Dinner in a Field Hospital, and All The Gettysburg Ghosts

 

Check out the balls found embedded in this tree from the Gettysburg battlefield, now on display in the Visitor Center at the Gettysburg National Military Park! Usually the tree grew over the places where a ball or bullet was embedded, and it's only discovered if it later has to be cut down and a saw hits it, so these are rare for how obvious they are.

We were told that it's also a mark of distinction (ahem) to own a Gettysburg house that has bullet marks, so the Farnsworth House, which Mr. Craft Knife and I saw while we killed time hoofing it around downtown before our evening ghost tour, must be a big winner!

All the white pockmarks are from bullets.

After sightseeing all the important spots from the first day of the battle, we ate dinner at Dobbin House, the oldest standing structure in Gettysburg, probable station on the Underground Railroad, and field hospital during the Battle of Gettysburg. Most of the rooms are fancy and require reservations, but you can dine as a walk-in in the basement springhouse, and it feels just as authentic with the decorations, wait staff in period clothing, candles on the table, and just general vibe of old-timey-ness:

I soaked up my Rum Bellies Vengeance, a cocktail so delicious that I just spent the last 45 minutes looking for a copycat recipe (maybe this one?), with an open-faced Reuben and some potato salad. 

I'm not really a ghost tour person, but in Gettysburg, at least during early May, which I was told is still considered the low season, they really roll up the sidewalks downtown after business hours, and I wanted to do *something* in the evening other than sit in my hotel room and watch hockey. I'd even have happily sat in a historic old bar and watched hockey, but those all closed early, too!

So a ghost tour it was!

I'd actually come very close to booking a ghost "hunt" instead, because those at least took place inside a genuine historic home of interest (and they let you hold an EMF detector!) and the weather forecast was looking miserable, but Mr. Craft Knife, who very rarely balks at any of my suggested plans, balked at this one. He said it would be too cornball, but maybe what he meant to say is that he would be too scared.

You know who else was scared?

Our ghost tour guide!

He 100% tried to dodge out of doing our tour, but to be fair to him, it actually had worked up to be quite a bit of a storm right before the tour was supposed to start. I'm normally not one to risk being struck by lightning, but the tour had said "rain or shine," I had on my six-buck poncho that I absolutely intended to return to Wal-mart afterwards (and I did!), and I wasn't dipping out of my tour without my money back, which this dude clearly had no authority to make happen. The other attendees obviously felt the same, considering that we all stood around him wearing our rain ponchos and remaining steadfastly neutral and non-responsive while he exclaimed at every lightning flash and talked about how he'd never seen weather like this before and wondered out loud if we should contact the company and ask for refunds.

Then he called his boss right in front of us to tell her it was storming very badly and he thought he should cancel, and I guess getting shot down while all his customers stood 1.5 feet away listening to the whole thing finally broke him, because after that he gave up and gave us our ghost tour.

And you'll never guess, but when he finally got going, it turns out that he could not stop talking about Gettysburg history and our 1-hour tour turned into at least 1.5 hours, lol.

Also, it was barely sprinkling by the time we got outside, so nobody was actually in (much) danger of being struck by lightning. And afterwards, we tipped him a LOT, so ultimately it was fine and maybe even a good lesson about being brave even when you're scared.

And his stories were VERY good! I wouldn't say that he told ghost stories, per se. He actually told stories from the battle with a lot of historical depth, and then at the end of each one he would sort of tack on some clearly memorized script about ghosts. Y'all already know from my homeschooling days that I am super into place-based learning as a way to enrich one's understanding through the sensory aspects of being present at a target location, and to build context through the physicality of geography, climate, etc., so this foot tour that involved walking down actual historic streets, standing outside each house while we learned about it, turning our heads to follow the tour guide's gestures pointing out the directions of soldiers here and sharpshooters there and field hospitals all around, was interesting and meaningful all on its own, since of course ghosts aren't real.

