Nobody Was Rude To Me At Ulysses S. Grant's House... This Time

A decade ago, when I blogged about visiting the Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site with my kids, I claimed at the end that I had "mostly forgiven" the park ranger there who had 1) told my child that the answer to a specific question in her Junior Ranger book could have been found by watching the park film if only she'd paid attention, when in fact that information was NOT given in the park film and I knew it, and 2) informed me that in her experience leading field trips, homeschooled children were "less curious" than public and private schoolchildren.

Saying that I'd mostly forgiven her was a lie, obviously, because I still bitch about that ranger regularly. I have never forgotten nor forgiven a single person who has ever been rude to me or my kids on the subject of homeschooling (or any subject, frankly), and I will still, with the barest of excuses, tell you the entire story, quoted dialogue and all, of that time that a random dude sitting next to me at a wedding told me that he didn't approve of homeschooling because "What about socialization?", or the time that a random woman at a party told me she didn't believe in homeschooling because "What about socialization?", or the time that a relative, a few months after I had started homeschooling, asked me if my four-year-old had "regressed in her academics" since she'd "dropped out of preschool."

And it's not like I was sitting there monologuing about homeschooling any of those times, either, but if a random person making small talk asked me back in the day what I did for a living, that's literally what I did!

Anyway, here's a screenshot of the Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site Junior Ranger book, with the contentious question:

Here are screenshots from the two relevant scenes in the park film, in which the man in question is referred to solely as "William":

If you could zoom in on that document in the film you could see his name, because that's his manumission paper! You cannot see it in the film, however.

As you can see, I have never gotten over even the smallest slight or forgiven any person for even the slightest wrongdoing ever in my entire life.

Nor do I intend to start now, apparently, since when Mr. Craft Knife, our older kid, and I were getting out of the car for this most recent visit to the Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site, I announced that if any park ranger dared to say one negative thing about homeschooling to me, I was going to burn down Ulysses' house.

Mr. Craft Knife was all, "We're literally just three fully grown adults here. Nobody is going to talk to you about homeschooling!"

And luckily for all of us, he was right!

I did nevertheless manage to be disappointed in the site since we were there on Juneteenth but there was no programming, or even acknowledgment, of the holiday there. Such a bummer, and I'm wondering if I should have gone to the Gateway Arch instead, because surely the park that held the Dred Scott trial would be having a Juneteenth celebration, but ah, well. I looked at a lot of stuff and read a lot of museum labels anyway!

I thought this ink blotter was super cool. They put a mirror underneath it so you could see all of the times Grant had blotted his signature there:

This is a historical recreation of Julia Dent Grant's wedding dress, watered silk and all!

There was some other Queen Victoria memorabilia elsewhere in the museum that, along with this wedding dress, gave me to understand that Julia Dent Grant was a fan of the Royals. Understandable, and also SAME, GIRL, but low-key scandalous in my opinion barely a hundred years after the Revolutionary War...

One of my favorite parts of visiting a national park site is collecting titles of books that I can spend the next few months reading. I found ebooks of this--

--and this--

--and I'll get to them pretty soon, but currently I am hyperfixated on George Washington Carver so it might take me a minute.

I don't really know what it is about daguerreotypes, but they are so life-like! Julia Dent Grant and her sons aren't even colored realistically, but to me they still look like they could step right off that metal plate. And bonus points for little boys dressed like girls!

It looked like most of the exhibit on slavery that we'd seen during our previous visit had been replaced by that exhibit on Julia Dent Grant, but a few artifacts were still there, including this bill of sale, which is easily the most upsetting item in the museum. Jefferson was only eighteen. Louisa was only seventeen, and described as a "mulatress," as well, signifying that she's already experienced generational violence. At least she's being trafficked with at least one of her children, a one-year-old, but clearly neither of these teenagers are the parents of six-year-old Kitty who is also being trafficked to Julia in this bill of sale. That poor baby...

I'm suspicious that Julia could possibly have been as naive as she's portrayed here, so I'll be curious to dive into that memoir!

