If You See Someone Crying on a Civil War Battlefield It's Me. Or I Guess It Could Also Be a Ghost.

If you see TWO people crying on a Civil War battlefield, then it's me AND a ghost!

In some ways, I'm finding this second school year of a completely empty nest to be easier than the first. I'm not sobbing in the shower every day, and I'm definitely not in that baffling state of mourning humans who are very much alive and well that seems specific to early days empty nesters. Yes, I maaaaaybe cried on a Civil War battlefield, but 1) I'd just finished dropping off the second kid less than 24 hours prior and wouldn't see her again until Fall Break, and 2) Civil War battlefields are sad! So many people died!

I've got my little autistic daily to-do list that I make for myself that keeps me busy all day, every day, both with productive things like, you know, work, and with less helpful things like painting that last damn family room wall that the entire family convinced me not to paint over the summer because it was too much hassle and didn't need to be done. Well, jokes on them, because when 2/3 of the people telling me not to do something moved out, I did it anyway! 

And when the years start looming over my head and I remember that my job, while fun and intellectually rewarding, is tenuous and also high-key evil, and I wonder what on earth people are supposed to be DOING with their lives when they don't have, like, some kind of noble calling or pursuit or whatever to dedicate themselves to, I just shove those thoughts back down where they came from and see what's next on my little autistic to-do list. Ooh, I need to scoop the litter boxes!

ANYWAY, look at this sweet little moth that stopped to rest on my partner's hand at Harpers Ferry:

You can tell it's a moth because it holds its wings flat while it's resting.

Just between us, I wasn't real revved up about visiting either Harpers Ferry or Antietam, but my deluxe national parks passport book is just another kind of little autistic to-do list, so obviously I've got to visit every national park site I can make an excuse to get to. AND back in May I bought myself a whole entire America the Beautiful pass so now I'm obsessed with getting my money's worth from it, and that means detouring to find all the national park sites that have entrance fees.

I saved forty bucks in entrance fees on this trip, and you don't need to ask how much I spent on gas or a hotel, because it's none of my business!

Harpers Ferry wasn't quite at Grand Canyon levels of crowded, but it was a LOT more crowded than I thought it would be, considering how not super revved up I, personally, was about it. I mean, just last year the big kid and I were literally the only visitors to Johnstown Flood National Memorial when we were there, and Johnstown Flood is objectively AMAZING!

To be fair, it turns out that Harpers Ferry is amazing, too, so I am SUPER glad that my little autistic to-do list brought me there!

And there actually IS a ferry! Or, at least, a bus that ferries you from the parking lot/visitor center down to the historic old town. If I'd had the whole day there we would have walked, but the plan was to hit up Antietam in the afternoon, so ferried by bus it was!

I sometimes wheedle my partner into reminiscing about a particular family road trip he took when he was a kid. He describes the trip as hot and muggy, and mostly consisting of battlefields, many of which he refused to get out of the car to look at. It's hilarious getting him to tell all the things he actually remembers from the trip, especially when you make him separate out the memories solely about baseball cards and road snacks and fighting with his brother from the memories of actual sightseeing.

He has no memories of whether or not he went to Antietam on this trip (although he must have--it's right there!), but he remembers exactly one thing about Harpers Ferry: there was a sign that showed you the heights of a bunch of old floods.

Here, then, is the only memorable thing about Harpers Ferry if you're a ten-year-old kid on a road trip across the Great Battlefields of America:

1985 was already on the sign by the time he visited, assuming they engrave their flood dates in a timely manner, but those 1996s are certainly new:

There's plenty of room for new floods in the middle, but if something happens that exceeds the big flood of 1936 they're going to have to add a new board!

Here's why they get so many floods:

Harpers Ferry is at the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers, and there's not much of a riparian buffer zone between the rivers and the old part of the town. But that does mean that you can stroll along right next to the water, and it's especially pleasant on a bright summer morning:

Here's a nice view of the piers of an old bridge in the foreground, then the original site of Robert Harper's actually ferry, then a railroad bridge and a pedestrian bridge that's also part of the Appalachian Trail. 

