Grand Visions

Some sights stay with you forever, just as real as the moment they happened. For me, one was the first time I saw Brenda. I know. I know. I’ve described many times how she sashayed by and grabbed my heart as she passed, never letting it go.

Another was the time I was enjoying a brief dalliance with the “sport” of scuba diving. My friend Doug Sisco and I booked a trip to the Cayman Islands where, on one dive, we traversed a short, winding cave to exit directly over the “Great Cayman Wall,” staring down into tree miles of darkening blue water, suspended above it like cosmic interlopers. Oh my.

Oh, and speaking of blue ocean water, I can’t forget the sight of the South China Sea from the airplane window as I left another place. I only mention it because I dreamed last night that they sent me back, the first reoccurrence of that dream in a long time. I think that’s a compensating dream after an aggravating day, my mind saying, “It could be worse.”

There was, going back a bit further, my first glimpse of Old Main, soaring above the “Mother of Mothers” as viewed from my family’s car on old Highway 71 coming into Fayetteville.

I can’t forbear mentioning one other sight that never fails to stir my blood. It was back in the 1980s I think. My old friend, running buddy, and legal mentor Argumento deMinimus, the Harvard-Bred lawyer was spending two weeks of Army Reserve training at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. Brenda and I flew up to visit ere he left. At some point, someone said, “Hey kids, let’s go to the Gettysburg Battlefield.”

Off we went. Arriving there, we found ourselves a little disoriented by the traffic and disorder. It’s a big place, the battlefield park. It is immaculately preserved, due largely to the initial efforts of one of the battles’ self-aggrandizing jerks, Union General Daniel Edgar Sickles. Sickles nearly blew the victory and then spent the rest of his life trying to destroy the career of General George Meade who whipped Robert E. Lee to a standstill at the three-day battle and was never forgiven for the insult, either by Abraham Lincoln or the writers of history.

Anyway, we decided to advantage ourselves of the first available parking place and then become oriented. This we started to do, wandering through a small entryway and heading up a slight incline toward the visitor center. As we walked, a small white building appeared on our right. “Hey,” I said, “that looks familiar.” Nobody listened. They just walked on up the hill. “Hey,” I said, “isn’t that General Meade’s Head … ?”

I didn’t finish, for I reached the top of the ridge where the other two already stood, transfixed. I froze as well. There we stood, at what they call “The high-water mark of the Confederacy," where from a line of battle a mile away, three divisions of Confederate troops had marched inexorably to doom against a Union force of men and cannons arrayed along the ridge where we stood.

I tell you it was really something. It makes chills run up my spine just to recall it. I have no truck with either the Confederacy or the cause for which it stood. I must admit, however, to recalling, at that very moment, the immortal words of William Faulkner, penned in his last novel, Intruder in the Dust. Remember what he wrote?

“For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it’s all in the balance, it hasn’t happened yet, it hasn’t even begun yet, it not only hasn’t begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and Armistead and Wilcox look grave yet it’s going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn’t need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose than all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago.”

Neither a charge, nor Pickett's...
His widow promulgated that myth.
It was an assault, an insane one,
by nearly 15,000 brave, but
misguided, men and stopped
by other brave men in epic battle.