virginia – Page 3 – World-Wide Matel

April 30, 2008August 3, 2020

Is This Heaven?

I got an email from my colleague in Iraq telling me that they are experiencing “the mother of all sandstorms.” Since we are still working out of tents, it is doubly bad. I go back to Iraq tomorrow. I expect that my can will be covered in dust and that I will have to shovel off my bed before I can take a nap. I don’t look forward to returning to those gritty 110+ degree days, but you can get used to anything, I guess.

That goes for the sweet as well as the bitter. I spent my penultimate morning in Virginia walking/running around my neighborhood. I probably covered around ten miles. What a pleasant place. But we have gotten used to it and don’t really appreciate what we have. If you listened to all the complaining, you would think our country was a horrible place.

I advocate the mental experiment of imagining you have lost everything. Now imagine you got it back. How happy are you? I have not lost it all but when I am in Iraq I really appreciate what we have in America. America has delivered on the promise to protect the natural rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Sometime we are just too fat and happy to recognize that we are fat and happy.

Below is part of one of my running trail

I think America is a great place. Let the dogs of cynicism howl. (Actually the word cynicism comes from the Greek word for dog. Cynics saw themselves are the guard dogs.) Some people would just call me naïve, but I have seen a lot of the world and my opinion is not based on lack of experience. In fact, I think it is the experience with different things that helps me see the wonder and beatuy in the “ordinary” things.

Being an American gives you options and choices. You get to pursue happiness. You don’t always catch it, but there are plenty of chances. I understand that there are also plenty of challenges, but overcoming challenges is the fun part of life. You cannot be happy w/o challenges. Besides on this earth is perfect. We have not achieved and never will achieve heaven on earth.

With all that in mind, I would paraphrase the exchange with Shoeless Joe Jackson on “Field of Dreams”. When he asked, “Is this heaven?” I think the response would be, “No. This is just the United States of America.”

Back to Iraq tomorrow I go. High Ho.

April 27, 2008August 3, 2020

The U.S. Marine Museum at Quantico

Above is the atrium from below.

After getting to know & admire the Marines in Iraq, I certainly had to take advantage of our new Marine Museum in the Washington area. It is at Quantico and they just finished it last year. Please click on the link for real details. I will supply only my personal impressions.

Below is the atrium from above.

Before I went to Iraq, I knew some individual Marines, mostly U.S. Embassy guards and military attaches, but I had not seen them in their own environment and I have to admit that most of what I thought came from the media, where You have the heroic “Sands of Iwo Jima” image mixed with less favorable left wing impressions . It has become a little hard for me to accurately recall how I felt before I went to live with Marines in Iraq. When I think back, I do remember that when they told me that it was a Marine COMBAT regiment and that they would issue me protective gear, I was a little apprehensive, both about being embedded with Marines and being issued protective gear. If they give you protective gear, it might be because it is dangerous enough to need it. I guess I was expecting to be in that “Sands of Iwo Jima” environment, or at least the one I saw on television news. Both were kind of scary. Fortunately, it was a lot more peaceful than that and the Marines were different too.

In the real life Marines, I found innovative problem solvers. They take pride in never really having enough resources and improvising to get the job done. But they are not merely men of action. Although some don’t like to admit it, many are true intellectuals. They are widely read and they try to adapt historical experience and theoretic knowledge to their practical problems. Their jobs give them a unique ability to test theory and the fact that lives are on the line makes them take this very seriously. There is an old saying that an intellectual is someone who will accept anything except responsibility. This is where Marines differ from the academic intellectuals who sometimes criticize them.

You can see that I have come to admire Marines, as does almost anybody who has real and sustained contact with them. They still have a practical belief in honor, virtue and honesty. Theirs is a tough life. I don’t think it is for everyone and the Marines certainly agree. I was fortunate to get to know Marines close up and I wanted to take the boys down there to share some of that too. Visiting the Museum is not much of an introduction, but it is something. Maybe the Marines could be an option for them.

The Museum has very clean architectural lines. It has a sweep like that of the Iwo Jima memorial. The exhibits are based on Marine history and actual Marines. Each of the characters in the dioramas in modeled on an actual Marine including facial features and body proportions. It is an interesting detail. BTW – we went with the free docent tour. I suggest everybody do that. Otherwise, you might not find out or pay attention to details like the one above.