This is the Jennie Wade House--

--but it was actually her sister, Georgia, who lived there. Georgia had given birth right before the battle, so instead of evacuating she was sheltering in place on the first floor with her mother (the house was a duplex then, so I don't think they had access to the basement). In a brief break in the battle during the first day, Jennie ran over from the family home to shelter with them. She brought a couple more kids with her, so there they were, three women, one immediately post-partum, and three children, one of them a newborn, right in the middle of the fighting.

In the map below, you can see the Jennie Wade House Museum, where they were sheltering. Northwest is McPherson Farm, more north is Oak Ridge, across the street to the south is the hill with Evergreen Cemetery, and immediately to the southeast is Culp's Hill.

In the surrounding houses other citizens who hadn't evacuated cowered in the basements, while in other houses Confederate sharpshooters took over attics and field hospitals were hastily erected on first floors. Field medics performed surgeries and amputations on family dinner tables, and broke the glass out of the windows so they could more easily toss amputated limbs out into the yards. In a few yards, the occasional injured Union soldier lay in hiding, camouflaging themselves the best they could behind a refuse pile or under some of the rubble. Some of these soldiers were aided by Jennie, who frequently left shelter to bring them water from the well in Georgia's yard and bread that she baked in Georgia's kitchen. 

It was while she was standing in the kitchen, kneading dough for yet more loaves of bread, that Jennie was shot and killed. The official story is that it was a stray bullet of unknown provenance, but our tour guide made the excellent point that there were a few houses with Confederate snipers in their attics in sight of Georgia's house, including in the Farnsworth House, and the snipers would have seen Jennie going in and out and known that she was aiding Union soldiers. Alternatively, because the house was in such a clearly dangerous spot, a sniper could have easily assumed that anyone they saw puttering around in the yard or on the other side of a kitchen window obviously wouldn't be a civilian, because that would be CRAZY, and so might have thought that they were sniping an enemy soldier. ALTERNATIVELY alternatively, the house was literally in the middle of No Man's Land, so friendly fire could also have been a possibility.

Regardless, she was a badass and a war hero, and a flag flies over her grave, which is in Evergreen Cemetery just steps from where she died.

Yet another field hospital was located in this building:

Apparently, there really are a ton of people who claim to have experienced paranormal events in this building, and it is true that although it's a historical building in a high-value location, many restaurants have come and gone, with none seeming to be able to stick it out long-term. The most recent, The Hoof, Fin, and Fowl, actually just permanently closed earlier this year.

The national cemetery is on the other side of this house, whose main claim to fame is that fence, part of the same fence that surrounds the national cemetery and that originally came from Lafayette Square Park in Washington, D.C.:

The fence was procured by Civil War veteran and child molester Daniel Sickles, who did a stupid job during the Battle of Gettysburg (he got shot in the leg, had to have it amputated, and it's now in a museum!) but a great job with emancipation, who set up the Gettysburg National Military Park just beautifully but also embezzled a bunch of money, and who murdered Francis Scott Key's kid.

Okay, so the tour guide did tell one story that got to me, so much so that I didn't even take a photo of the house in question, the Gettysburg Orphanage. The orphanage was established after the battle, as a home for the orphaned children of Union soldiers, and during the time of its first headmistress, it was apparently excellent. But the second headmistress was a sadist who did terrible things to the children, so much so that the citizens of the town, who didn't even realize the true extent of her abuses, eventually figured out enough to raise an outcry that led to an investigation that led to her ouster.

Our tour guide said that people who visited the orphanage during ghost tours sometimes reported encountering the ghosts of the abused children, being touched by little hands or hearing cries or the whispers of little voices asking for help. So first of all, I think that it's gross to tell these awful, looky-looish stories about children, but I get that people have jobs and they've got to do them, and lord knows that my own job palpably makes the world a worse place, sigh, so setting that aside, how completely terrible it is to think that or pretend that abused children would not be at peace after death. Why on earth would you think or pretend that the soul(?) of a child is still actively suffering, and that you're going to go pay money to visit it, and that if it touches you and asks you to help it, you're just going to... what? Shiver and be scared and then later talk about it like it's an awesome story? Would you not want to pay all the money in the world to find every exorcist in the world to do whatever it is that exorcists do to send souls on to the afterlife?