We kept to the outskirts of the old town, checking out the fire engine house where John Brown and his followers barricaded themselves during their raid:

Here's my partner embodying the mentality of domestic terrorism for a righteous cause:

That's not its original spot, though, because the "fort" went on something of a national tour for a few decades, and while it was gone the railroad built up the site where it had been located into an embankment. But you can climb the embankment to the original location of the armory and find a monument marking where the fort was when John Brown used it:

I was trying to get a shot of the monument in the foreground and the fort in the background, when this group of youths arrived and started picnicking across half my photo. They looked so cheerful and wholesome that I bet they were Girl Scouts.

There's another lovely view over the river from the armory site:

We checked out the starting point of the Lewis and Clark expedition, then sort of sideswiped the edge of town to hit the Appalachian Trail for a bit. 

This is a very picturesque rock overlooking a picturesque view that was apparently written about by Thomas Jefferson:

I'm looking at the website right now, where it tells me very firmly NOT to climb this rock, but in my own defense, there was zero guidance, either written or verbal, about this at the site, and also everyone else was doing it.

Anyway, it IS a really pretty view if you stand exactly where you're not supposed to:

I really wanted to walk the Appalachian Trail in the other direction for a bit, too, mostly because you get to go on this pedestrian bridge right next to a working railroad bridge across the Potomac and it looked like it led right into a super creepy tunnel where there are definitely zombies (I later learned that the pedestrians don't get to go through the tunnel so I'm glad I didn't blow up our afternoon plans for it)--

--but the afternoon was already wearing on, and we had to make time to go here!

As always, Visitor Center (and the gift shop and passport stamps) first!

The museum inside the Visitor Center was just two rooms and most of the artifacts were off display, but as someone coming in cold, with only my AP US History knowledge of the Civil War (great for the politics and economics and human geography aspects, but not so much for the specifics of exactly who did what exactly where and exactly when), it was a super helpful grounding, with actually a lot more context than I thought I'd get:

I thought that this explanation of the two sides of the slavery issue as evidenced by two Maryland citizens was an insightful way to approach the conversation:

And this display piece simply cracked me up:

Okay, NOW it's time for the specifics of exactly who did what exactly where and exactly when!

I don't usually love the start and stop, hop in and out of the car style of battlefield tours, but Antietam is so thoughtfully preserved and restored that it drew me in immediately. There's the self-guided tour with the specifics of who did what where, of course, but my favorite thing by far was the placement of structures that tell the story at an almost sensorial level. For example, wherever you see a split rail fence, that represents where an actual fence was on the day of the battle. And there are 30 acres of corn planted there on the site of the Millers' 30-acre cornfield where the bloodiest fight of the bloodiest day of the Civil War occurred:

Conveniently, the existence of the cornfield and the surrounding fencing probably keeps people from traipsing all over that spot and hunting for artifacts. There were a couple of volunteer docents staged at a few sites around the tour, and I sort of wondered if they were positioned at the spots most vulnerable to artifact poaching. 

Cannons, like the one here at West Woods, are placed on the sites where actual cannons were placed during the battle:

The barrels of the cannons are also from the Civil War. 

The West Woods itself is in the long-term process of being reforested to look more like it did during the battle, but you can hike into it kind of at the front of where the Confederate line was:

It's crazy, though, to think that on the day of the battle, the only trails in these woods would have been ones made by deer, and so everyone would have been dodging and hiding behind trees and the visibility would have been so low. I don't know if this would have been an old-growth forest at the time, though, so they may or may not have also been getting tangled up in every type of underbrush and briar. The woods on my property was partly cleared and farmed once upon a time a 100+ years ago, and it's still got a lot of tangly undergrowth around the slower-growing trees. 

Although there's a lot of more contemporary wayside signage, if you want a real deep-dive into exactly who did exactly what exactly where and exactly when, there are also these VERY thorough signs strewn around the battlefield:

They were created within the same generation as the Civil War, the brainchild of a Union general who was so interested in getting every exact detail that he essentially created a letter-writing campaign to survey all the surviving soldiers. He was only interested in the tactics and so didn't do anything interesting with the other stories they told him about the tragedies and horrors of war, BUT the circumstance of the correspondence alone worked to get those extraneous stories they told into the public record. 