I got a slightly different impression of WWII from being in Iraq and visiting the museum helped confirm that. In the last years of the war, the Japanese strategy was to try to kill as many Americans as possible. They knew they couldn’t win against the U.S., but they figured that if they killed enough Americans, they could achieve an negotiated peace. The Marines paid the biggest price, as the Japanese just fought to the death on each little piece of ultimately indefensible land. We did not give up, but we might have. People living in the past made decisions as we do today. They didn’t know they were living in the past and they did not know the outcomes, because those outcomes had yet to be decided. There is no such things as fate.

The docent talked about the famous picture of the flag raising on Mount Suribachi. People see that as the mark of victory. Actually many days of fighting followed the flag raising and three of the men in the picture were subsequently killed. There is good book and movie about what happened to the surviving men involved called “Flags of Our Fathers.”

In the36 days of fighting there were 25,851 US casualties; 6825 were killed. And Iwo Jima is a really small place, about the size of Al Asad and just about as featureless. Or put another way, it is only about 1/4 the size of Milwaukee (only the city, not the whole county). We have lots of heros in our current generation too, but fortunately we have not faced anything like that in Iraq. The “greatest generation” earned the title.

April 21, 2008August 3, 2020

2008 Tree Farmer of the Year

As I mentioned in earlier posts, one of the things I get to do as VFA Tree Farm communications director is to interview the outstanding tree farmer of the year. I learn a lot from these guys and I like to share a part of it with others through the write ups. I met this year’s winner at his farm near Hardy VA a couple days ago. This is my draft article for the “Virginia Forests” magazine.

Tom and Sallie Newbill are bucking the trend and doing what so many small forest owners dream of doing. While fragmentation is a big challenge of today’s Virginian forests as farm and timber lands are divided into smaller parcels, some almost too small for proper management, the Newbills have been bringing land together into a bigger well-managed unit. They started to assemble the pieces that became Montmorenci Tree Farms in 1967 and over the next decades built their inventory of land to include 1190 acres in Franklin County, Virginia and Halifax County NC. Their home place unites three adjoining farms in Franklin County, VA plus two others are nearby. The North Carolina place comes through Sallie’s family. That is also where the name Montmorenci originates. In 1772, Sallie’s mother’s family received a land grant in North Carolina from the King of England, in this case George III, and they called their estate Montmorenci. Sallie and Tom revived the name for their farms.

Tom Newbill was not always in the forestry business. After graduating from Virginia Tech with a degree in engineering, he took a job with Westvaco and later worked for IBM and as a principal in a computer services company in Atlanta, Georgia, where the family lived between 1966 and 1996. Sallie taught school and later spent ten years as a State Senator in the Georgia state legislature. But Tom felt the pull of the forests of home. He grew up in Franklin County around forestry operations. His uncle ran the local saw mill and Tom had a long and natural connection with forestry so he always appreciated the stable value of land and timber.

When the Newbills had opportunities to invest for their future, timberland seemed a natural choice and the woods of home a natural location. Tom was returning to his deep roots in Franklin County. His mother was a long time school teacher in the region and it seemed like half the people of the county had been her pupils. The Newbills bought their first forest land in 1968 and eventually brought together what had been five separate farms. Both Sallie and Tom inherited land from their parents, and later bought out their siblings. Each farm had its own story and its own family cemetery, where some of the biggest trees still grow. Tom and Sallie are very respectful of the cemeteries. Family members still occasionally visit, but as the years go by the visits are becoming less frequent.

Below – controlled burning is an essential tool of forestry and wildlife management. Virginia pine forests are fire dependent. Native Americans burned forests every couple of years. Small controlled fires stimulate growth and help avoid the large disasterous forest fires that result from too much fire supression.