I swear, I have never in my life been so grateful to be an atheist, because what the fuck is going on with these ghost-believers?!?

Anyway, the tour guide's story of how a townsperson's pigs got loose during the battle and ate a bunch of dead/dying soldiers was better.

And speaking of dead/dying soldiers... tomorrow, it's back to the battlefield!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

In Which John Burns Is My Favorite Old Coot Of Gettysburg

Let's go on a road trip!

Ohio has both a brand-new Wawa and a brand-new Buccees. Mr. Craft Knife and I tried the Buccees a few weeks prior when it was more crowded than Disneyland and I did NOT get the hype, but what with all our drives back and forth to Pennsylvania, I DO now get the Wawa hype!

I didn't ever tell you the story about how the kid and I messed up ordering at Wawa SOOOOO badly during our long-ago trip to see the college that would become her alma mater, because it is genuinely humiliating and the kid and I vowed never to speak of it again (while still almost constantly referring to it to each other, because we literally cannot process it, it was so embarrassing). But because of that, every time I visit a Wawa and its ordering kiosk has actual instructions, I always take a picture and get a little madder at the Independence Hall Wawa. I hate you, you guys! You exist in one of the biggest tourist spots in the country--WHY IS YOUR SPECIFIC ORDERING KIOSK SO NON-INTUITIVE?!? WHY ARE YOU SO HIGH-KEY RUDE ABOUT IT!!!

I once again managed to convince Mr. Craft Knife not only to come with me on this trip to pick our daughter up from college, but also to make a proper sightseeing trip of it, so I had someone to take pictures of me chatting with Lincoln at Gettysburg National Military Park!

Bro is soooo much taller than me--my feet barely even reach the ground in front of his favorite reading bench!

Also, he is the only person in the family patient enough to drive me wherever along the battlefield I want to go, hang out with me while I read every plaque, stand where I tell him to stand while I take photos of him in front of every significant (and insignificant) spot, and basically just do whatever I tell him to do while I am also being very, very, very boring about it.

I can remember the exact moment, approximately a decade ago, when I let a friend borrow my audio tour of Gettysburg on CD, but it's definitely too late to ask for it back now, ahem, so instead, Mr. Craft Knife and I relied on the NPS app for this first day of battlefield touring.

Here we are looking northwest towards the McPherson Farm:

On the morning of June 30, 1863, soldiers from the US cavalry and soldiers from the Confederate infantry were VERY surprised to discover each other on the road in front of McPherson's barn. In the image below, the road, Chambersburg Pike (because it runs from Chambersburg!) is the Hwy 30 just to the north of the McPherson Farm label, which marks McPherson's barn. My photos are taken from around the 1st Brigade 1st Division Cavalry Corps memorial.

This Confederate army, headed by Robert E. Lee, had sneaked past the US forces and into Pennsylvania, hoping to draw the US army out of the Confederate territories for the summer so that the Southern farmers could get a proper harvest for the first time since the war had begun, the better for the Confederates to steal it all later. He also hoped that putting battles in front of Northern faces would convince Northern politicians to press for peace, because who wants a battle right in front of their face (spoiler alert: definitely not the citizens of Gettysburg!)? He'd accomplished the sneaking part, and now he was stationed in Chambersburg, and his entire 75,000-person army was stretched in a big semi-circle over and around Gettysburg, busy pillaging and raiding and looting the countryside.

But the Union was chasing them north, just like Lee had wanted, except that Lee didn't know exactly where they were, because his cavalry, headed by Jeb Stuart, was also out and about, wandering around far from home base, and if Stuart sent Lee any communications about the location of Union troops, Lee didn't receive them.

