John Brown's Body

STATES VISITED: West Virginia / Virginia / Maryland / Pennsylvania

We hauled the teenagers out of bed today at 8:30am, probably the earliest they've had to get up all summer. But sorry, kids, this ain't no party, this ain't no disco, this ain't no fooling around. We had hikes to hike and historic landmarks to mark, and time was a-wasting. (Must be something about being in West Virginia that gets me talking like Pearl Bodine.)

First off -- well, after the Froot Loops and muffins from the motel's breakfast bar -- there were battlefields to tramp around, in this case the Murphy Farm, a.k.a. the Chambers Farm, as it was known in 1862 when the Confederates set up their cannon in the hayfields to rout the Union forces. Stonewall Jackson's finest hour, apparently. The view of the Shenandoah valley from the farm is truly spectacular:

That's looking upriver towards Maryland. West Virginia was still Virginia in 1862, which just confuses all this history even more. It's pretty amazing to think that these soldiers hauled those heavy guns up these steep ravines from the Shenandoah River; I could barely drag my handbag uphill (though god knows how much I've got in that purse). The Union forces never expected they'd be coming from the south -- never underestimate the power of surprise.



The Union troops were a little farther north, in the town of Bolivar (it used to be called Mud Fort before the townsfolk changed the name to capitalize on the romantic image of Simon Bolivar, the "George Washington of South America"). Here's the Union troops' defensive position, looking south towards the Blue Ridge:

Walking around old battlefields may not be everybody's cup of tea, but we get a kick out of it. It's a good excuse for an hour's hike, anyway.

This is really is a gorgeous part of the country, I have to say. I'm sure my pictures don't do it justice.

And then of course there's the obligatory staring-down-the-cannon-barrel shot. For some reason this absolutely never gets old.

It really was ironic to see those Union cannons trained on that little gap in the trees, blindly pointing the other direction from the farm we'd just visited, where A.P. Hill and his men (not to mention his own big guns) were massing all the while, behind the Union flank. At the end of this battle, over 12,000 U.S. troops surrendered to Stonewall Jackson, a record that was not surpassed until World War II. Then apparently the Confederate troops withdrew from Harper's Ferry a few months later and the Union took it over again anyway. Go figure.

I can't claim to be much of an expert on this history, mind you; I'm only telling you what we learned this morning from Park Ranger David Fox, who delivered a genuinely impressive 45-minute overview of Harper's Ferry's colorful past, beginning back with George Washington, who surveyed the land as a young Virginia surveyor, and Thomas Jefferson, who sat on a rock here exulting over the view of the Potomac gap.

Here is a picture of my son Tom sitting on that selfsame rock, ignoring the view while he is texting friends on his cell phone:

Washington was the one who decreed that one of the two U.S. armories should be built here, where there were local iron and lumber for raw materials, and water power to run the gun factory works. If Washington hadn't located the armory here, then abolitionist firebrand John Brown wouldn't have come here to try to swipe guns to arm all the escaped slaves he was planning to help to freedom.

This John Brown stuff is the aspect of Harper's Ferry history that got me the most intrigued. It sure is a bizarre story. And where there's a bizarre story, what better way to tell it than a cheesy wax museum? Don't get me wrong, the John Brown Wax Museum is perfectly respectable as wax museums go, but all wax museums are by definition inherently cheesy, aren't they? So of course we had to visit it. Here's a fuzzy photo of my favorite tableau in the place, the denouement of Brown's crazy raid on the federal armory. Note: Brown is the kneeling figure in the tan coat, cradling in his lap his dying son who he dragged into this escapade.
I get the idea that Brown was, to put it delicately, a bleeding nut case. His goals may have been perfectly admirable, but his methods were highly suspect. In the end, he got half of his 21 men killed (did he really think he could pull off this raid with just 21 men?) and got himself hung for treason. He was tried, all right, but it doesn't look to me like this could possibly have been a fair trial -- it took place just a few weeks after the raid, when Brown himself was still suffering from wounds received in the skirmish. I'll bet it was a zoo, the 19th-century version of the OJ trial. On the other hand, Brown's lunatic raid helped to ignite the Civil War, which eventually did end slavery, so maybe he knew what he was doing after all.

Harper's Ferry has been basically a national park since the 1940s; only about 300 hundred people live here now, most of who seem to be running gift shops or selling ice cream. Nice gift shops, mind you, and delicious ice cream. It's a cool little town and we enjoyed poking around. A lot of the shops are gussied up to look like they did in the 1850s, but right now they've just got fake displays in the windows. I'd like it even better if more of them were fitted up with repro merchandise and costumed shopkeepers. You know the drill -- the fake print shop, the fake blacksmith's forge, the fake general store. I love historic restorations. I love costumed interpreters too, but they were in short supply today. We saw exactly 3 women in long skirts and bonnets and one Civil War soldier walking around for the benefit of the educational programs. Maybe there would have been more if we'd come on a weekend. I'll bet they've got loads of them organized for John Brown's 150th anniversary later this year.


