How do you start a life change? Is it like a race? After prep or training, stretching, lined up, waiting for the gun. Pop. You are off. Similarly, how do you finish? Is it crashing through the tape, collapsing, exhausted, dry heaving, hearing manly comments, \u201cBro. He left it all on the field, man!\u201d? Or do you Hollywood, strut about calmly. Hands on hips. Controlled deep breathing. Calm, while you are sweat soaked and your lactated thigh muscles feel like they are about to Elvis and shiver beyond your control. Nah. It\u2019s probably neither. Destination unknown. It\u2019s the journey, not the arrival.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Gettysburg, PA with its battlefield, was to be my start; Montgomery, AL with the National Memorial to Peace and Justice, was to be the end. West Point prefaced Gettysburg and Historic Blakeley State Park bookended Montgomery. Neither location expected. Each making the transition or conclusion easier.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
West Point, surprisingly, introduced the Civil War. Close to three hundred graduates served as generals for the Union and half that number for the CSA. I had known of Lee, but not the backgrounds of others like Beauregard (whom I really thought had been a character in a Lost Cause novel) or Longstreet (another potential protagonist\u2019s name). In retrospect, it opens the question of why did those fighting for the CSA choose to abandon their oath to the US Constitution? Especially, how did Lee, who had been superintendent at West Point, resolve his personal conflict? Sam Houston, then governor of Texas, refused the oath, also required of governmental officeholders, and was removed. He had argued for the Union, stipulated that Texas, if seceded, should revert to its original status as an independent republic, and believed the Confederate States would lose any war.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Blakeley, or to give its full name, Historic Blakeley State Park, represents a great road-find in pointing the hood of the car and following its lead. The park is a large preserve on the bank of the Tensasaw River, on the east side of Mobile Bay away from Mobile itself on the western boundary. Like my West Point campsite, I sheltered the van in the woods. Only here there was no rock, and the trees were tall southern pines whose needles carpeted the site, then my windshield, then my camp chair, and Wilson, if he snoozed too long in one place. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Blakeley\u2019s historic designation comes from two sites in the park, the historic town from the early 1820s planned to be the center of commerce for Mobile Bay and to link Atlanta to the gulf coast and the West. Despite early success as a deep-water port, dredging to provide access and the subsequent development of the port of Mobile caused the town to never reach its ambitions. It was abandoned. The town is remembered with framed silhouettes of the original buildings that you can walk through \u2014 an interesting recreation of a ghost town. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
More importantly, the park preserves the site of the Battle of Fort Blakeley, one of the last Civil War battles, fought on April 9, 1865, the day Lee surrendered at Appomattox. Unlike Gettysburg, Shiloh, or Vicksburg, this site is bereft of memorials mounted by combatant units, has marginal park signage, and few viewpoints. It is a battlefield at peace. The preservation is meaningful – the earthen ramparts remain, the cleared fields for field-of-fire remain cleared, hurdles and stick baffles remain. You have a sense of the battlefield, how the attackers charged against the defended positions, how hurdles were to hobble and make men stand tall in the face of defensive fire. But it is a peace. The battlefield and interpretive apparatus are not trying to tell a story. They are not trying to make history. Being spare, we get to figure out what happened, we get to side with the defense or the assault, we get to write a story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This unremarkable battlefield, from an unremembered battle, at the war\u2019s end makes a fitting conclusion to my tour. I am still puzzling over questions from early on. But I have personal clarity \u2014 maybe not answers, but something of an understanding. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
How do you start a life change? Is it like a race? After prep or training, stretching, lined up, waiting for the gun. Pop. You are off. Similarly, how do you finish? Is it crashing through the tape, collapsing, exhausted, dry heaving, hearing manly comments, \u201cBro. He left it all on the field, man!\u201d? Or […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-440","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ww-on-the-wroad"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/omp.space\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/440","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/omp.space\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/omp.space\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/omp.space\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/omp.space\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=440"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/omp.space\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/440\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":512,"href":"https:\/\/omp.space\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/440\/revisions\/512"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/omp.space\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=440"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/omp.space\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=440"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/omp.space\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=440"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}