The Newbills use some of the best forestry practices on their acreage, including planting the latest generation of trees (Tom even has a few third generation loblolly pines on his land), controlled burning, proper thinning, and use of modern chemical treatment; but he does not take the credit for understanding and employing all these techniques. Tom says that Jim Ebbert, who recently retired from the Virginia Department of Forestry, was for most practical purposes his land manager. Tom joked that he wondered how Jim could accomplish the other parts of his job while doing so much for Montmorenci Tree Farms. Another big help was Westvaco’s Rob Bell, who ran the local Cooperative Farms Management (CFM) program. Among other things, Rob helped with details of timber sales, something that the DOF does not do. Today Tom gets professional advice from both MeadWestvaco and Travis Rivers at the Virginia Department of Forestry.

Travis nominated Tom Newbill as this year’s outstanding tree farmer and says that working with someone like Tom is great for everybody involved. The Commonwealth of Virginia has a strong interest in helping responsible tree farmers like Tom and Sallie improve their land and produce timber while protecting the soils and waters of the Old Dominion. Partnerships like this make it all possible. In addition to timber production, about a quarter of Montmorenci Tree Farm’s land is devoted to stream management zones, wildlife plots, and cropland rented to a local dairy farmer. Tom actively manages the wildlife plots and turkey, deer and quail abound on the land. Water and wildlife resources are further enhanced by a five acre lake he built on the home tract. The lake supports bluegill and largemouth bass. Ducks and geese use the waters. Tom says that one particular pair of geese had been returning to his lake for six years to raise their families of goslings. In 2006, six goslings grew to maturity.

Below – Tom’s lake. I hope to make a similar one on my land.

The advantages of managing as much acreage as the Newbills’ own is the diversity it allows. Over the years, timber has been harvested from all Montmorenci tracts, mostly clear cuts, and currently the oldest plantation was established in 1978. The youngest is from 2000. This gives Tom a variety of harvest and management options, as one or more of the eight unique stands, plus SMZ or wildlife plots is always ready for some kind of treatment. Tom also gets a first hand, up close experience of the difference between growing pines in the mountains (Franklin County) as opposed to the tidewater (Halifax County, NC).

Tom’s observation is that loblolly pines in the mountains are about five years behind those of the tidewater, which is a significant difference. Franklin County lies on the edge of loblolly country. In fact, Tom’s farm is outside the natural range of the tree. One advantage of growing loblolly pines in the mountains is that there are very few “volunteer pines”. Tom has not had to do any pre-commercial thinning and when properly treated there is little competition from hardwoods or weeds. The southern pine beetle is also somewhat less of a problem in this cooler and higher environment. In the tidewater, well within the natural loblolly range, volunteer pines fill in much more profusely, as do weeds. On the other hand, properly managed pines grow significantly faster. Beyond that, the flatter topography makes thinning and other treatment operations much easier. Another more general difference between tree farming on the tidewater and in the mountains is species composition. The mountains provide good natural regeneration of poplar and there is a good local market for it.

Tom has been a member of the Virginia Forestry Association since 1974. Whether it is in the mountains or the tidewater, Tom Newbill and his family are doing an outstanding job as tree farmers. They are well and truly achieving what tree farmers strive to achieve. They are producing timber while at the same time protecting water and wildlife resources and providing places for recreation. The Virginia Tree Farm Committee congratulates the Newbill family on a job well done and a job they continue to do.

April 20, 2008August 3, 2020

Arthur Treacher’s, A&W and Other Endangered Gastronomical Delights

The only free standing Arthur Treacher’s I know about is near my house. All the others have gone the way of the dodo, except a few remnant populations in food courts along the New Jersey Turnpike. I like the original fish and chips and the offerings of Long John Silver or Red Lobster just do not measure up. Someday, maybe soon, this one will also be gone. On that day I shall mourn. BTW – Notice the pay phone, another endangered species.

A similar fate has befallen A&W stands. You can still get the root beer at the grocery store, but they are mostly gone as free standing stores with the honest draft style root beer. The only one I know about is on HWY 29 on the way out of Charlottesville. When I was a kid, my cousin Lani used to take me to swim at Racine beech. We would stop off on the way back at the A&W on Lake Drive. I think that is some kind of drive in bank these days. Near Holmen there used to be one across from the Skogan’s IGA. I could walk to that one from Chrissy’s parents’ house. It still features root beer and still even has the drive in, but it is no longer A&W.

