Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Unfortunately, I lost the station soon after dropping Hal off and spent the rest of the morn-
ing searching for it without success, and eventually ended up listening to a competing pro-
gram in which an ear specialist gave advice to callers with hearing difficulties. Later there
was a woman whowas an expert ondealing with intestinal worms in dogs.Asthis princip-
ally consisted of giving the dogs a tablet to make the worms die, it was not long before I
felt as if I were something an expert on the matter too. And so the morning passed.
IdrovetoGettysburg,wherethedecisivebattleoftheAmericanCivilWarwasfoughtover
three days in July 1863. There were over 50,000 casualties. I parked at the visitors' center
and went inside. It contained a small, ill-lit museum with glass cases containing bullets,
brass buttons, belt buckles and that sort of thing, each with a yellowed typed caption be-
side it saying, “Buckle from uniform of 13th Tennessee Mountaineers. Found by Festus T.
Scrubbins, local farmer,and donated byhis daughter,Mrs.Marienetta Stumpy.” There was
precious little to give you any sense of the battle itself. It was more like the gleanings of a
treasure hunt.
The only truly interesting thing was a case devoted to the Gettysburg Address, where I
learned that Lincoln was invited to speak only as an afterthought and that everyone was
taken aback when he accepted. It was only ten sentences long and took just two minutes
to deliver. I was further informed that he gave the address many months after the battle. I
had always imagined him making it more or less immediately afterwards, while there were
still bodies lying around and wraiths of smoke rising from the ruins of distant houses and
people like Festus T. Scrubbins poking around among the twitching casualties to see what
useful souvenirs they could find. The truth, as so often in this life, was disappointing.
I went outside and had a look at the battlefield, which sprawls over 3,500 acres of mostly
flat countryside, fringed by the town of Gettysburg with its gas stations and motels. The
battlefield had the great deficiency common to all historic battle fields. It was just coun-
tryside. There was nothing much to distin_ guish this stretch of empty fields from that one.
You had to take their word for it that a great battle was fought there. There were a lot of
cannons scattered about, I'll give them that. And along the road leading to the site of Pick-
ett's charge, the attack by Confederate troops that turned the tide of battle in the Union's
favor,manyoftheregimentshaderectedobelisksandmonumentstotheirownglory,some
of them very grand. I strolled down there now. Through my dad's old binoculars I could
clearly see how Pickett's troops had advanced from the direction of the town, a mile or so
to the north, sweeping across the Burger King parking lot, skirting the Tastee Delite Drive-
In and regrouping just outside the Crap-o-Rama Wax Museum and Gift Shop. It's all very
sad.Tenthousandsoldiersfellthereinanhour;twooutofeverythreeConfederatesoldiers
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