Oh, and one other cool thing about Harper's Ferry -- it's the mid-point of the Appalachian Trail. We ran into at least a handful of hikers with their walking sticks and backpacks, though they didn't look grubby enough to have come all the way up from Georgia or down from Maine. After reading Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods, I'm ready for every Appalachian Trail hiker to be mud-coated and wild-haired and stinky.

Mid-afternoon, we bid Harper's Ferry adieu and headed on toward Wheeling, West Virginia. The road we drove on, I-68, running from Cumberland MD to Wheeling, was called the National Freeway -- apparently, in 1806 Thomas Jefferson ordered the first federal road to be built along this route, linking the Potomac and Ohio rivers. (This fact I picked up from the great book I'm reading right now, Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure by Matthew Algeo -- more on that tomorrow.) It was a beautiful highway with hardly any cars on it -- mostly just a handful of 18-wheelers laboring up these long inclines and huffing around the curves. I was driving so I didn't get to soak up the long blue-misted mountain views, and the other folks in the car were snoozing so they didn't see them either. So much for seeing America...

Crossing the Mason-Dixon Line

STATES VISITED: Pennsylvania / Maryland / Virginia / West Virginia

Before we left Bethlehem this morning, we did the obligatory spin through the old steel mills neighborhood. (I've written about this derelict site, once the proud home of the Bethlehem Steel Corporation, in my book 500 Places to See Before They Disappear.) Bob's father and all his uncles worked here for years; Bob himself had a summer job here as a janitor. Good incentive to go to college, you gotta say that for it. After the steel went bust, the smokestacks went cold and the mills stood empty for several years, big rusting ghosts in the center of town. I guess you could say they have their own weird poetry:
Finally, the Sands Casino rehabbed one of the old mills and recently opened it for business, offering nonstop slot action. Bob's sisters have been talking about this for ages, and I have to admit I was skeptical about it ever really happening. Well, it did, and this was our first chance to finally see it. I'm not sure this is exactly what this economically depressed area needs, but I have to give them props for the clever adaption of the industrial site. They've hung their blazing red logo on an old railroad crane across the entrance:
After that we drove out to the site of Bob's other summer job -- the Saucon Valley Country Club, where he used to caddy for the rich steel executives as they busily charmed clients into buying American steel. If this course hadn't been such a plum place to play golf, the U.S. steel mills might have gone belly-up years earlier. It's such a great course, it seems that they're having the U.S. Women's Open there right now -- at any rate we saw this giant merchandise tent set up at the edge of the course:
The real reason for going past the country club, though, is to drive on Saucon Valley Road, which has a fantastic series of whoopdedoo bumps -- if you drive fast enough (and we always do), it's like riding on a roller coaster. Ticklebelly Road, the kids call it. Well, I guess if you grow up in Bethlehem, you need to have something to do in the car on a Saturday night . . . .

* * * * *

We headed west on I-78 towards Reading, then followed I-81 south. By the time we needed to stop for lunch, we were at Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Its main claim to fame as far as we're concerned is Dickinson College. Hugh applied to Dickinson and got accepted, but he'd never actually visited the campus. Everyone told us it was beautiful, and they were right -- what a little gem, an ensemble of neat fieldstone buildings set around a shady quadrangle with these red Adirondack chairs plopped down on the grass. Here are the kids, buddying up to the statue of physician Benjamin Rush, Dickinson's founder. He looks like he's about to drop his book on Grace's head, doesn't he?
They have this cool new science building too --
After a very respectable lunch at the Gingerbread Man (we enjoyed watching Wimbledon on TV, then we saw the US pull ahead of Brazil in the FIFA Confederations Cup -- a game I'm told the US eventually lost) we had a little walk around town. Favorite pic of the day, taken behind one of the local churches:
* * * *

Heading south on I-81 toward Maryland, we decided to try out the GPS system that came with the rental car. I swear, our GPS voice had a speech impediment. "At the next light, turn bleft," the robot lady said. "In five hundred yards, turn bright." (As if we weren't already bright enough...). We had to turn off the voice part, it was driving us so crazy. The GPS gods, however, sent us on a different route than the one the Google map gods had decreed, which caused a momentary short circuit in our navigational peace of mind. We went with the GPS edict, mostly because the GPS gadget was actually in the car with us and could have turned vicious at any minute. It ended up being serendipitous, though, because that route led us through the quaint town of Boonsboro, Maryland, which was founded by some cousins of Daniel Boone, distant ancestors of mine. It's the kind of town that has log cabins on the main street with gift shops inside -- it sounds hokey but honestly looked cool. Then we cut across country and crossed the Potomac river into (briefly) the very tippy-top corner of Virginia, which we wouldn't have gone into if we'd gone the Google route. Boosting this trip's total of states, always a plus.

Our destination: Harper's Ferry, West Virginia, set at the strategic confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers, where abolitionist rabble-rouser John Brown convinced a gang of like-minded freedom fighters to attack the federal armory in October 1859. As the front desk clerk at the Comfort Suites informed us, this year is the 150th anniversary of John Brown's raid -- "Or maybe the 150th anniversary of him getting hung. Great. Let's celebrate this guy getting killed, that sounds like fun." I'm glad to know that cynicism is alive and well in West Virginia.