Of course, all sorts of new chains have come to take their places. At the Taco Bell near my house, you really cannot order in English and expect your order to be correct. I guess that is why the numbered menus are so useful. You can just hold up as many fingers as the item you want to order. American high school kids used to work at these places, but now you find nothing but recent immigrants. The other day I went to Taco Bell and was amused to find some Asian immigrants in the back speaking in heavily accented Spanish. It must be challenging to be the immigrant within the immigrant community.

Duncan Donuts is doing all right, having weathered the low carbs craze of a few years back. I always preferred Duncan Donuts to the Krispy-Kreme sugar-dough balls. Krispy-Kreme sailed ahead from its southern bastions until it was wrecked on the low-carbs rocks, taking its customers and sharholders on a roller coaster ride. Duncan Donuts abides. Up in Boston, there is a Duncan Donuts on every corner. There are not quite so many around here. They do make the best coffee. I don’t like Starbucks as much. I can never figure out what all the various coffee types are called and which ones I like.

Speaking of coffee, there is an interesting relationship. Back when I was a kid, gas cost around quarter. Everybody looks back with great fondness to those prices, but everybody made a lot less money too, so it was about the same number of hours/minutes worked to fill up. But coffee used to be a nickel. Today gas costs $3.39, but if you go to Starbucks or someplace like that, coffee costs about the same as gas, so gas is a much better deal than coffee.Away from Iraq, as you see, my thoughts become more prosaic.

The great privilege of freedom, BTW, is the freedom to have prosaic thoughts. When everybody thinks serious thoughts most of the time, you know the country is in trouble.

April 19, 2008August 3, 2020

Two Cans of Coke Zero & a Salami Sandwich

We went out to Old Rag in the Shenandoah today. The weather was beautiful. Old Rag is the best hike in Virginia. In the roughly eight miles, you get lots of variety, including very interesting rock scrambles and excellent views. I don’t go on the weekends, since it gets too crowded. On weekdays it is just right.

Below – This rock has been hanging there since the last ice age, or longer, but I am always afraid it will let loose just as I am squeezing below.

Alex & Espen are in good condition these days. I used to have to drag them behind me; now I am the one being pulled along. They were making fun of me. With each jump they asked me if I was worried about breaking a hip. I have to admit that I am not as nimble as I used to be and I am more likely to shimmy down and less likely to leap. You re better off, BTW, wearing softer bottom shoes. Stiff bottomed hiking boots protect you from the rocks, but it is good to have shoes that allow a little toe dexterity.

Below – ditto this rock

Old Rag is one of my “home places”. This is my 24^th year of coming here. I first took the boys when Espen was only seven years old. They still remember that time, or at least remember the story of that time. It was a very foggy day and the low visibility gave the whole place a surreal, end of the world type look. Somebody brought a dog names Spike. We couldn’t see them, but we heard the group behind us. Now it is against the rules to bring dogs, with good reason. Dogs do not do well on the rocks and they might knock somebody off. In this case, it was Spike himself who had the problem. We heard barking and people calling to Spike. Then we heard somebody say, “Spike no.” After that, we heard Spike no more. What happened I don’t know, but I don’t think it was good.

Below – You can imagine the problems a dog might have climbing those rocks ahead of Espen. They are steeper than they appear in the picture.

My friend Doron Bard and I once hiked up here with his dog called Tuckahoe. I had to literally throw Tuckahoe up some of the rocks; Doron caught him and he did not suffer Spike’s fate, but we learned that dogs and sheer rocks don’t mix. Their little paws slip and canines just cannot climb as well as hominids.

Below – This used to be labeled “Fat man passage” but the PC crowd scrubbed it off.

Anyway, enjoy the pictures and do the hike. From Sperryville, go south on 522 to SR 601 and follow the signs. Nearby is another great hike in White Oak Canyon.

Below – How great thou art. Every time I am up in the hills, I feel newly inspired. The words of the old hymn come to mind: O Lord my God, When I in awesome wonder, Consider all the worlds Thy Hands have made; I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder, Thy power throughout the universe displayed.

Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee, How great Thou art, How great Thou art. Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee, How great Thou art, How great Thou art!

When through the woods, and forest glades I wander, And hear the birds sing sweetly in the trees. When I look down, from lofty mountain grandeur And see the brook, and feel the gentle breeze.

Fits well, doesn’t it.

