush covering, well, steep and rocky
slopes. Difficult to walk in daylight hours.
By this time, it was nearly midnight.
Darkness had fallen a few hours earlier that June night. Vision would be
difficult, especially on the steep and rocky slopes that are covered with thick,
unrelenting brush.
After enlisting Mrs. Leeway to call begin
calling the phone every ten minutes or so, I borrowed three flashlights from
the hotel and plunged into the night searching for the escapee.
Retraced my steps from earlier in the
evening. Checked the artillery emplacements near the entrance to Culp’s Hill
that I’d photographed and found no cellphones. Searched the area where I’d
parked earlier to no avail. Finally, with no choices left, I drove into the
Culp’s Hill area, all the way to the top and parked next to the observation
tower.
Reluctantly, I walked through the
poison ivy-laced unrelenting brush and started down the path on the rugged side
of the steep and rocky hill I had photographed that day. Here is a photograph
of a monument to an Ohio command that juts out from the surface of the steep
and slippery hillside. This is the exact terrain I searched that difficult
night, as I had photographed parts of the area earlier.
No phone. No noise. Not a single
luxury. Like Robinson Crusoe, as primitive as could be.
Further down the hill I staggered,
toward the next area I’d explored during the daylight hours, back when it was
possible to avoid the dangerously aggressive and poison ivy-laden bushes on the
nearly unapproachable rocks on the cliff-like hillside.
Here is the next image I’d captured
earlier in the day. Back when I could safely see where the next footstep ought
to go. When the conditions were such that there was a reasonable opportunity to
live through the experience.
Here is an image of the path I walked
down in the daylight hours and again in the pitch darkness of a moonless night.
All the flashlights really did for me was to cast long shadows into the
nothingness that was the dark of night.
About this time, I realized that
thousands of Confederate soldiers attacked the same area on the night of July2/3
in 1863. All they got out of it was a belly full of bullets. Their attack
failed.
My search failed as well. There was no
cellphone on Culp’s Hill that night.
I returned the next morning to look
again but there was no sign of the escapee. I began to look back fondly to the short
flight of the other cellphone back at the Alabama sports car track. At least I
knew where to look for that phone.
The Gettysburg story has a happy
ending. After I headed off for the next day’s activity, Mrs. Leeway started
calling the phone again and, Eureka! She got an answer. Turns out a group of
teenaged French tourists found the phone and walked it to the nearest building
they saw, which was a business that gives tourists bus rides around the
Gettysburg area. When I returned to the hotel to have lunch with my sweetheart,
she informed me of the development and we raced off to retrieve the wayward
device.
No way to determine where the kids
found the phone, the bus company told us. The wonderful youths spoke just
French and could only use sign language, of a sort, to report finding the
phone. It was just luck that the manager of the company heard the phone ring
when Mrs. Leeway called that morning. He moved around as a part of his job and
wasn’t normally in position to hear it make noise. The battery was nearly
exhausted.
The moral to the story? There are two:
The first is that French teenagers are both observant and kind. The second is
that cellphones are a jumpy bunch. Try not to take offense.
Thanks for reading.