After dumping our gear at the Comfort Suites -- a marvel of chain-motel predictability, not that there's anything wrong with that -- we went into the historic district for dinner. All the costumed reenactors have gone home for the night and the cutesy gift shops are closed, but we had a decent dinner at the Secret Six Tavern, which commemorates six New England abolitionists who secretly funded Brown's activities. Walking along the tavern wall looking at the steel engravings of those guys' faces, I discovered that one of them was Samuel Gridley Howe, who, um, I'm pretty sure is another ancestor of mine. This DAR stuff can be embarrassing sometimes . . . .

O Little Town...

STATES VISITED: New York / New Jersey / Pennsylvania

I expected, realistically, we'd finally get going by 2pm. My husband, Bob, imagined we'd be off by 10am. My son Hugh rolled his eyes and predicted it'd be 4 in the afternoon before we left.

Guess who won.

But there are so many things to do before you take off for a trip, even more if it's going to be a long one. There's the rental car to pick up, the prescriptions you'll need while you're gone to get from the pharmacy, the last trip to the grocery to lay in cleaning supplies for the house cleaner, the last last trip to the grocery to stock up on road snacks. (At least I could send my sons to do that one -- they are excellent road snack buyers.) Then there's the instructions to leave for the catsitter, the money to leave for the house cleaner, the final bag of kitchen garbage to set out, the last load of dishes to run in the dishwasher (and wait to make sure it completes the cycle without blowing up). The beds to be made, because I hate coming home to a messed-up bedroom. The children to be nagged into making their own beds, because they do not mind coming home to a messed-up bedroom. The pile of bills to be mailed. The keys to be left with the doorman. The windows to be shut, the lights to be turned off. It's a wonder we got off by 4pm, really.

Here's the kids and the car:
In their infinite wisdom, National Car Rental decided to give us not a Dodge Caravan, but a Toyota Sienna. Now, having just researched minivans (the lease on our Volvo runs out in a week), I happen to know that the Sienna has much worse safety ratings than comparable minivans. I am so glad that I know this now, as we are hurtling across I-80. I will say, however, that it's a pleasure, after that cramped back seat of the Volvo, to luxuriate in the space of this minivan. Sitting in the third row (what luxury to have a third row!), Tom noticed that the console between the seats of the middle row looks like a sad smiley-face:

Later Grace took a picture of the sad smiley-face with Hershey Kisses in the cupholders to look like eyeballs. Every time we hit a curve, the sad smiley-face rolls its eyes. Hilarious, hunh? (I guess you had to be there.)

I reckon one of the reasons we weren't in such a burning hurry to leave is that our first stop is Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where Bob grew up and where his sisters still live; we couldn't really pass by without stopping overnight to see them. No check-in deadline, no stress about whether we'll get there in time to get connecting rooms, no worries about where we'll find to eat. We make this trip so often, it doesn't really feel like a vacation yet.

But it's always fun to hang with Bob's sisters. After dinner (a very tasty Italian restaurant way off the highway that we'd never have found if we didn't know people in town), we played Scrabble and watched Notorious on TV and then taught Hugh how to play Hearts. Card games seem such an archaic skill; in the Xbox era, nobody plays cards anymore. He's a fast learner; by the second round he beat everybody's butt. A fine skill to pick up for college.

To bed at 2am. We definitely have to get on a proper schedule once the trip really starts.

One Day and Counting...

Packing. Yeesh!! Packing for myself is one thing, but how's come I'm packing for all of them too -- the 14-year-old, the 16-year-old, jeezus, even the 18-year-old, who three months from now will be living the independent life at college? And here we're packing for summer time, which means the clothes are lighter -- take up less space -- but you also need extra in case it's hot as a furnace and you end up soaked with sweat, which is entirely possible when we get to the Arizona part of our coast-to-coast journey. Arizona? I'm betting Kansas City will be plenty hot too, and don't even get me started on St. Louis.

So how did I get myself into this? Eighteen days of driving across this great big country of ours, starting in New York City and ending up in San Diego. Maybe it was the only way I could get my family to visit my hometown, Indianapolis, by padding it out with treats like five baseball games (Cincinnati Reds, St. Louis Cardinals, Kansas City Royals, Colorado Rockies, Arizona Diamondbacks) and a stop at the Grand Canyon. Which of course means jiggering the whole schedule to match up with home games, and finding hotels near the stadium in every one of these cities, and adding side trips to small towns we'd never otherwise see (because when are we likely to be in Nebraska again?).

Remember that old commercial "See the USA in a Chevrolet"? That's what we're doing, except we'll be seeing the USA in a Dodge Caravan, which is probably the next best thing to a covered wagon. Three teenagers fighting over the shotgun seat, and arguing about whose iPod we plug into the sound system. I may regret not opting for the DVD players -- but wasn't the whole point of this trip for us to actually talk to each other?

Shoot me now.