The Union didn't know where the Confederate army was, either, but their 2,700-horse cavalry was nearby, trotting ahead of the army keeping their eyes open, and that's who spotted the Confederate infantry marching down Chambersburg Pike towards Gettysburg on June 30. The Confederates spotted them, too. 

And then both sets of forces literally noped out, lol! They both just reversed themselves right back where they came from and decided they'd deal with it tomorrow.

Which was July 1, 1863!

So, the morning of July 1, the Union cavalry had set up super early on Chambersburg Pike (the yellow road on the map), around the Herrs Ridge Road line (far left), keeping an eye out for the inevitable march of the infantry to show up from the west. When they spotted each other, that's when the Battle of Gettysburg began:

So, you've got 2,700 Union cavalry versus 10,000 Confederate infantry. Both sets of forces are basically just trying to hold off the other set until reinforcements arrive, but it's harder for the cavalry, because not only were they fewer in number, but they also didn't actually fight on horseback, so some of the cavalry had to opt out of fighting just to hold everyone else's horses for them. But it also sucks for the infantry, because every time they have to fight they basically all have to stop marching, and most of them have to get off the road and scramble over ditches and fences so they can line up right. And then they succeed in pushing the cavalry back a little bit, which the cavalry had actually planned for so they've got a few spots down Chambersburg Pike where they can retreat, and they have time to do that because before the infantry can follow them, they keep having to scramble back out of the fields and pastures and back into lines on the road.

Late in the morning, the Union cavalry finally got their first infantry reinforcements, the 1st Corp led by General Reynolds. He deployed the infantry to the north and south of Chambersburg Pike, including in that woods at the bottom of the picture. The woods mark the spot where he was also almost immediately killed, poor dude. Abner Doubleday was field promoted to take his place. But later that day, when General Meade finally arrived, he demoted Doubleday and made somebody else the 1st Corps Commander, and Doubleday pretty much sulked about that for the rest of his life.

Also, he maybe invented baseball.

The best part of the Google Map is that you can use all the memorials to figure out where everybody was in the battle. My favorite memorial is for John Burns, just north of the woods. He was just some old dude, a random pissed off civilian who'd already been agitating against the Confederate occupation in the previous days (including citizen arresting a few Confederates during their earlier pass-through, lol!), and who on this day took himself out onto the battlefield with an antique Revolutionary War musket to get those damn Confederates off his lawn, goddamnit! 

At one point, he managed to wheedle a proper rifle off of a wounded Union infantryman, and at another point, the general of the Pennsylvania infantry was able to convince him to at least go fight in the woods where he'd be out of the sun (and possibly the way, ahem). Burns paid him back, though, by fighting like a total badass in the woods, even shooting a Confederate officer clean off his horse. And later, when he was wounded and had to be left on the field while the Union soldiers retreated (more on that later), he convinced the Confederates that he was actually a non-combatant who'd just happened to get caught up in the cross-fire. They apparently didn't recognize him from his earlier agitation against Confederate troops, so they let him go back to town, where he recovered from his wounds and lived another nine years as a national hero.

Fun fact: when Abraham Lincoln came to Gettysburg the next year to dedicate the new national cemetery, he was asked if there was anything he wanted to do in town, and he replied that actually, he'd quite like to meet John Burns. So he did, and by all reports the two got along great!

Anyway, it's a good thing that Reynolds had deployed some of the Union forces north of Chambersburg Pike, because there was a whole northern segment of the Confederates, who'd been pillaging and looting north of Gettysburg, who had now managed to bust their butts to get back down south to meet those Union forces. They had a whole other fight on Oak Ridge, north of Chambersburg Pike and north of Gettysburg:

Buford's monument marks where that morning fighting was. Lincoln Highway is what they're calling Chambersburg Pike. At the bottom you can see the north edge of Gettysburg.