I liked this view from the West Woods, in which you can see the Millers house and their cornfield. The Confederate survivors from the cornfield ran this way into the West Woods, and Union troops followed them, but what the Union soldiers didn't know was that there was another whole group of fresh Confederates coming into the woods from the south. They outflanked the Union soldiers and it got so chaotic that Union soldiers were literally shooting at each other as well as at the Confederates:

Meanwhile, just southeast of the cornfield and the West Woods was a farm lane that went along between two properties and led from the turnpike to the west to a gristmill over by the creek. Generations of wagons full of grain and flour had worn down the level of the lane so it was a few feet lower than the surrounding land, kind of like a buffalo trace only wider. on both sides, there was more corn--

--and more fencing:

In a strategy reminiscent of the following generation's trench warfare, Confederate soldiers were stationed here to "hold the line." But as the Union soldiers in the West Woods were being massacred, more Union soldiers came in from the northeast to attack the Confederates holding the Sunken Lane, and there was a simultaneous massacre of Confederates.

Eventually, the Union soldiers captured the lane and the Confederates retreated to a nearby farm. The Union followed them but couldn't take the farm so they retreated, too. At the end of the day there was essentially no gain of ground by either side, but in the process over 5,000 people were wounded or killed just from that set of skirmishes. 

Here's where I was all, "Wait, WHAT are they all doing right here?!? Was Antietam a major supply depot? It wasn't a port city. Did some famous politicians set up shop here?" I finally figured out that it was all because Confederate General Robert E. Lee was trying to invade Maryland, and Union General McClellan was chasing him down, so this was basically just the spot that Lee picked to stop and try to kill off his pursuers. So all these skirmishes aren't even necessarily *about* gaining ground or whatever--these two armies were literally just trying to kill each other. It's really easy to get lost in the weeds when you're touring a Civil War battlefield!

Meanwhile, in a completely different spot south way southeast of all of this, Confederate troops were holding this one bridge that spanned Antietam Creek and kept the Union forces coming from the east away from the town of Sharpsburg and the rest of the battle:

This is from the Union side.

There weren't a lot of them, but the lay of the land and the relatively narrow bridge crossing meant that they held the line for a few hours, slaughtering any Union soldiers who tried to cross:

Eventually, though, some Union soldiers finally got the idea to try crossing downstream from the bridge where the Confederate weapons couldn't reach them, and the Confederate soldiers were starting to run low on ammunition, anyway:

This is looking downstream.

So when the Confederates got outflanked AND outgunned they finally retreated, but they'd held the line so long that more Confederate reinforcements, marching up from their battle at Harpers Ferry, had time to get to them.

This sycamore by the bridge is famous because there's photos of it as a little sycamore in the aftermath of the battle:

There were a couple more spots on the driving tour, but as we were navigating to the next one we got turned around a little, and then we were all, "Hey, is that a WINERY right next to the battlefield?!?"

It WAS!

So, since we figured we knew how the Civil War ended, and since the afternoon was getting on and pretty soon we'd have to head out on the rest of the drive to our overnight spot well west of here, we decided to close out our tour of Antietam with a shared flight of wine:

In conclusion, Antietam was kind of a stupid battle and I can't believe they killed or wounded over 23,000 people over it, and then left a huge mountain of rotting corpses for the innocent citizens of Sharpsburg and the surrounding countryside to deal with.

P.S. Come find me over on my Facebook page, where I often talk about my adventures, experiments, misadventures, and yet more misadventures as I'm doing them!

I Read a Book about America's Founding Daddy, Baron von Steuben, and I Have Thoughts

Baron Von Steuben statue at Valley Forge, October 2024

Washington's Gay General: The Legends and Loves of Baron von Steuben by Josh Trujillo
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Baron Von Steuben and the issue of his queerness has been one of my Special Interests for a while. This biography is accessible, interesting, and brings up one of my related Special Interests, the impossibility of understanding sexuality, particularly queerness, in any historical context, along with the importance of trying to bring forth, discuss, and interpret historical queerness anyway.

