Memorial Day

  I had dinner alone in a swank restaurant in the basement of a hotel built in 1850 in Milford PA last week. Guy who built it started Delmonicos in NYC before the Civil War. Bartender went to find me a copy of the Times - "Look no offense but I just can't watch you read off your phone, man"- but they'd thrown it out so he grabbed the local weekly. "I mean if we're gonna talk and all." I agreed. He was a Mets fan, from Brooklyn, if you couldn't tell. 
  Things I learned reading the Pike County Register over some fine spiced kale and a decent ribeye.
  Did you know Norway used to be run by Sweden? Till like 1910.
  Did you know their used to be 4 billion chestnut trees up and down the Appalachian corridor? Then came the fungus.
  Did you know:
  It's 60 minutes from Milford to the nearest hospital with a maternity ward. A local author gave birth halfway along the ride. "I'd like to thank the good officers of the Jersey State patrol for helping my husband and I as we waited to deliver the placenta."
  French Huguenots settled along the upper Delaware in the early 18th century. There's a red brick church in…umm "Huguenot" NY….. that their descendants are trying to save. A good number of them are catholic.
   Did you know the Delaware Water Gap was gonna be an inland sea- dammed up for the tap water benefit of Philly and NYC- until they realized the place they'd picked for the dam would have failed. So the Fed did an about face to save face and said it was supposed to be a national park all along.
  JFK signed the law. At a house about 3 miles from my barstool. Grey Towers. I went up the next day to see the place and talked to the gardener for 20 minutes, which was far more informative than the tour. He was 14 when Kennedy got up to speak, happy simply to be out of school, "He landed right over there on the big lawn. Spoke right here in front of the records building. Under the Copper Elms…..and then, who knew, they shot him a couple weeks later…"
   I didn't ask but when he went on less about the great home of Gifford Pinchot founder of the National Forestry Service and more about what a tragedy LBJ was, I did the math. 14 in 1963. 18 in 1967. Small town. Not much for the books. Vietnam. 
  Rich was his name. Lanky, sunbaked, happy to be the care taker of the mansion he'd watched fall apart as a boy, playing in its ruins. "We put 30 million into it, bought back 400 acres, used local materials again and local people just like Pinchot's dad did way back. It's a rock."
   I liked that when he said "we" he meant the Federal Government.
   He walked me thru the forest Pinchot had planted - "By God I do wish I could return in a hundred years and see my trees.", the old man had famously said - at least that's what Rich said- but as we climbed thru the Pines and the Elms and the Maples and Cherry trees 4 feet in diameter, I thought about all the times I've gone hiking back East in the parks and state game lands of my youth and how you realize it was all clear cut, was all scoured fields and mountainsides of nothing for so long until guys like Pinchot pounded it into people's heads that if you erase the forests you'll drown the towns and destroy your farms and end up in a wet desert.
  Look at photos from the Civil War, look at panorama shots on the opening days of the great museums and libraries of the Progressive age, and what you might notice is the things stand in barren ground.

    There were no trees. We'd cut them all down. We mowed Pennsylvania. What you walk thru now unless you're deep, deep in the woods is third and fourth growth replanting, or random species that have blown in and can live on nothing.
  "I think this place is still here cause the Kennedys have a soft spot for it….doesn't make much sense otherwise. Must be earmarked every year."
   I had to agree that a multimillion dollar pile of stone in honor of a conservationist of wood didn't make much sense but I was glad it gave him a job.

   Rich waved me off, "Next time park in the lower lot, there's shade in that corner." And I drove 5 hours on back roads to Gettysburg, and it felt like I'd crossed a continent. From the gouged out valleys of the Lehigh and the northern Appalachians to the God blessed open fields of Lancaster. It's like going from the Balkans to the English Home Counties. From West Virginia to Iowa. You get some tiny glimmer of how people once measured distance. And how they were marked, molded, and dyed by the land they lived in. What they called their homeland, where they were from as opposed to that oh so different place on the other side of the mountains. Land we can hop across, to and from now in hours.
  I drove through a massive storm, clouds practically reaching down to scrape Pottsville and Lebanon off the PA map, trucks swerving in the wash, folks parked under the overpasses with the hazards on, but when I got to the battlefield the skies softened, went from bruise black to grey, and held. I had to laugh. It was just what you'd imagine. Rain plastering the windshield as I parked. I reached for my raincoat, opened the door and …..nothing but wind.
  And there was nobody there.
  Stones and statues dripping. Handful of intrepid school kids from Missouri, one in a wheelchair they couldn't push across the muddied field of Pickett's charge. The open farm land they say Lee looked across and said "Here. It will be here."
  And was it ever.
  Did you know at a steady walk it takes 15 minutes to cross the fields from the Confederate line to the Union angle. It's almost exactly 1300 steps. 1297 on my count. Though I imagine the last quarter of those, for the handful that made it, were at a dead run, so divide the last 400 by 4, and you get the feel for every step taken by those men across the grass.
  "The world will little note nor long remember what we say here…."