This spot has a nice observation tower where you can look out onto most of the first day's fighting:

This view shows where the Confederate forces came from the north:

And this view is to the southwest, back toward Chambersburg Pike and the morning battles:

There was a lot of back-and-forthing, and the monuments here are interesting to read because they're all, "In this spot so-and-so division was posted, then they advanced and shot some people, then they retreated and were shot at, then they advanced again for a little bit and did some more shooting, then they were chased screaming through town. Most of them died." Out of the 296 soldiers from the Pennsylvania division that this monument memorializes, seven were killed, 52 were wounded, and 31 were either captured or just plain went missing:

These new Confederate forces coming in from the north actually overwhelmed the Union force, who retreated south through the streets of Gettysburg (while the citizens cowered in their basements) all the way through town. Just south of town were two hills, one wooded and one bare, and that's where the Union was finally able to make their stand to end out the first day of battle.

The Gettysburg National Cemetery/Evergreen Cemetery area and Culp's Hill are where they ended up: 

And that's the end of the first day of battle!

Next up: dinner in a former field hospital, then a ghost tour with the world's most reluctant ghost tour guide.

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, encounters with Chainsaw Helicopters, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Sewing American Girl Doll Clothes Is My New Mid-Life Crisis Hobby

One Facebook Story of my little niece holding her brand-new American Girl doll later, and my summer fate is sealed!

The art of sewing doll clothes is fairly new to me, but I always like to learn new things. And once upon a time I would also have told you that the sewing of tiny garments full of fussy, precise details did not appeal to me, but tbh I think that I, myself, am growing fussier as I age, because I kind of don't mind it now. So many precise 1/4" seams! So much tidy edge stitching! Such fussy cutting of novelty prints! I used to hurry through all my sewing to get to the finish as quickly as possible, more than ready to move on to the next exciting thing, but lately I've been pretty into the process, taking my time and focusing on the details and whiling away whole evenings puttering through a project while listening to endless audiobooks.

I just finished Endgame, which was a biography of Bobby Fisher, and now I'm ready for The Long Game, the last book in my hockey smut series!

There are several books of patterns for 18" dolls that I want to sew my way through, and first up is Doll Couture, a book that I actually own but never found the time to dive into when my own little American Girl doll enthusiasts were the right ages to have appreciated my work. Good thing I've got a new audience now!

This simple dress, a sleeveless bodice with a gathered skirt, is my first project:

Highly recommend owning an entire roll of tracing paper--it's so handy!

The instructions in this book are shockingly difficult to parse--they literally didn't tell me that the dress is supposed to come together like this--

--so at every stage I kept trying to sew the skirt into a circle, or stitch the bodice back closed, and once I thought I'd finally figured out what the step I was looking at said to do and ended up sewing the bodice shut at the bottom(?!?), but eventually my very own little Goodwill American Girl doll modeled a well-fitting dress for me:

I literally found her at Goodwill for eight dollars! I LOVE her! I think she's going to be my own personal version of the porch goose, and she's going to have SO many handmade outfits for all seasons and holidays. I need to fix her hair, though, so please send me all your best tips for untangling American Girl doll hair.

And then I sewed another!

I do really like all the tidy details involved, all the edge stitching and stitching down my seams and how nice everything looks when freshly ironed.

Oops, gotta trim that thread!

I experimented with a puffier skirt for the Halloween dress, and I find it much improved.

I really like how well-proportioned small-scale novelty prints look in an 18" doll's garment, and my plan is to use up as many of my novelty prints as possible sewing my niece a wardrobe of doll clothes for her birthday.

I've also been working hard to upgrade my photo set-up:

That's two softboxes plus a giant flexible vinyl panel from Menards that I clamp to my tabletop and sort of slither up the wall to make a seamless backdrop. Vinyl is such a bummer, but I love how it looks.