One of the many complicating aspects of writing a biography outing von Steuben is that historical expressions/perceptions of homosocial relationships aren’t our contemporary expressions/perceptions. It’s a great example of the fact that gender, sexuality, and really even sex identity are cultural constructs. And because a certain cultural concept of heteronormativity was prescribed and assumed in all of the cultural contexts that von Steuben experienced, nobody thought it necessary to put into writing (that has survived, at least) exactly what the rules were for maintaining that heteronormativity, nor what rules could possibly be bent/broken and still maintain one’s heteronormativity. And because of the prescriptive nature of heteronormativity, people certainly weren’t writing down what rules they transgressed and exactly what that looked like and the extent of the transgression in terms of their contemporary society! So while I think it’s pretty clear that Baron von Steuben would have met our current contemporary society’s definition of gayness, there’s no evidence that he, himself, ever put it into words in such a way that we know for a fact that’s how he saw himself. And although it’s FAR more likely than not that his personal assistants/adopted sons Walker, North, and Mulligan, in particular, had some sort of sexual/romantic relationships with him, and in some cases some of them with each other, as well, Walker and North, for one, went on to have completely heteronormative marriages, and we have no idea how their male-male relationships impacted their self-concepts, nor how these relationships would have been viewed within whatever unwritten rules of sexuality that we also know nothing about.

AND our current concept of power dynamics and the taboo of power differentials within a relationship are very correct, but also very contemporary to us, so there’s no way to evaluate the morality of von Steuben’s strongly implied relationships with subordinates within his own contemporary culture. He absolutely had some relationships that we’d all consider criminal today… but were they then? We know there must have been some concept of some way to misuse the power dynamic between authorities and their subordinates and between older and younger people, because that gossip was used to discredit von Steuben back in Prussia… but did von Steuben’s behavior really meet that definition of misuse, or was the gossip about his relationships with teen boys back in Europe simply lies to discredit him? And later in America, when he did the same types of things and it was apparently fine… was it really fine, or did nobody simply care to protest? What were these younger assistants’ feelings about these relationships, and how did they experience them within their own contemporary views of work and emotional life? How would these experiences compare to, say, the experience of an underage wife to a higher-class husband, or really any wife to any husband, considering that women had no legal, property, or monetary rights, and sexual assault wasn’t an act considered possible between a husband and his wife, since the husband always had the “right” to sex with his wife? I haaaate strings of rhetorical questions in essays, and yet here I am, because we have no way of knowing what the reality really was, and it’s so frustrating that we don’t have time travel yet!

All that is to say that’s why tl;dr I’m distraught that this graphic novel biography doesn’t have a bibliography or even endnotes/footnotes. I want the sources that give the first-person statements that led the authors to their conclusions, and not even so I can try to argue with them, but so I can enjoy them, build context, and delve more deeply. Like, Baron von Steuben held a dinner party using his own funds for the entirety of the Valley Forge encampment, including the poorest, lowest-class soldiers, and the only cost of admission was that everyone had to be in their undies or naked? Please tell me where I can drink that tea straight from the source, please! The book notes that “John Mulligan’s written recollections and cataloging of von Steuben’s papers inform the first full biography written about the baron in the 1800s, after his death.” So… what is the title of that book?!? What would be some other authoritative but more current biographies to read? Or articles, even? Something peer-reviewed, perhaps? Hell, I’ll even take a PhD thesis! Since the book does bring up the problem of defining historical sexuality, I’d also expect to see some references or a bibliography or a recommended reading list for this. I did find a Valley Forge program (“The General Von Steuben Statue: Interpreting LGBTQ+ Histories of the Revolution”) in which Dr. Thomas Foster of Howard University drops a number of relevant book titles--The Overflowing of Friendship: Love Between Men and the Creation of the American Republic, Bosom Friends: The Intimate World of James Buchanan and William Rufus, Charity and Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America, Sex and the Founding Fathers, and Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity among others--so I’ve got a few to look up, but I’d rather have gotten relevant resources in an Appendix in this book.

