Freefalling into Fifty, Because If You Don't Nearly Vomit On Your Birthday Then Did You Even Have One?

So, I just need to preface my story by telling you two things:

1. I would absolutely, 100% tandem skydive again in a heartbeat. It was WONDERFUL, I loved it, and dissociating myself back there got me through my last dental cleaning.
2. The literal first thing I did after touching ground and being unclipped from my instructor was roll over onto my hands and knees and dry-heave onto the grass. 

But I did not actually vomit!

But anyway! My fiftieth birthday earlier this summer was excellent. I ate a lot of cookie cake and spent the whole day with my favorite people, accruing experience gifts like a dungeon crawler collecting loot boxes (Guess what I'm currently reading, lol!). The little kid and I solved a murder mystery. Mr. Craft Knife and I decided to ride a ferry up the coast of Norway this winter so we can see the Northern Lights. And the big kid arranged for the two of us to go tandem skydiving, something that we've talked about together for years, but always with that sort of "someday, I wish" vibe.

Turns out that Someday, I Wish is an actual calendar date in August!

The big kid has always been my fellow adventurer--remember the time we strapped ourselves to cables and walked around on top of the CN Tower?--and given a choice among all the people on the planet, she's exactly who I'd want to throw myself out of a plane with.

I mean, look! It even says DANGER right there on her harness!

MY harness doesn't proclaim any such thing!

It was a perfect day for skydiving, and although it took a good two hours from arrival to flinging ourselves out of an airplane, sitting in the shade of an airplane hanger, reading my Matt Dinniman and watching parachutes meander down to Earth was a quite lovely way to spend an afternoon.

The big kid and I each got our own personal photographer for the trip, but since Mr. Craft Knife and the little kid had also wanted to tag along to watch us fall out of an airplane, I gave them my camera to take photos, too, so the big kid and I basically had a whole entire paparazzi experience. We got photos of ourselves from one side--

Fun fact: I wasn't sure what to wear, so I got onto Skydive Indianapolis' Insta to see what everyone else was wearing and then matched it, including cropping a pair of my leggings with scissors. I did a great job, because even my instructor is rocking the cropped leggings look!

--and the other!

You can't tell, but that's me BEAMING and waving from inside the plane. I was so excited to finally be off! 

My only previous look at the inside of a plane used for skydiving was in this SNL video--

--and shockingly, they don't actually look like the inside of a sound stage! This plane had two long benches running parallel along the inside, and we straddled those, facing the back of the plane, our instructors behind us, so they could busy themselves strapping us to them while the plane got high enough:

I'd had it in my mind that I'd better not forget to just double-check that my instructor had attached us before we jumped, since, you know, he was the only one entrusted with the actual parachute, but my god. When this dude was done, I was basically carabinered to him like I was in a metal-forward Baby Bjorn. When he was ready to skydive, he shuffled himself over to the edge of the plane, and I, too, found myself there like luggage strapped to the roof of a car:

My photographer did protest at how tightly he strapped on my goggles, though, and made him loosen them a little bit, which he did not want to do but after looking at my photos I am SO GLAD he did. Goggles so tight that they cut straight into the apples of your cheeks that are already doing weird things in the 120 mph wind are NOT a cute look for the photos that you paid a lot of good money for. The big kid's instructor kind of did her dirty that way, but hey--the important thing to him was that her glasses stayed on her face. And they did!

Anyway, guess who got to go first?!?

Check out my cool as hell photographer clinging like a spider to the OUTSIDE OF THE PLANE.

That's how she gets the shot of my face the first time I see the world this high and not through an airplane window!

Those fucking goggles! Very jealous of the proper skydivers who get to wear the cool-ass helmets.

And here we go!

I swear that I was feeling pretty normal about things, everything considered, but I cannot stop cackling every time I look at that photo. Omg my FACE!!!

The big kid was next, so her photographer also got a couple of shots of me while her instructor was shuffling them into place. Do I look less close to mental collapse in her photos from the plane?

Hahahahaha... nope!

Also, my head is supposed to be BACK. My instructor was griping to his co-workers on the flight up that none of his students had done a single thing he'd told them to do all day, and I guess I'm one of them. Sorry, Dude! My brain wasn't online for instruction-following just then!

This one's a little better, mostly because you can't see my face as much, lol:

And okay, to be fair, I had not exactly visualized what the jump would feel like, but I also had not anticipated that we would do so much tumbling end-over-end. It was fine, though! Just gotta let my dude get settled and release his drogue, and then it became the most insanely disorienting/best experience of my life:

All better!