Now that I've finally cracked what the instructions wanted me to do, this dress is the simplest thing in the world to sew, and it turns out so cute every time. I even upgraded some bits, like fully lining the skirt and finishing the side seams, so mental note to make physical notes so I don't forget!

I considered appliqueing one of the gingerbreads from the skirt fabric onto the bodice, but I thought that it might look too baby-ish to the sophisticated eyes of its future six-year-old recipient. I kind of wish I'd done it anyway, though, because surely one can't have too many gingerbreads on one's outfit!

I had to make myself stop at two dresses for my niece's doll, though, because I have a lot of different patterns that I want to try. But it's surely not too late to sew just a couple of dresses for my own girls' childhood American Girl dolls, so carefully put away in the top of my closet (until I got them out to serve as extra fashion models for these photo shoots, ahem...). 

And of course my own little American Girl doll will need some outfits to wear when she's not helping me out with her fit checks of the garments I'm sewing!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, encounters with Chainsaw Helicopters, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

That Time You Saw Bigfoot Is Like That Time That I Definitely Met The Real Santa Claus

Bigfoot probably doesn't live in my woods, but anything is spooky when you photograph it in black and white!

The Secret History of Bigfoot: Field Notes on a North American Monster by John O'Connor
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I believe the people who say that they saw Bigfoot, even though I also think that Bigfoot is not real. I get the cognitive dissonance of having an encounter completely unexplainable except by an impossible reason. This is the only thing that explains your encounter. And yet this thing is not real.

Because when I was twenty, I definitely met Santa Claus.

At the time, I was a Senior in college. Everyone I knew was a college student, a professor, or one of the few townies also into punk rock and also too young to get into the good clubs to hear our favorite bands play. I spent a lot of time loitering downtown outside of said clubs, in class, or at house parties.

I hit the books a LOT less than my own children do, but don’t tell them that. I work very hard on my “I want you to have fun at college, but remember that you’re there to study” face.

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One afternoon in early December, when I should have been studying for finals, my boyfriend and I instead found ourselves wandering around the local mall. I needed to buy Christmas presents, ideally for less than five bucks a person, and if some pretzel bites also happened to find their way into my possession, well then so be it. My boyfriend was keeping me company because hey, any excuse not to study!

The Santa Claus spot at this mall was set up like an ice castle, with the line snaking towards the castle and Santa himself inside it. There were open windows all around the castle so that you could look in and see the kids sitting on Santa’s lap, but I imagine that when you were inside it you felt sort of cozy and private and like you had Santa all to yourself.

As my boyfriend and I walked past, I peeped through one of the windows and saw that Santa was sitting there all alone, nobody on his lap, so I impulsively called out, “Hi, Santa!”

He looked up, smiled, and I swear he gave a jolly, “Well, hello, Julie!”

I don’t think I even replied or responded in any way, because my flabbers were too ghasted. My boyfriend heard our exchange, but he didn’t respond either, because he said later that he just assumed that random guy and I knew each other from somewhere and that’s why I’d called out to him in the first place. But Y’ALL. I did not know that old guy with the white whiskers sitting on Santa’s throne! None of my professors were at all Santa-like, and this college I went to was the kind of place where the professors weren’t moonlighting as Mall Santas. My college friends were very much college-aged, and my three or four local friends were around that age, as well, with the addition of lip piercings and neck tattoos, etc. I did not know a single other soul in the entirety of Texas.

I've told this story dozens of times, to friends and acquaintances, to kids who believe in Santa Claus and to kids who don't, and I always tell it about the same (occasionally leaving out the punk scene and or my lack of studiousness, depending on my audience), and I'm always all, "I dunno, guys. The only rational explanation is that it was Santa."

Like, yes, I recognize that logically it wasn't Santa. Logically, the person wearing the Santa suit in that mall on that afternoon did randomly know my name, or he said something else and I just thought I heard my name. It obviously wasn't actually Santa, because Santa isn't real. But also: I dunno, guys. The only rational explanation is that it was Santa.