I am enjoying my trip home and I have to admit the thought of returning to Iraq is not a pleasant one. But, what can you do? I often make this mental experiment. Imagine you have lost everything and then you got it back. How lucky are you? I am lucky now and will be again.

Below – For the good (non-Iraq) times.

Below – Not all is well. Over the last 20 years almost all the hemlocks have died out, victims of the hemlock whooly agelgid, introduced from Asia in 1924. Invasive species are as much of a threat to our forests and ecosystems as global warming.

Hemlocks used to line this stream. It was dark and beautiful and the shade cooled the water. There is no easy replacement for the niche formerly occupied by the hemlock in Eastern N. America.

BTW – Espen & Alex wanted to drink the water. I think the water is clean, but drinking it is not a good idea. We each had two cans of Coke Zero & a salami sandwich. What other rations can you need for a hike like this?

April 17, 2008August 3, 2020

Vienna Virginia … Again with the Running

Along my habitual running trail is a neighborhood along Glyndon Street. The little brick houses there (as above) are disappearing. People who want to live here but dislike the current housing options have been tearing them down to build bigger and more luxurious homes. These nice homes are very different from those they displace. The people who live in them are different too. In driveways next to old houses, you find Chevy pickups holding the tools of McCain supporters. In the multicar garages of the new homes are Prius with Obama bumper stickers.

It goes deeper than that. Whole Foods comes to displace Safeway. Restaurant menus change from down home to ethnic fusion. There are fewer kids playing on the streets and Virginia accent becomes less and less common in this part of Virginia. Native Virginians have long said that you probably have to go south of the Rappahannock to get to Virginia. That is becoming more uniformly true. The area is gentrifying. Lawyers and government workers are replacing the small business employees and owners.

I have mixed feelings about those things. I am a carpetbagger myself. I think shopping at Whole Foods is a waste of money, but my tastes run toward the gentrification. Those houses are too big for me, but I like to look at them in the neighborhood. (It is always better to have the cheapest house in a rich neighborhood. You get to look at your neighbors’ houses and they get to look at yours.) On the other hand, I have come to like many of the aspects of the neighborhood I had. I learned to like Old Virginia. I also don’t like the “style” of some of my new neighbors, who insist on wearing designer running suits and those tight bike pants.

I guess on balance the change is good, but my ledger does not balance the same debits and credits as most of my neighbors. For example, I like the density near the Metro. I think they should build high rises for residential and office space and lots of retail. That is the only way to get “transit oriented development.” I want my Metro area to look like Clarendon.

Local citizens’ groups try to fight density. Ironically, it is often the newest people leading the charge. They moved here to escape such things and now it is following them and they want to lock the door. I think that position is hypocritical. We can’t expect to have a Metro stop with a low rise neighborhood around it. All that means is more people drive more cars more often. A Metro stop is too important an asset to be left sitting lonely. We either build density here where commuters can use the Metro or push sprawl out onto the farms and fields in Loudon or even Harpers Ferry, from which people will commute hundreds of miles a week in their cars. For me the choice is obvious.

Above is part of an older Virginia suburb too. The development is named for Stonewall Jackson and all the streets are named for his subordinate commanders or his famous campaigns. I doubt anybody would choose those names and themes today.

Strange the things you think about when you are running. As I mentioned in the previous posts, running gives you a thinking opportunity. I didn’t say it was always profound thought.

April 16, 2008August 4, 2020

Running After the Meaning of Life

I know my title is extravagant and vainglorious, but it makes some sense to me. I have been running regularly literally my entire adult life. I began to run in along the lake trails at U of Wisconsin in 1977. It was in style back then and technology had just made regular running possible. Shoes are the key to success in running and the Nike “wafflestompers” were just coming out. W/o good shoes, you wreck your knees and few guys my age would still be able to run with the old shoe technologies.