So, to me, it actually did not feel like falling. Like, at all. It did not even occur to me at the time that I was falling. There's not really any perspective--even if you look at the ground, it's so far away that it doesn't look like you're falling towards it. It's just blue and white all around you, and honestly hard to see anyway partly because of those goddamned goggles but also because there's so much wind. Like, yes, you're feeling the wind because you're falling at terminal velocity, but if you've never done that before then that's not actually what falling feels like. So it's just weird and disorienting and awesome.

It's funny because the big kid actually did not prefer this part of skydiving. You'd never know it, though, because unlike her mother, who has a cartoon for a face, she is the picture of stoicism:

She still loved it, though! She just liked the parachute part better:

The freefall, though, was my own personal absolute favorite thing ever. Check me out--I'm FLYING!!!

The little kid made fun of me because in almost every photo my hands are locked into thumbs-up position. The photographer thumbs-upped me, I thumbs-upped her back, and then forgot that my hands existed and therefore never changed it up!

I'm pretty sure my instructor physically un-thumbs-upped my hands for me, lol. 

Sooo... I had a little bit of an issue when my instructor deployed our parachute. I was 100% completely fine through the tumbling end-over-end and the falling through the air belly-first at 120 mph, and even the jolt of the parachute was totally fine, but I guess then the instructors have to steer us over to the actual landing site, and they've got to do whatever parachute-steering maneuvers they have to do to get us in the right spot and make sure we're not knocking against the other parachutes, and so on. And for us, this meant that all of a sudden my happy freefall fun time was taken away and instead we did a bunch of spins.

A whole bunch of spins.

If there's one thing that you might not know about me but should, it's that I. Do. Not. Spin. My eardrums are kind of fucked up and my sense of being upright and on balance in the world is iffy at best. Spin me, and any hope that I will ever be able to rearrange myself properly on this planet is over, at least until after I've had some ginger ale and a very, very, very long nap.

So all that fun, all the flying in an airplane and then jumping out of a plane and then falling through the air like a goddess, and I'm taken out by some spins.

Meanwhile, though, look how Mr. Craft Knife got photos of us up so high!

My parachute is the one at the bottom. Apparently we are spinning AND we are sideways. I had no hope.

Leveled off, at least! And we seem to have stopped spinning, yay!

Here's a good shot of the big kid's parachute:

Right behind me out of the plane, and right behind me back on the ground!

So, um... did you notice anything about that photo of my beautiful, brave daughter parachuting to the ground?

Yeah...

But I did not vomit! I just really, really, really felt like I was going to.

Ugh. Of all the things that could have gone wrong, it had to have been SPINNING!!!

Anyway, NEXT time I go skydiving, I will take two Dramamine an hour before I jump.

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How To Field Cast Animal Tracks, Because If You Don't Field Cast Animal Tracks Are You Even a Homeschooler?

 

I originally published this tutorial over at Crafting a Green World.

Have you ever been hiking and come across a really cool animal track? Maybe you don’t know what animal made it, or maybe you do know, but the track is just so perfect that you wish you could bundle it up and take it home to admire? Maybe you’ve got a kid who loves animals and nature, who could use a little hands-on science enrichment?

You need to know how to field cast.

Field casting is easy, requiring just plaster of Paris, used cardboard food packaging, masking tape, and water. It won’t take a ton of time away from your hike, and it’ll leave you with a great memory and a useful piece of scientific evidence for studying the real animals who’ve walked your path.

Here’s how:

1. Find an animal track. We’ve chosen to hike in the woods behind our house the day after a big rainfall, and my ten-year-old finds just what we’d expect to find: deer tracks!

2. Make a cardboard collar around the track. Cut strips of the cardboard food packaging about 1″ wide and long enough to completely encircle the track; tape pieces together with masking tape to lengthen them if necessary.

Tape the two ends together into a collar that will circle the track.

3. Mix the plaster of Paris. Although there are specific ratios of plaster to water that will guarantee a standard result (and I used to do all our field casting that way), I went on a dino dig earlier this summer and learned there how to simply eyeball my plaster mixture. In a throwaway plastic cup that’s at the end of its life, dump some dry plaster, then add some water and stir with a stick. You’re looking for a pudding consistency, better thin than thick, so continue to gradually add plaster or water to reach this approximate consistency.