Tangentially, but in light of that NPS program that thoughtfully discussed von Steuben and the relevance of interpreting LGBTQ+ histories, I was super disappointed when I went to Valley Forge earlier this year and did not see a single display, note, exhibition label, sign, icon, or ANYTHING that referred to von Steuben’s sexuality. Obviously, I get that the problematic nature of how sexuality was perceived in the 1700s makes it problematic to define von Steuben’s sexuality one way or another, but we all know that if you don’t bring up the possibility that a historical figure was queer, you’re basically giving everyone the impression that they definitely weren’t. And it’s not even just that they didn’t have signage, but I didn’t see any books on any kind of LGBTQ+ histories in the gift shop. I’ll even let you omit Washington’s Gay General from the shelf, since it has no bibliography, but there was nothing! I was so sad for all the queer young people dragged to Valley Forge as yet another boring stop on their boring family vacation who would have been SO excited to see some representation. Hell, I’m a 48-year-old bisexual woman in a heterosexual relationship, and *I* would have been excited to see some representation! 

I would have bought the snot out of a T-shirt with Baron Von Steuben’s face on it and the slogan “America’s Founding Daddy” and I would have put it on and worn it out of the store.

P.S. View all my reviews.

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Girl Scout Troop Trip to Boston: On Friday, We Explore the Aquarium and Attend the Ballet

Our last full day in Boston was another sausage day in the hotel breakfast room. Moral of the story: eat ALL the bacon when it's there, for you never know when it will be your last bacon.

We had a bit of a lighter itinerary on this day, because I wasn't sure how long each of our planned activities would take. First up: the bus to Airport Station, the subway to Aquarium Station, and then a short walk to the New England Aquarium!

My college kid and I have been low-key obsessed with eels after listening to this Gastropod episode together--

--so we were both delighted to see a real, live eel minding its own eely business:

Here is more interesting information about eels, because I know that now you, too, care a LOT about them.

Also, a scuba diver:

And seahorses! 

Did you know that seahorses are extremely challenging to keep happy and healthy in captivity? Their food pretty much has to boop them on the nose before they'll bite it, and if anything upsets them in the slightest they'll simply die about it. But, of course, it's not like the oceans themselves are generally humane places for sea creatures to live anymore, either. They like having stuff to hang onto, though, so this little dude seems pretty okay with life:

This piranha and I became best friends:

And here's a super rare blue lobster:

I'm also low-key obsessed with lobsters ever since that time I drove through the Maine woods for several hours while listening to an hours-long radio program on their local NPR station about the dwindling local lobster industry. Thanks to global warming, the range of the lobster is steadily moving northward, so much so that eventually New England lobsters will no longer be an American product!

Along with seahorses, jellyfish are my other favorite ocean creature to watch:

After a long morning at New England Aquarium, the troop walked over to Faneuil Hall Marketplace for a late lunch--

My cheesesteak was so bland that I wondered if I'd missed a sauce station somewhere, but I was starving so I hoovered it down anyway.

--and to finish everyone's Junior Ranger badges!

Because Junior Ranger badges aren't the comfiest thing to wear on the back of one's Girl Scout vest, I bought Boston National Historic Park patches for the kids to wear, instead. And I bought myself the 1993 National Park Passport Stamp Set because it features Boston National Park. That was one of the two souvenirs I purchased on this trip!

Does it count as a souvenir if a kid buys a bunch of candy, but then eats all of that candy before she gets home? Because that happened, too...

At one point I was supposed to be meeting up with my own two kids in Faneuil Hall Marketplace, but I lost them. I texted them to ask where they were, they texted back to ask where *I* was, and in response I sent them this photo:

The teenager arrived within a minute.

I hadn't been sure about how long visiting the aquarium and finishing up the Junior Ranger badges would take, so when everyone had their Junior Ranger badges in hand by 2pm, we had tons of free time left until our 7:30 Boston Ballet performance of Cinderella. The kids had a mini meeting and decided that people could head off to do their own thing until then, and we divvied up the chaperones to support them. I ended up with my own two kids and an afternoon agenda of bookstores and the Boston Massacre Site.

The kids were navigating, though, so first we walked a complete circle and saw Faneuil Hall again!

And then we figured out how to simply put away our phones and stay on the Freedom Trail path, and that led us handily right to the Old State House--

--and the Boston Massacre Site:

We'd only missed its anniversary by exactly ten days!