That label also sent me on a different deep dive, because when I read it I was all, "They still had people enslaved here in 1864? But the Emancipation Proclamation was in 1863???" 

Okay, so for everyone else who was as underserved in their US History as I was (and apparently I underserved my children, as well, oops--you know us homeschoolers and our lack of curiosity!), the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, specifically freed only the slaves held in Confederate states. I knew that, and I knew that there were states that were both not in the Confederacy AND were slaveholding states, such as Missouri and Kentucky, but I guess I hadn't connected the dots. Juneteenth, which we were also celebrating on this day, was about the last enslaved people finally being told about the Emancipation Proclamation on June 19, 1865, and I'd assumed those were the very last slaves ever in the United States, but those were the last Confederate slaves ever. There were literally still people being legally enslaved for several more months! Missouri had already abolished slavery, although not until January 11, 1865, but Kentucky and Delaware, as well as New Jersey and its habit of apprenticing people for life, hung on until the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified on December 6, 1865.

So, new holiday idea: we also need to celebrate every December 6, because nobody's free until everybody's free!

Check out this notable coral fossil that was found embedded in some roots on the property:

And the summer kitchen, where enslaved people cooked and did laundry for the white members of the household:

 

I wanted to see where the enslaved people had lived, and the land where they'd labored, but that's all neighborhoods now:

Random, but this was on the bulletin board next to the bathrooms, specifically this dude's pose that is twinning with Grant, is genuinely the best thing ever:

I will NOT be driving back to St. Louis to attend his dinner and colloquy, however, because tickets cost ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-FIVE DOLLARS. 

Instead, we went to Fitz's--

--where I ordered something appropriately festive for Juneteenth:

And it wouldn't be a proper field trip if you weren't learning how something is made, so here's a look at their working bottling facility:

Oh, and his name was William Jones! 

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I Read the Canon Work on Ley Lines, and Then I Read Some Ley Lines Fanfic

This is my tourist map of the ancient sites of Great Britain. Watkins used maps about 10 times this size for his ley line hunting.

Early British Trackways: Moats, Mounds, Camps and Sites by Alfred Watkins
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The other night, I looked up from the book I was reading (this one, lol!) and said to my older daughter, “So, okay. You know the guy who invented ley lines?”

And she had the nerve to be all, “Oh, yes, indeed! The perennial subject of half our conversations? That guy who is a Totally Normal Guy For You To Always Be Talking About? Please, do tell me what that guy who obviously everybody knows and discusses regularly said this time!”

Well, humph. At that point I didn’t even want to tell her, except obviously yes of course I did, because this guy was creating his ley lines by hand with a straight edge and pins on taped-together ordnance maps with a scale of 1 inch to 1 mile. England is something like 280 miles wide, y’all! That is WILD WORK!

This screenshot of an ordnance map showing just south of Avebury is about the right size. Even at this scale, though, you can't see the sacred wells or "named trees" that Watkins continually references as waypoints. At this scale, I'd sort of assumed you could see the individual stones of West Kennett Avenue and Avebury, and you also can't see the cross markers that Watkins also continually references. He would have LOVED Google Earth!

There are two things that I find the most interesting about ley lines. The first is that they’re not real. Or rather, it’s more like they’re real, but only in the sense that Great Britain is so chock-full of ancient sites and mounds and wells and earthworks and ponds and tumps and trees and river fords that surely every single one of them must be in line with several others, ESPECIALLY if you dial down to a scale of 1 inch to 1 mile. Like, I genuinely do not think you could walk a single mile through the British countryside without bumping into a sacred well, or a tree with a name. A barrow! A hill! A pond! And okay, that’s not *exactly* what he meant--what he wanted to do was find lines that represented purposeful walking tracks, like from a flint quarry to a settlement, say, with markers that you could pick out by sight to guide you back and forth--but still. So many ponds. So many tumps.