4. Pour into the animal track. We always need two people for this, one person to steady the collar and one person to actually pour.

The thinner the consistency of the plaster of Paris is, the better it will fill the animal track without bubbles, but the longer it will take to cure–use your own judgment about how much free time you have to kill making field casts on your hike.

5. Remove the cast. When the plaster is firm to the touch, you can remove the cast and clean up your work.

The field cast will be dirty, but you can rinse it, and then label or paint it.

If you’d like to hang the field cast on your wall later (we do this sometimes), unbend a paperclip into a hook, then embed it in the plaster after you’ve poured it.

If you’ve got an extra-savvy kid who needs a science fair project, have them see what information they can learn about an animal based solely on its track. Height? Weight? Age?

This is also a great technique to employ if you happen to come across an animal track that you can’t identify. You might come up with the first conclusive evidence of the elusive Sasquatch, or the wily chupacabra!

Actually… I have a story about the chupacabra. Buy me a margarita sometime, and I’ll tell you all about it.

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George Washington Carver Was So Awesome WHY WAS EVERYONE SO MEAN TO HIM?!?!?!?!

George Washington Carver: A Life by Christina Vella
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

ME, worriedly, every so often: "Please don't tell anyone how much I hate Booker T. Washington so they don't think I'm racist."

ALL FAMILY MEMBERS: "Okay, but you're the most likely person to tell someone that."

And fine, it's true, so here we go:

I hate Booker T. Washington. I think he did a really terrible job running the Tuskegee Institute (he did a really great job founding it--he just did a really terrible job running it!), I think a lot of what he said and did was wrongheaded, I think he should have been open to other leaders' ideas of how best to lift up their people instead of just stubbornly following his own personal brand of black-and-white thinking, I think he got distracted by showmanship too often.

But most of all, I hate him because he was really, really, REALLY mean to George Washington Carver for literally no reason. Washington acted like his whole purpose in life was to serve his people, and then turned around and stole away probably the greatest genius of that time and hid him away and made him work like a dog without any of the resources he could have so easily provided and then when Carver created miracles anyway, Washington acted like those miracles were garbage and just continued trying to stomp Carver down.

And for some reason beyond all comprehension, or really just because that's the kind of guy he was, George Washington Carver LOVED Booker T. Washington, loved him and admired him and had so much affection for him, and in return, Washington's every action toward Carver (after, of course, he'd gone to all the trouble to woo Carver into taking that job at Tuskegee) was filled with just palpable contempt. In George Washington Carver: A Life, author Christina Vella writes that every Christmas, Carver made these beautiful hand-painted Christmas cards for all his favorite people. They were masterpieces. Washington always got one, and barely even acknowledged them. But the next year, Carver would go right ahead and paint him another beautiful masterpiece, and Washington would again be all like, "Meh." But after Washington died (yay!) and another guy took over as head of Tuskegee, Carver went to all the trouble to make that guy his very own hand-painted Christmas card, too, because he was just that nice.

And that guy was so touched that he wrote Carver a genuine multi-paged THANK-YOU NOTE FOR THE CHRISTMAS CARD. THAT'S HOW MUCH HE LOVED IT.

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Ugh, Booker T. Washington!

Honestly next I should probably read a proper biography of Booker T. Washington, because right now he exists solely in my mind as a cartoon villain.

He really was VERY mean to Carver, though.

Which I feel like is a pattern that started when Carver was a newborn! Susan and Moses Carver, the people who raised him from the time of his mother’s abduction (at least the official story is an abduction--I’d tell you what I think happened, but I feel like I have already expressed an unhealthy amount of George Washington Carver-centric conspiracy theories in my life and I think I'm already not getting invited to parties about it) to the age of nine or ten, allowed that nine- or ten-year-old to leave home and figure out his own means of sustenance and support when little George, with a knack for learning, decided that an education was what he really, really, really wanted for himself. Vella writes somewhat bemusedly that George didn’t seem to remember much of his childhood and/or would often simply tell some amusing anecdote that he’d contradict in a later interview. She attributes it to absent-mindedness, in that his focus was always elsewhere, but honestly I don’t buy it. As an adult, this dude seemed VERY focused on interpersonal relationships. He treasured his friends, and was kind to fans and acquaintances. I feel like if he couldn’t remember his childhood enough to even give a consistent count for the number of siblings he had, there was a reason for it. And if it wasn’t a memory issue but instead that he didn’t want to talk about his childhood and fiction was easier, well, there was a reason for that, too.