We were actually walking towards Old South Meeting House when we saw Commonwealth Books in a little alley to our left, and we ended up staying there for a looooooong time:

Here's the teenager examining a book that I excitedly brought to her and which I would actually end up buying. It's an 1899 first-edition book about our collective Special Interest, Gilles de Rais! The author definitely thinks he's a serial killer, which I do NOT, buuut the book has handmade pages, many of which remain uncut, and is in overall beautiful condition and a total steal at $35. I'm not really the book collector that the teenager is, but I couldn't pass up such a lovely copy on one of my favorite topics:

We had quite the trek over to the next bookstore I really wanted to see, but it was worth it because Porter Square Books was the BEST bookstore I think I've ever been in! It was super comfy with nice bathrooms (yay!), and check out the awesome displays:

This one was a display of each of the Boston Bruins as a book:

Lol at these poor guys!

I learned here that there's a new sequel to The One and Only Ivan! The One and Only Ruby is on hold for me at the library as we speak.

Fun fact: my college kid STILL won't read The One and Only Ivan! She says it's because it's "overhyped," but you and I both know it's because it has animals that are sad inside it. 

Even after all the wandering and candy eating and bookshopping, we still had time for one last stroll along the waterfront--

--and then just one more quick visit back to Granary Burial Ground because the college kid hadn't seen it on this trip yet and *I* hadn't seen Paul Revere's grave!!!

The burial ground was closed by the time we got there, so I Google Imaged what Paul Revere's grave looked like, then we peered at the burial ground through the bars of the fence until we spotted it. Success!!!

Time to go to the ballet, then!

Citizens Opera House is in walking distance of Granary Burial Ground, and it is the prettiest building I have ever been in. The auditorium is absolutely stunning, and I didn't even think to get a photo of the ceiling, which is even prettier!

The ballet was also the prettiest thing I've ever seen! I really thought that I'd seen myself some ballet, with all the university productions I've been to, but whoah. I. Have seen. NOTHING compared to this. I barely even followed the fairly simple plot of "Cinderella," I was so enchanted by just the sights and sounds and pretty dancing. My only regret is that they only showed Cinderella's carriage for, like, five seconds, and it was the prettiest part of the entire ballet!

Interestingly, the ballet had the traditional casting of male dancers in the roles of Cinderella's step-sisters, but they didn't do any gender-related jokes with it, and the program had a blurb about their choice and the ballet's partnership with the Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition. I've been much more aware of the possibilities of men dancing en pointe this year, as our local university has a male-bodied dancer who dances en pointe with the corps in university productions, and my partner, the teenager, and I went to a performance of Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo recently, also hosted by the university. Considering that this school year the teenager danced in a new Nutcracker reworked to remove its yellowface and heteronormative gender stereotyping, AND a new La Bayadere reworked to remove all its racist components, it feels like there is suddenly a revolution going on to wake up the world of ballet to all the possibilities of diversity in representation... just in time for my kid to graduate and miss out on most of it, dang it!

Ah, well. We can still enjoy the ballet world's growing diversity in representation from the audience, if not from the stage and the wings.

I think the kids were well-paid for their sophisticated choice of the ballet, in that they all seemed to have loved it, too. We left the opera house along with all the other fancy people--

--and went back by subway and bus to our comfy hotel rooms for one last night. 

The next day, it was one last hotel breakfast (still no bacon, sob!), one last airport shuttle, one last adventure through security, and two more flights home. The kids had each earned a Girl Scout badge, a Junior Ranger badge, and a fun patch. They'd navigated airports and TSA, mapped their way around Boston, figured out public transportation, and learned the social scripts for Italian bakeries, Chinese restaurants, and throwing tea into Boston Harbor. They ate new foods, tried new activities, talked to strangers, and visited a college campus. 

In other words, it was a perfect trip!

Here's our entire trip:

• Day 1 in Boston: Underground Donut Tour, Old North Church, Paul Revere's House, New England Holocaust Memorial, Boston City Hall Plaza Playground, Boston Public Market, and the North End
• Day 2 in Boston: Tours of Harvard and Simmons, Boston Tea Party Ships and Museum, and Chinatown
• Day 3 in Boston: New England Aquarium, Faneuil Hall, bookstores, and Boston Ballet

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