That being said, however, I genuinely don’t find the bones of this idea unreasonable, and I think that it makes overt the important concept that people of other times didn’t necessarily perceive or think in the ways that we perceive or think. Their methods of wayfinding don’t have to be ours, and there’s nothing wrong with being creative in our hypotheses about how those methods might have worked. Like, sure, if you’re taking a two-day hike to the flint quarry, you absolutely have some sort of visual markers to guide your way. When it comes to placing Stonehenge and a couple of sacred wells and a really cool tree on that same path… I dunno about that, but maybe sometimes! It would certainly say a lot of interesting things about those ancient peoples at a societal level if it were true!

The other thing that I find the most interesting about ley lines is how they were co-opted by the mystical-minded. Watkins didn’t think they were lines of energy, or magnetic forces. He didn’t think they were mystical. He wasn’t standing on the sidewalk at Glastonbury offering to do tarot card readings. He would be SO sad to learn that his precious ley lines that he invented were now an iconic determinant of an individual’s woo-ness. But honestly, I’m kind of into it! It’s like people have been writing fanfic about ley lines, and I LOVE fanfic! I somehow found out about a small zine, The Ley Hunter, that was indie published in the 1960s and 1970s, allll about the woo version of ley lines and similar mystical topics, and then I found a good samaritan who had scanned a bunch of them into pdfs, and now I am nose deep into Ley Hunter lore. Currently, I’m living in 1965, learning about how the lost civilization of Atlantis was located off the coast of Ireland, and reading an article about how following the path of a ley line out from Bramber Castle makes for a lovely weekend stroll. If I lived in England, I would have so many interesting ways to fill my weekends!

The article actually said that it was the tree-topped mound right next to Bramber Castle that was the actual ley line sighting point, which agrees with Watkins' assertion that many castles and other notable buildings and settlements were placed next to, not on, ley lines. 

I did think it was interesting that in The Ley Hunter vol. 1, issue 4, author Jimmy Goddard writes about buying a 1 inch to 1 mile ordnance survey map of the Isle of Man, with the plan to map and then walk all of the ley lines he could find, creating the world’s first actual comprehensive survey of ley lines in one distinct area. Because the Isle of Man is small, he writes that he thought this would take a few weeks. But then he writes:

“How wrong I was! I now know that if I plot all the leys on it in a year I will be very lucky. From the first time I laid ruler to map leys and centres leaped up at me, and it seems that there isn't a tumulus on the Island which is not a centre. Every one I have tried has proved to be - and there are still a great many more to go.”

So, yeah. You can’t walk a single mile through the Isle of Man without running into a sacred well, or a tree with a name. A barrow! A hill! A pond!

Glastonbury, which Watkins would absolutely have agreed is a ley line center, and which has been associated with VERY much ley line woo since the 1960s.

Fortunately, walking across every inch of England, sniffing out every sacred well, tree with a name, barrow, hill, and pond sounds like the loveliest of pastimes. I'd happily be a ley hunter just for the excuse to amble in straight lines back and forth across the British countryside every weekend!

P.S. View all my reviews

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Gettysburg to Philadelphia to Columbus to Home

The battle ended and the armies moved on, leaving over 7,000 corpses and several hundred amputated limbs lying wherever they'd fallen or been tossed. The civilians came back or came out of hiding and put the place back together again, burying everybody and everything wherever they could be buried, in shallow graves and mass graves and here and there anywhere there was a spot, sometimes marked and sometimes not. A local lawyer, David Wills, organized the creation of a national cemetery for the Union dead adjacent to the local cemetery, and over the next few months all the corpses who could be found who were Union soldiers (and a few who probably weren't but got caught up in the mix) were moved there. 

Meanwhile, the Confederate corpses stayed in their various shallow graves for several more years, until a local doctor organized the exhumation of whoever could still be found and had them sent to proper consecrated cemeteries back in the former Confederate states. If you want to see a couple of people who have Big Feelings about this and are willing to say so with their full government names, you should check out the Comments section of this blog post from the sadly now defunct Gettysburg National Military Park blog. In it, some guy named John Eady Simmons, Jr. says that the Union soldiers were "misled by Lincoln!" That's not something that you want on the first page of a Google search of your name!