So that's what I think a lot of these Bigfoot hunters are feeling. Logically, they know Bigfoot isn't real. But they have an encounter that is best explained by Bigfoot being real, so now they're all "I dunno, guys"ing around reddit and maybe going on the odd Bigfoot hunt and attending the occasional meet-up with other people who've had encounters best explained by Bigfoot being real. And then other Bigfoot hunters are more woo about it and have psychic links to Bigfoot and use crystals to communicate with it, etc.

And then other Bigfoot hunters… Honestly, based on O’Connor’s book, other Bigfoot hunters just seem like they want something where they can be right and everyone else is wrong, where they’ve got the truth that’s out there and everyone else is a sheeple. O’Connor compares them to Trumpers, which many of them already are, in an interesting and alarming and kind of obvious-when-you-really-think-about-it way.

Ultimately, I think that O’Connor did the work of writing an ethnography of the search for Bigfoot in a world in which Bigfoot is not real. It does mean that the book feels like a lot of… well… nothing, but that’s because ultimately, there’s nothing to tell. Bigfoot isn’t real, and the search for Bigfoot is just a bunch of people poking around the woods, finding out that Bigfoot isn’t real, and ignoring that in favor of continuing to wonder if maybe Bigfoot is real. I think O’Connor could have made the storytelling more dramatic, but likely only at the expense of the individuals who I think he was trying his best to treat respectfully. It reminds me of The Cold Vanish, in which the author has more dramatic stories to tell, but those stories often involve tearing apart some extremely vulnerable moments in the lives of vulnerable people, in ways in which he ought to be ashamed. This book, on the other hand, toyed with being boring, but nobody was victimized by the telling.

I think O’Connor’s most interesting and most important point is this:

“The ties that bound together flesh-and-blooders with the woo’ers and idly curious had everything to do with pursuit of the extraordinary and in turn with a desire to understand the world. A commonality, it seemed to me, that hitched them to the rest of us and to the great folkloric heroes and heroines of the past. And even, in a sense, to scientific tradition.”

In O’Connor’s worldview--and mine!--everyone wants, or should want, a meaningful life. A life that understands, perhaps, its place in the world. A life, perhaps, that understands the world itself. Personally, I’d love it if the world and everything that happened in it made sense and had a greater purpose to it! It doesn’t, and I find my meaning elsewhere, in my husband and children, in the pursuit of knowledge, in writing and in creating, but I’d love it if it did. Is it those who cannot find their meaning elsewhere, and who cannot take comfort in the meaningful fiction of organized religion, who find it in conspiracy theories and tempting untruths like these? Are they the ones wearing Trump hats and protesting floridated water and insisting that Forrest Fenn’s treasure is still out there and searching for Bigfoot?

P.S. View all my reviews

P.PS. 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!

That Time During the Great Depression That Canada Stole Five Identical Babies and Put Them in a Baby Zoo and Made Them Do Brand Deals

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The Miracle and Tragedy of the Dionne Quintuplets by Sarah Miller
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

WTF, Canada?!?

Just… every part of this story that comes after the children’s birth and first weeks--truly a miracle that the kids all survived without long-term complications!--is so messed up. The kids’ lives were the worst combination of overworked child actor and infant ape stolen from the wild and raised like a human for science. The way they were taken from their birth family, actively prevented from forming healthy sibling relationships (with their other siblings and with each other), raised with asylum standards by employees with a high turnover rate, and used for publicity stunts and brand deals and media attention is all so obviously wrong that I can’t imagine how anyone went along with it. And let’s be honest--the only way those kids managed to get out of that institution is because they, like sitcom child actors everywhere, grew up enough that they were no longer perceived as cute enough to stay kidnapped. And even then they had to leave the only home they’d ever known and go live with people who resented them and were jealous of them and abused them in a multitude of ways.