Thank goodness little unhoused Carver met people along the way who did help and nurture and support him, although he clearly witnessed and experienced a lot of trauma, too. And he made his own way. He cleaned houses, he took in laundry, and Vella tells a story in which as a child he talked his way into a job as a personal chef and to cover the fact that he didn’t know how to cook he got the lady of the house to demonstrate how to make every single dish so that he could, as he told her, “make it the way you like it.” And after that, he did!

After making his own way in the world, traveling to wherever there was a school he could learn in, pausing his enrollment periodically as he ran out of money, he finally got enough education to be accepted to Highland College in Kansas. He used the rest of his money to get himself there, but when he showed up, the head of the college was all like, “Oh. Yeah, we don’t actually admit Negros,” and Carver had to simply walk away, broke and with his dreams dashed AGAIN.

I hate you, too, Highland College.

Carver was, if anything, even more poor when he was finally able to attend Simpson College, an art school, and then after that, thanks to a teacher who took him under her wing, Iowa State College. But I feel like Iowa State was where he was the happiest in his entire life. He still cleaned and took in laundry, but Vella notes that his teachers and schoolmates and neighbors would make sure he at least had tons of work, because that’s the only way they could get him to take their money. In 1893, four of his paintings won entry into the Chicago World’s Fair, and Carver was going to get to go see them there. But all his clothes were garbage. So one day, some of his classmates literally kidnapped him off the street, manhandled him into a department store, forced him to try on clothes, and then bought him a beautiful new suit, completely against his will.

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And you guys. I cry every time I tell this story, because it is literally so sweet and SO insane, because Carver basically NEVER TOOK THAT SUIT OFF AGAIN IN HIS ENTIRE LIFE. I mean, like, I’m sure he had pajamas, and he spent a lot of time in a lab coat, but if he was dressed up and out and about, he was wearing that suit. That twenty-year-old suit. That thirty-year-old suit. That FORTY-YEAR-OLD SUIT. It was always clean--Carver, after all, was a laundry man!--and it always had a fresh flower in its lapel, but people started to not be able to tell what color it was supposed to be. It was probably, like, dry rotting or something at some point. And sometimes, someone would be like, “Buddy, you want to get yourself a new suit or something?” And Carver, even after he finally had some money--although he never had money like he was supposed to, because Tuskegee never paid him a decent salary, much less the salary he deserved--would just be like, “But clearly I already have a suit I am literally wearing it right now?”

So here’s the thing: Vella makes very clear that Carver was super happy at Iowa State. Some people were for sure racist towards him but a lot of people were not, he had friends, he had mentors, he was learning and he loved it, he was blowing everyone away with how smart he was and how nice and how good he was at everything, and he already had an excellent job lined up right there as soon as he graduated, because these professors did NOT want to let him out of their sight, he was so awesome.

Enter Booker T. Washington.

And okay, to be fair to Washington, the people of Alabama, Black and white but especially Black, were just absolutely beyond destitute at this time. Anything that anyone could do to help them was a very good thing. But Washington had a very black and white, VERY limited idea of what was best for Black people as a whole, and he didn’t give a fuck that it wasn’t what many Black people wanted for themselves--he was going to do for them what HE wanted to do for them, and that’s it.

And what he wanted to do for them wasn’t so much to offer a proper school education, although to be fair Tuskegee did teach literacy and numeracy, but essentially to offer more sophisticated farming and industrial education. I think it was this weird wanting to serve his people but also hating intellectualism vibe that Vella describes that made him 1) work as hard as he did to woo Carver away from his perfect Iowa State prospects, but also 2) shit on everything Carver tried to do and act contemptuous of all his accomplishments and thwart all his efforts because Carver was clearly very intellectually gifted and treasured intellect, and that shone through as much as his kindness did.

So Washington refused to fund Carver’s teaching lab, causing Carver to resort to garbage picking and DIY to stock it. Carver scored a very prestigious federal grant to host an experiment station at the school, and Washington refused to assign him a consistent staff to work it. When Carver succeeded with the station anyway and published useful educational brochures, Washington refused to have them printed. It got so bad that when Washington learned that Carver had been teaching--for free! in his free time!--an extremely popular Bible study class for the past three years, he immediately shut it down. Tell me one reason why he’d do that that’s not from simple spite!

Tuskegee could have furnished his lab if they'd wanted to.

Also, I’m very open to the possibility that the author is biased against Booker T. Washington and has simply passed it onto me. Like I said, I need to read a proper bio about him!