Anyway, a few months after the battle, when the corpses of the Union soldiers had been more or less settled into the brand-new national cemetery, it was officially dedicated and consecrated. Abraham Lincoln came and gave a speech. He stayed with David Wills, and likely wrote some of the speech in his house. He asked to meet John Burns, and they hung out for about an hour and by all accounts had a lovely chat. 

And on November 19, he gave this speech:

Back in our homeschooling days, it took my eight-year-old six months to fully memorize that two-minute speech (So many big words! So many relative clauses!), and I'm still chuffed at her accomplishment.

Also, she managed it in 1:23. She can talk faster than Lincoln, woot!

It was a beautiful day to walk around the national cemetery--

--and see Lincoln's handwritten speech in the place where he'd read it--

--but eventually we had to get back on the actual road, since the Battle of Gettysburg was meant to be by no means the main event of this week.

Okay, one more detour...

At our dinner at Dobbin House the previous night, Mr. Craft Knife had a local cider so delicious that he looked to see if 1) the cidery is open to the public, and 2) if it was reasonably on our path. It is, and it was!

Okay, now we're REALLY on our way!

Because we can be productive and efficient when we need to, by that evening we were enjoying a walk around the little kid's college campus after packing most of her stuff into the car (these knock-off Frakta bags are the BEST things to pack in! They hold a ton, they've got handles so they're easy to carry, and when they're empty they fold up flat and can be thrown in the top of a dorm room closet until they're ready to fill up again):

By the next morning we'd packed up the rest of it and were on the road, by that evening I was in Ohio, dancing to a band that, after an hour of trying to play the music they wanted, had submitted to the crowd and was indulging all the parents of the next day's college graduates with covers of classic 90s songs (the lead singer had to literally read the lyrics for each song off of her phone, and WE DID NOT CARE!), by the morning after that I was snagging seats inside a college gym--

--and by that afternoon I had myself a brand-new college graduate!

And then we packed her, up, too, and drove another four hours back home.

This big kid has grown up so much from that tiny little moppet with messy blonde curls who loved dinosaurs and baby farm animals and interesting rocks. For a while, I really longed for that little kid again--not because I wanted her instead of my own grown-up daughter, but because in retrospect, those days were so magical, and, it turns out, so fleeting. Tangential, but now I, too, have become the person who tells parents of young children in a slightly too intense tone to cherish the present because it's gone before you know it, and the parents always nod and agree but I know they're rolling their eyes because why do all older women keep telling them that but SOMEDAY THEY WILL KNOW WHY.

But anyway, yes, I still miss that little kid, and the best day of my life would be to somehow be a time traveler and get to babysit her and her even littler sister and see those little faces and hear those little voices again, but I wouldn't trade that little version for my own grown-up daughter for anything in the world. It's excellent to have a kid who's all grown up, and you can see that they're thoughtful and kind, they're generous, they're funny, they're happy to be alive and excited to see and do everything they can, but they're still also your kid who will hang out with you and listen to all your boring stories and tell you much more interesting stories in return. And obviously, they still love dinosaurs and baby farm animals and, most of all, interesting rocks.

In related news, if you know of any great job openings for early career environmental scientists, please send them my way!

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In Which Pickett's Charge Is A Metaphor

In the mornings, I usually get up well before Mr. Craft Knife, so when we're on a trip, I like to hop out of bed, get dressed, and head out with my nook to have a little snoopy around whatever free breakfast options there are in the hotel lobby. On this particular morning, I beelined for the coffee machine, waiting in line behind a guy dressed in pajama bottoms who was making a couple of cups.