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Also just… the ABSOLUTE NERVE of the Canadian government and their official “guardians” to take custody away from the Dionne parents because they’d made a publicity deal with the Chicago World Fair--a publicity deal that they made to, you know, GET THE CHILDREN LIFESAVING MEDICAL CARE AND MONEY TO PAY THEIR BILLS--and then themselves go on to high-key expose those kids to publicity stunts and brand deals and advertising schemes for nearly a decade, all for money in everyone else’s pockets. The kids had to pretend to open Christmas presents months before Christmas so that the magazine layouts would be ready for the holidays. They were required to act in a movie years before they were allowed to sleep in their family home. They had to shill specific brands, and be in their doctor’s Christmas card photo with him instead of his own son.

What a bunch of assholes!

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The children’s upbringing really sets off the difference between surviving and thriving, and for whom. Sure, that early intervention is absolutely what allowed those babies to survive, but continuing it for months longer, then years longer than that emergency warranted may have been marketed as the best thing for the children’s continuing survival, but the only people thriving in that arrangement were those making money off the kids’ marketing deals and trust fund. Even if anyone involved in their care thought they were doing the best thing for them--which I’m pretty sure nobody really and truly thought that--sacrificing the children’s potential to thrive, to have big lives full of friends and family and experiences and normality, feels like too big a cost.

I found some of the old newsreels and footage of the kids (although I can’t find that movie they had to act in), and I guess we’re just more savvy about our reality television these days, because it’s obvious to me how often the kids look towards someone behind the camera to get instruction. That’s not even reality at that point--that’s an episode of Full House!

Random moments that horrified me:

• The nurses weren’t allowed to kiss the kids or show them physical affection, and their siblings were rarely allowed to visit and their parents weren’t left unsupervised with them. Was Canada TRYING to raise them as psychopaths?!? It’s a separate miracle that everyone managed to grow up as mentally healthy as they were able to. Annette, Cecile, Émilie, Marie and Yvonne Dionne are some of the most resilient human beings I’ve ever read about.
• People complained when they’d line up to watch the kids play in their custom-build playground that served as a panopticon/baby zoo and the kids didn’t look super cute like they did in the magazine photos, so the nurses had to dress them up and curl their hair before both their morning and afternoon yard time. And people would get pissed if they didn’t see all five kids or any of the kids were just moping around, so the kids had to go out even when they didn’t feel like it, and they had to “romp.”
• The trip to go meet the Royal Family when the kids were five was the first time they’d left their property since they’d been moved there as babies. Seriously, WHAT?!? No trips to the seaside or an amusement park or a zoo, much less to the hardware store or their parents’ farm or on a picnic? The kids had never even seen a cow before!!! How did anyone in charge of them think that would be good for their brains?
• When they tested the children while they were still institutionalized under Canadian guardianship, they discovered that the kids were developmentally behind, especially verbally because they’d lived in the same few rooms their entire lives and had nothing to ask questions about and nothing new to talk about, and physically because they never had to try anything new or develop independence.

Although I wish I’d been told more about the adult lives of Annette, Cecile, Émilie, Marie and Yvonne Dionne, I actually appreciated that I was not, because that’s clearly the better and more ethical choice. Those kids had their privacy stolen from them, and as adults they definitely deserved to be free from all the looky-loos who made their babyhood kid zoo so popular. That doesn’t mean that I don’t have burning questions that I didn’t try to Google on my own, ahem! But at least I had to do my own work for my gossip. I even Googled to see if anyone had ever found Cecile’s asshole son, Bertrand Langlois, who stole the rest of his elderly mother’s fortune and disappeared.

I hope you’re dead in a ditch somewhere, Bertrand!

P.S. View all my reviews.

P.P.S. Want to see what we're going to do with a bushel of apples, a gallon of cider, and two Jack-o-lantern pumpkins, one very large and one very weird? Follow along on my Craft Knife Facebook page, where cider cocktails and caramel apples are made, and teenagers are in charge of the applesauce!