I'm a believer in the idea that we can be connected to a place even on first visit. That happenings leave something behind and sometimes we can feel that power, if we are open to it. Some will say that what I'm about to describe is indeed a power, but that only power is imaginiation. I think there is something more, although I certainly grant that my personal experiences are fueled by imagination and by my knowledge that there is something extraordinary that happened at these places.
I'll start with the least dramatic, for me in the moment, of the four places I'm going to talk about. They are also the two places where you would probably find the most other accounts of these kind of feelings, not that any of my four places aren't special to many besides me. I'm deliberately choosing well-known and public places to talk about, not little corners where the feelings are only about what I personally experienced. I have those too, but the shared experience with others may very well be a large part of why these four affected me so.
The first two places are ones of key historical importance, so their power is broader than just what I felt. I am talking about Antietam and Gettysburg. Places of great bloodshed and family tragedy for so many, places where events shaped an entire nation's forward movement in the wake of what happened there. For me, the immediate and obvious effect to an outside observer is perhaps ironic considering what occurred here. Because the first effect on me is quiet, and peacefulness. Inside, I am certainly not at peace standing on these pieces of bloodstained earth. Looking out over The Cornfield, or standing in the sunken road known as Bloody Lane, my mind is anything but quiet. But the effect on my external projections is quiet. A silence I consider respectful, broken only by my telling my children why these simple vistas are so horrifying and troubling to my interior.
My son has told me he swore he watched me flinch while standing behind the stone wall at Gettysburg, near the copse of trees that was the visual target for the men making the ill-fated assault that has come to be known as Pickett's Charge. As though I were trying to avoid the ghost of a long vanished minnie ball on it's muderous path.
And the reference to ghosts is appropriate. For even though my only visit to the battlefield outside Sharpsburg and my multiple visits to the historic fields in Pennsylvania have come on fairly quiet and temperate summer days, I have felt the chill passing of spectral memory in both locations. I can SEE men falling in the Cornfield, I can hear the report of musket and cannon. At Gettysburg, I watched waves of men cut down by cannister as they attempted to reach the lines where boys in blue instead of gray awaited them. Brutal suicide in service of their country. While some changes in circumstances might have altered the result of what those boys did on the third day, the great loss of life was assured from the moment the men in butternut and gray stepped out from the trees and began their long march in the open across the gentle upswell towards the ridge.
In those places my knowledge of the history certainly loads more weight upon what I feel, and I have wondered if a visitor who was unaware of that history might not feel differently than I do, but my personal belief is that there is an atmosphere born of what happened that affects even the unaware. No one needs to tell visitors to be respectful in those places. It just happens. No one needs to tell boys on vacation that this is not the place to throw the frisbee or play tag and whoop and holler.
My third location also feels the weight of history, and history that is related to those other two. I have long been a student of the bloodiest and most internally destructive time in our nation's story, and as such I have also long been a great admirer of the man I consider our greatest President, Abraham Lincoln. th third location I wish to mention is Ford's Theatre.
You can't go into the presidential box. You can't sit in the chair where Lincoln was sitting when he felt the sharp pain in the back of his skull just before he lost his final awareness of this world. You can stand across from it and perhaps imagine that you hear the repeat of the gunpowder through the laughter from the punch line that Booth planned to use to cover his deed. Perhaps smell the powder or see a small puff of white smoke. But that's not the specific place in the theatre that brought me shakes and makes me wonder if ghosts are real. There are two spots that most affected me emotionally. One is not actually in the theatre, but across the street, the room in what was then a boarding house where Lincoln finally breathed his last the next morning and where Secretary Stanton announced, "Now he belongs to the ages...". The spot in the theatre is one where I was told John Wilkes Booth stood and waited to slip into the box to do his dastardly deed. That spot felt so filled with potential. If he had turned away, rethinking his actions, how different our world might have been. I am one of those who feel there could hardly have been a worse person to lead us into reconstruction than Andrew Johnson. I think the survival of Lincoln into the post war years would have had a dramatic affect on the direction of the country. Perhaps I am wrong, perhaps the vitriol was so great that even Lincoln's leadership could not have prevented the backslide in the south and the apathy in the north about the conditions suffered by the negro race. But I can see at least the possibility of a turbulent time that none the less keeps Jim Crow from ever existing, where there is no need for a civil rights movement in the middle twentieth century, of the institutionalized racism being confronted in it's infancy and of us growing into a better nation.
The last of my four locations is the only one where you can't nail down an occurrance and say THIS happened HERE. It's a place that has grown into a memorial, but there are no statues or tour groups. It's Strawberry Fields. Not the orphanage in Liverpool, but the small section of Central Park near the apartment of John Lennon and Yoko Ono. There is a mosaic, a path through some trees and a couple of small meadows. It's exactly the kind of place that those of us who loved John from afar think he would have enjoyed.
And it's the place on the list where I had the most visible reaction personally. When I stood in front of the "Imagine" mosaic for the first time, I just completely lost it. Tears streamed down my face and sobs shook my shoulders. I was transported back to being 14 and hearing the unbelievable news that my idol was dead. It was as though I could see him standing on the other side, smiling and inviting people to live in a more caring and rational world, just before he was stolen away from it.
I grew up with the Beatles. My mom's favorite was Paul and my Dad's was George. I own both of their copies of "Meet The Beatles" to this very day. Their music was the soundtrack of my childhood and John, specifically, was the man I grew up thinking was a great example of what a modern man could be. Artist and visionary, with visible flaws that I felt did nothing to diminish his greatness but only added to it, because he could be so wrong and yet inspire so much good.
Later, after I became composed enough to move on, my companion and I walked out into the streets of New Yor and I stood outside the alley where he was shot and again the tears flowed, although less visibly and more silently.
A man isn't suppossed to react that way in public, not even now when we have swept away many (but not all) of the repressive ideas about what a man should be. But I should note that no one looked askew at me that day. There were no questioning gazes, no noticing and then quickly looking away, no staring. I believe it's because people that were there understood. Many, if not all, of them probably idetified with what I was obviously feeling.
I have not been back to that part of Central Park and I'm sure that my reaction the next time will not be so harshly obvious. But I have no regrets.
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