As he moved aside to do his cream and sugar dance, I put my own cup under the spout and hit the button for coffee. It filled my cup something like 20% full, then stopped, so I hit the button again, which was apparently the signal for coffee to start streaming forever out of the spout and never stop again. I worriedly let my cup get 99% full and then pulled it away, but that meant that the coffee was now hitting the metal bottom of the dispenser instead, which caused it all to loudly and wildly splash EVERYWHERE. Like... just absolutely everywhere. I was horrified, the guy next to me was clearly horrified--but also comfortingly supportive! He handed me napkins and was all, "I'll pretend like nothing happened if you do!" It was very sweet, and I thanked him and used his napkins to mop up the mess while he escaped before I could spill coffee all over him, too.

I calmed my nerves over a book and a breakfast of white toast, cream cheese, and hard-boiled egg (I don't know why hotel breakfasts always have the most random assortment of breakfast foods, but this combo turned out to be DELICIOUS!)--

--then decided to brave the coffee machine again for a refill.

This time, a sign that I had not seen before was taped to the machine directly at my own personal eye level, and it said, "Please press button only ONCE for coffee." So I pressed the button--only once!--and, okay, the spout dispensed my coffee cup only about 25% full, then paused and made some grumbling noises, then started pouring again without me having to press anything else. Still, though, I kept my hand on the cup, at this point ready for anything...

...except for a voice right behind my ear that said, "Don't spill it!" Startled, I jerked away, meaning that the hand that was holding the coffee cup also jerked away, meaning that the coffee cup in my hand also jerked away, and once again a stream of coffee hit the metal bottom of the dispenser and began splashing EVERYWHERE. Horrified, I turned around and met the again equally horrified eyes of the same man from before, this time fully dressed, clearly just having gotten off of the elevator to see that crazy coffee lady again (still?) at the coffee machine, perfectly set up for him to say the funniest thing ever for us to both have a lighthearted chuckle at.

I tell my husband ALL THE TIME that I am incapable of interacting with other humans out in the wild, because every single time I do it gets weird, and he always tells me that cannot be true, that he himself is constantly interacting with people out in the wild without issue and surely all the weirdness is just all in my head.

And yet.

So let's go see some other people who made bad decisions out in public!

Next to this sign is another sign asking you to please not deface the Confederate memorial. I think that it's obviously correct and ethically sound not to deface this memorial, but I still feel like the miniature Confederate battle flags are a little much.

The day before this last day of battle, Robert E. Lee had gathered experiential evidence that neither attacking the left flank nor attacking the right flank of the Union line could get his Confederate forces through. So on this day, he'd planned to send his troops right through the middle. Major General Pickett's division hadn't actually done any fighting yet in this battle, so they were going to be in front, which I guess is why it's usually called Pickett's Charge even though several commanders and their divisions were involved. Shrug!

Throughout this whole plan, the guy who was supposed to have the overall command during this attack, Lieutenant General James Longstreet, was generally just a big wuss about the whole thing. He did not want to do it, said it wouldn't work, had a different idea that he thought would be better, but instead of obeying like he was supposed to, or flat-out disobeying like Sickles had the day before, he just hedged and hemmed and hawed and half-assed it and eventually obeyed, but only in the worst way possible that definitely fucked the whole thing up. He didn't start the charge when he was supposed to, which means that the Confederate attack on Culp's Hill at the Union right flank that was supposed to divide the Union forces wasn't simultaneous like it was supposed to be, so the Union could easily bring reinforcements to the center of the line. Pickett himself had to go find Longstreet and literally ask if he should start the charge, and even then Longstreet wouldn't give him a direct answer, but instead just bowed. Like... okay? What is THAT supposed to mean, Dude?

After Pickett left to go start the charge Longstreet even tried to get another guy to go find him and tell him nevermind, but that guy was all, "Bro, it is TOO LATE. WE ARE CHARGING."

I get that Longstreet was all morally quandried or whatever, but come on. It's not like this is your first day in the army! You know how armies be! You fish or you cut bait or you go hide in a basement with the rest of the civilians you've put in the middle of your war zone! It's fine that he was acting like a baby about this, though, because he was one of the bad guys.