But you know what? Carver took Washington’s contempt and Tuskegee’s garbage and with them, he performed wonders. He genuinely saved Alabama, and the South as a whole, with his research and outreach. Enslavers had used their access to free labor to monoculture cotton to such an extent that the land was completely devoid of nutrients, and so everyone who was still trying to live off the land had resorted to simply growing more and more of that same monoculture just to chase any kind of profit. People were malnourished because they’d converted their kitchen gardens to cotton. Same with their livestock yards. Part of Carver’s extensive research and outreach was finding nutritious, cheap crops and livestock that fed people, turned a profit, and also healed the land. Sweet potatoes. Hogs. PEANUTS!!! People were also longing for more elevated lifestyles but weren’t sure what that would consist of, so were spending their precious money on stupid stuff like fancy clocks and organs that represented culture to them (tangent, but I thought this detail was VERY interesting, because way north in De Smet, South Dakota, the Ingalls family was also spending their precious money on a stupid organ!). So Carver researched methods of making beautiful paints cheaply from the local soils, then taught everyone how to paint their homes and furnishings so they could have pretty things around them without wasting their money.

Another tangent: all throughout the book, Vella just keeps on referring to Carver’s “woman’s voice.” She genuinely goes out of her way to bring this up ALL THE TIME. Carver meets someone famous--they must be surprised to hear his woman’s voice! Carver gives a lecture--people probably thought it was strange hearing a woman’s voice! At one point, I swear she is absolutely giddy because Carver met a woman whom she says had an unusually deep voice, and she’s genuinely all, “OMG I BET IT SOUNDED SO WEIRD! BECAUSE HE SOUNDED LIKE A WOMAN AND SHE SOUNDED LIKE A MAN! AND WHEN THEY TALKED TO EACH OTHER IT WAS LIKE THE OTHER PERSON’S VOICE SHOULD BE COMING OUT OF EACH OF THEIR MOUTHS! HAHAHAHAHA!!!”

So anyway, I kept reading her taking these shots at Carver’s voice and being all, “Dude! Why is she obsessed with saying he sounds like a woman?” So I got on YouTube to see if there are any videos of Carver speaking.

There are. And fine, he sounds like a woman. Just… Vella acts weirdly excited about it, okay?

Anyway, *I* was very excited in the book when Booker T. Washington died, even though it caused Carver to go into genuine mourning for months and also donate half a year’s worth of his pitiful salary to a memorial for that asshole. I’m just so mad at how much of his life he gave up for that man.

There’s another whole weird part of the biography concerning how Carver apparently also gave up another huge chunk of his life to massaging people with peanut oil, because it got published in the newspapers as a miracle cure, causing people to show up from everywhere all the time asking him to, and he was too nice to say no. It’s super weird, though.

Another weird part: although everyone online seems to think that Carver was queer because he was life partners with the lab assistant he had late in his career, Austin W. Curtis, Jr., Vella does not think that this was true at all. Honestly, she low-key makes Curtis out to be a villain who made secret deals behind Carver’s back to profit off of their professional partnership and their friendship. Instead, she puts forth the VERY convincing case that Carver was queer because he was deeply in love with a much younger man whom he met through church stuff. He wrote him obsessive letters for years, letters in which you can literally feel the agonized longing, translated into Jesus-speak. This besottedness went mostly unreciprocated, poor dude. Honestly, I think Carver was probably aroace. His letters of religious fervor to that dude did sound pretty sexy, but I dunno, religion can be weird like that.

Eventually, Henry Ford befriended Carver and built him the fanciest of fancy labs. But you guys, you might as well go ahead and start crying with me again, because by then, Carver was too frail to get much use out of it. He just always worked so hard, and I feel like he never got exactly what he deserved out of life. I guess he’d be proud of his beautiful George Washington Carver Museum at Tuskegee, although I’m low-key mad about it, but his other memorial is literally at his enslavers’ house sooo…

So… I dunno, you guys. All I know about George Washington Carver I learned from his national park site and this biography and some really sketchy online content that I do not believe. People are such weirdos. So, did Vella do me dirty? Is Booker T. Washington actually awesome and now I hate him for no reason? Was Curtis really Carver’s lover and Vella simply won’t say?

Is it super weird that she kept saying he had a woman’s voice? I mean sure, it’s high-pitched--okay, it’s remarkably high-pitched--but she’s being weird about it, right?

P.S. View all my reviews

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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!