I don’t run for exercise alone; I would never do it on a track or treadmill and I would never – every – bowdlerize the experience with an I-Pod. I run with nature, to be in the environment feeling the wind & sun, hearing the sounds, feeling the undulations of the topography and getting to know the place – and my place. You cannot really get to know anyplace until you have put your feet on it and it is important to experience different seasons and moods. Running gives you a chance to think and the movement helps you think clearly. Running (hiking too) balances me. I suppose there are other ways to do that, but it is hard to think of easier or more effective ones. Running has the side benefits of good fitness and the virtue of being cheap and universally available. You need the good shoes, so running costs around $100 a year. Other accessories are even cheaper. I still wear a sweatshirt that hails the 1987 Minnesota Twins championship. I don’t doubt that I have some clothes that are older, but they don’t have dates printed on the front. The per-use cost of these thing is vanishingly small. Everything else is free.

I have run all over the world. I really cannot say which is my favorite trail. I still look back with fondness to my “original” trails through Grant and Warnimont Parks in Milwaukee and the lake trails in Madison, but Norway on Bygdoy and Brazil, through the lush woods at St. Hilaire Park also hold strong positions. My favorite trail in Minneapolis was in Wirth Park. I loved running in Las Wolski in Krakow, with the caveat that there was significant air pollution sometimes. I ran on the old road between Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts. That was wonderful because of the surface of the road and all the historical buildings around it, but I only did it once. You see, I collect running memories the way some people collect coins or beanie babies.

Washington region has lots of possibilities. At lunchtime at work I run around the Capitol Mall. That is the “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” run. You get to go past the Capitol, Whitehouse, Jefferson, Lincoln, Washington Monument Vietnam, Korea, WWII and the Smithsonian all in around a half hour. Talk about inspiration. The W&OD trail in Virginia follows old railroad lines, so it provides a long trail w/o too many hills. It goes all the way from Washington to Purcerville in the Blue Ridge. Of course, I have never run the whole way, but I have been on many segments. The pictures are from the part of the trail nearest my house on the W&OD and the nieghborhoods around and from the Washington Mall trail. I have been running on this trail since 1997.

Below is a neighborhood of Vienna, Va near the trail. I cut down along these suburban roads. Nice houses in pretty surroundings. They completed that one just last year. They do a good job of making them fit in and seem like part of the established neighborhood. The homes are not cheap. Maybe less expensive now with the mortgage crisis, although I doubt this is a subprime place.

I have gotten a lot slower over the years. I used to repeat my miles in less than six minutes. Now I feel doing them less than nine minutes is an achievement. It still feels the same and I have a hard time believing I am moving 1/3 slower than I did before, but it has been more than thirty years. Sometimes young punks come flying past me, but I assume they are just sprinting at the end of their runs. I have replaced my running watches several times, since I figured they all must be defective, but I have been unable to find one that records my miles at anything less.

It is funny – almost paradoxical given my other attitudes re running – that I don’t like to run w/o the watch, but I really don’t care about the times. I know the distances along the W&OD because there are mile markers, but most of the places I run I don’t know how far I am going and I don’t try to find out. But over 30 years of running I have gotten the idea that it is not really running w/o the clock running. My saving trait is that I don’t write the times down and do not keep good records. I can kind of fool myself that I am still not that slow and the self deception doesn’t cause me much distress.

Only a shallow person lives a life w/o contradictions and only a fool tries to resolve them all.

August 27, 2006July 24, 2020

Lawrenceville, VA

Our tree farm is about seven miles west of Lawrenceville. The property records are in Lawrenceville and that is where we made the buying deal. The city was founded just after the Civil War. It is a pretty little town, but kind of dead. Incomes are low. Everyone was friendly to me and very informal.

A very interesting are the accents. It is not quite the usual southern accent, more like a mixture of tidewater and upland.

Here are some pictures.

Main Street. If a cute little town was close to Washington, the houses would be worth a fortune. Here they are not. I think a dog sleeping in the middle of that street would not have much to fear from traffic

August 3, 2003July 23, 2020

Fredericksburg, VA

We visited Mariza’s future school – Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg. It is a cute place (pictures below). Everything is neat, clean and well maintained. It looks exactly as you would expect a college in the middle Atlantic south to look. There are only about 5000 students at the school and all the courses are taught by professors, not teaching assistants as we used to get at the big Midwestern universities I attended. (I lost a lot of respect for teaching assistants when they gave me that job at U of M. I knew less than some of the students I evaluated.)