While Longstreet was having his whole little dither, there was one of the largest ever cannonades also going on, which would probably have been a little cooler if either side could have seen where they were shooting. But they couldn't, so both sides mostly missed, but that also meant that the purpose of the Confederate cannonade, intended to soften up the center of the Union line so they didn't slaughter the Confederates like dogs during their infantry attack, did not work at all. It did run the cannons on both sides almost clean out of ammunition, though this was a bigger deal on the Confederate side. The Union cannons had done this sneaky trick of kind of petering out their cannon fire, as if their cannons were getting hit one by one and going off-line. This made the Confederates think that they were safe to charge, but when they did, the Union cannons started blasting them again.

The actual Confederate charge was so, so, so stupid, and it turned out so, so, so bad. They started from way back here--

--and most historians think they were probably using that copse of trees over my left shoulder as a visual marker. None of them ever got that far, though. For one thing, they were WALKING, not running, supposedly in formation until that devolved into chaos. Also, this area was literally people's farmland back then, fields separated from each other by extremely sturdy fences that had to be climbed over or through but that did not provide any shelter from gunfire to the person doing the climbing or scrambling. Cannons were just blindly firing at them, some from as far away as Little Round Top, and since they weren't aiming at anything in particular they never knew where they'd hit, so in the space of a second the spot next to you, and all your buddies in that spot, would simply be obliterated, and you never knew if you'd be next.

Here's the view out from the Union line (with my trusty guidebook in the foreground, obviously!):

You can barely see the monument that marks the beginning of the charge way far off in the background, kind of near the left corner-ish.

monument to the 72nd Pennsylvania Infantry Regiment

Obsessed with lining up my Gettysburg field guide just right so I can look up from the map and see the real place right in front of me. Major Magic Tree House vibes!

monument to the 1st Pennsylvania Cavalry

monument to Brigadier General Alexander Webb

I wanted to walk the whole length of the charge but we really didn't have time for that, so here's what it looks like partway through, looking towards the Union line:

The copse of trees is on the right, and the whole ridge is lined with Union cannons. The last time that I visited Gettysburg, with my kids, we did not know that you're not supposed to climb on the cannons--oops!

monument to the 59th New York Infantry

monument to the 42nd New York Infantry

The whole attack lasted less than an hour, and it was the disaster that knocked the fight right out of the Confederate side. They had a casualty rate of over 50%, and anyone who could have reasonably been in charge near the front lines was part of that, so there was nobody to organize a proper retreat--Confederate soldiers just ran back the way they'd come, or stayed hiding in the ditches on either side of Emmitsburg Road and waited to be taken prisoner.

I grew up in the South, where my education about the Civil War was not even-handed, but I still see Pickett's Charge as a metaphor for the Antebellum South--though not in the way that it was taught to me. I don't share a geographical nostalgia for the days of chattel slavery or a wistful, "if only" feeling about the racist bullshit that is the Lost Cause. I do, however, recognize what it looks like when a bunch of elites throw a bunch of poors at a cause as literal or metaphorical cannon fodder. They're still doing it today, throwing the ignorant poors with their ill-funded grade school public educations and resultant lifelong media and cultural illiteracy at Republican ideals, getting them to wear their stupid Trump hats and fly their stupid Trump flags--which all cost money!--and pretend like it's awesome that gas prices are exorbitant and screwworms are infecting cattle herds and their children are once again marching off to be on the wrong side of a war.

And god forbid any of us try to move on with our zero generational wealth and focus on carefully educating our children, doing double the work since it often requires re-educating ourselves, battling through unfair taxes that the rich don't pay and student loan debts that they don't have and wages that don't rise to match inflation that they don't have to worry about. We can support and encourage our kids to attend amazing colleges and study in useful fields as much as we want, but federal funding for early career scientists and every kind of public servant BUT the fat cat politician will get cut before they can even graduate with their hard-earned degrees from their amazing colleges, so back to blue collar work they go.

Anyway, let's go look at where Abraham Lincoln gave his Gettysburg Address next.

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