The city of Fredericksburg is also cute and historic. It reminds me of Alexandria. It is about as old as Alexandria, (founded in 1728), although not as aristocratic looking. It was more a working or commercial town. The city originally handled sea commerce that sailed up the Rappahannock River, until seagoing boats got too big for the shallow river harbor to accommodate. Fredericksburg is best known for the battle that took place there in December 1862. Wave after wave of Union troops attacked Confederates well entrenched behind a stone wall. Many of the deadliest battles of the Civil War took place within a short distance of the city, which made the mistake of being about equal distance between Richmond and Washington. According to what I read, about 100,000 men fell in the battles of Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Spotsylvania and the Wilderness, all within a long hike from each other. The armies passed this way many times and battles were fought over the same ground. Soldiers in 1864 had the unpleasant experience of coming across the remains of comrades from the last conflicts. It is hard to envision the carnage now on the peaceful and pretty forests and fields.

Chrissy and Mariza try to decide who is taller. I think the contest was long ago decided. This is one of the buildings on campus. Most of the others look similar – red brick and white pillars. They could use some ivy on the walls. Everything is “Gone with the Wind” style. This is a pleasant campus. I think you can walk from one end to the other in about ten minutes, so it should not be too hard for her to get to classes.

These are dorms. They are much nicer than the dumps I had to live in when I was in college. There was also a lot of snow in those days and it was colder. I had to walk many miles to class – up hill both ways. Kids today have it too easy.

A street scene in Fredericksburg. This city has more antique shops per foot than any other place I have ever seen. Parking is a problem. Fortunately, Mary Washington does not allow freshmen to have cars. The town center is about a ten-minute walk from the campus.

The stone wall. It was not so peaceful in 1862. I would not want to run up that hill while people were shooting at me. The battle took place in December. Virginia is not a particularly cold place, but it is frozen in December. Some of the injured men froze to death on the field in front of the stone wall.

July 27, 2003July 23, 2020

Manassas, VA

We got back “home” to northern Virginia yesterday. We are staying at the Courtyard Inn at Manassas battlefield. In the South they call the battles first and second Manassas. In the North they are better known as the battles of Bull Run. The Rebels tended to name the battles after nearby cities. The Yankees favored geographical features. Bull Run is a creek that runs through the battlefield. Since it is located in Virginia, the National Park Service uses the local name – Manassas. The big battle that took place in September 1862 in Maryland is called Antitem. Southerners call is Sharpsburg after the town. In Maryland, the National Park carries the Yankee name.

Alex and I went to the battlefield. First Manassas, the first big battle of the Civil War took place right about this time in 1861, so we were feeling similar weather and seeing similar sights. I thought about Wilbur McLean. He lived on what became the battlefield before the war. The Rebs commandeered his house as an HQ and it suffered severe damage. After the battle, Wilbur decided he didn’t want to be in such an action filled area, so he moved south to a peaceful little place called Appomattox. When Generals Grant and Lee came to terms in April 1865, they commandeered his parlor to sign the armistice. Trouble just follows some people..

Peaceful farmland of N. Virginia, site of the first battle of the Civil War. It was hazy. On clear days you can see the Blue Ridge. This part of Virginia is one of my favorite regions in the world. It is not breathtaking, but it is green and pleasant. During the Civil War there were not so many trees, as you can see from old pictures. Horses needed pasture.

“There stands Jackson like a stonewall. Rally behind the Virginians!” This is the place where Thomas Jackson, later always called stonewall, stopped a Union victory at first Manassas. I don’t suppose he was as muscular as the statue implies. The terrain is rolling and large numbers of troops can be concealed in the undulations. The Yankees were surprised when they ran into the Rebs behind the hill. Jackson was an instructor at VMI in Lexington. He studied the campaigns of Napoleon and believed in the bayonet. He had trained his men well in its use. The Civil War was a time of technological change, as the rifle was replacing the smooth bore musket. Bayonets and even pikes were still effective weapons at the start of the war and both sides were fond of the charge. Unfortunately, the longer range of the rifle was making this a deadly – if heroic – anachronism. The next year, at Fredericksburg, not far from here, the Union spent many thousands of lives charging entrenched Southern positions. The Union paid them back in kind at Gettysburg in 1863. Southerners boasted of Pickett’s charge for the next fifty years, but it was a mistake.