Hey y’all. How’s everyone doing out there? Another week has come and gone sheltered in place here in Washington D.C. It’s had its ups and downs, like every week has, but I’m feeling a lot more positive this week than I was last week. I’ve gotten out of the house more (though not as much as I need to be), and have gotten back to playing my guitar and avoiding the news as much as possible. As July begins, it continues to heat up here in our Nation’s Capital, and 90+ degree days with high humidity are prevalent in the forecast. I’m getting up earlier to get my walk in before the heat really takes hold of the day and trying to get outside in the evening as well when it cools off again. Meanwhile I’ve been eating a lot of watermelon because really is there anything better than cold watermelon in the middle of a heat wave? I can say that before this summer I only knew how to cut a watermelon into slices. Now I’ve watched some videos on the subject and can cut a whole one into chunks pretty easily (seriously, there are some fascinating methods out there). I’ve also found that making watermelon balls, covering them in vodka and freezing them are quite the treat! In short, despite the heat it’s been a decent week and watermelon is delicious.
Thursday was an interesting day. As a follow-up to our Tuesday trip to Monocacy Battlefield, we wanted to go and visit Fort Stevens, the site of the only Civil War battle fought inside Washington D.C. After the 1864 Battle of Monocacy, Confederate General Jubal Early trained his sights on the Nation’s Capital. Thankfully, the delay at Monocacy had allowed reinforcements to be brought north from Richmond in steamships and the Confederates were turned out. President Lincoln was there that day and it was the only time that a sitting president has come under enemy fire during a war.
Having been rebuilt by the Civilian Conservation Corps during the New Deal and now administered by the National Park Service, Fort Stevens is the only one of our many forts which actually looks like a fort as most have been turned into parks and receded into the landscape. There isn’t much to it, but it’s only 10 minutes from our house so it was an easy place to visit. After wandering around the fort, we headed up Georgia Avenue to Battlefield National Cemetery, where 40 of the Union soldiers who had been killed during the battle are buried. With just an acre of property in the heart of the city, it is one of the smallest National Cemeteries in the country, and is really quite interesting to visit…
The photos below come from a recent visit to Monocacy National Battlefield Park just south of Frederick Maryland - site of the “Battle that Saved Washington”. Civil War Chronicles will trace the major battles of the Eastern Theater of the war through photos and brief histories.
The Battle of Monocacy is a bit of an outlier in that it wasn’t really a major battle of the Eastern Theater of the Civil War, but a minor one with major implications. While Generals Grant and Lee were engaged in the final grappling of the war around Petersburg, south of Richmond, Lee wanted a distraction to pull some of Grant’s army away. He attempted this by sending General Jubal Early to go on the offensive and attack into Union territory, the third Confederate invasion of the North during the war. Early was sent with 15,000 men to threaten Washington D.C. and, if possible, to raid the prison camp at Point Lookout and free the Confederate soldiers being held there. Lee also knew that a presidential election was looming and he hoped that another invasion of the North might bring about the defeat of Lincoln and a favorable end to the long and brutal war.
Early’s army crossed the Potomac River into Maryland on the 4th of July, 1864 and marched past Sharpsburg, the site of the Battle of Antietam two years earlier. You can’t march 15,000 infantry troops across a state without anyone noticing, and word quickly got to General Lew Wallace who was then the Union commander in Baltimore. Wallace gathered what men he could muster and quickly set off towards the west. Thinking quickly, Wallace decided to head towards Monocacy Junction, just south of Frederick, Maryland. He didn’t know where the Confederates were headed, but this point would allow his troops to defend the Georgetown Pike to Washington, the National Road to Baltimore and the Baltimore and Ohio Rail Line. If he got there first, he could strategically place his men along the Monocacy River and defend all three of those routes which crossed the river at that point. He arrived in time to dig in and establish a line of defense.
Hey y’all, I’m not going to lie, it’s been a tough week for me personally. I think this whole process has brought waves of emotion for us all, and I’m grateful that I have had peaks in the midst of it, but this week was definitely more of a valley. And don’t get me wrong, valleys can be beautiful places, you just don’t see the sun as often when you’re in them.
Last week I wrote about the permanent closure of the tour company I’ve worked for through much of my adult life. It’s a company which was founded three years before I was born and which I guess I expected to be there, in one form or another, indefinitely into the future. The company and I had found a good rhythm, one which worked really well for us both. For me, it allowed me to do something which I enjoy and which I’m good at and which allowed me to travel to beautiful places, hike often and practice my photography. In return, my company got a true professional career guide who could work independently and be gone for months at a time with minimal supervision while still producing high quality tours and satisfied customers. I could make enough money in a few months to pursue my other interests during the rest of the year and I think it’s been a pretty fair and balanced relationship. While there are other companies out there and I know that my experience will land me a job in the future, it won’t have the same shared history for me. Couple that with the uncertainty of the when’s and where’s and it has left me less upbeat about the future than I usually am. And that, for me, is a problem. If you’ve been following this blog long enough, you know that I suffer from depression and anxiety and that travel helps me cope with both. In the past, when things have gotten bad for me, I’ve inevitably been able to look optimistically towards the future and find some point in my mind where things are okay and things are better. And even when I didn’t necessarily think I would be going back to guiding, it was always there as an option and thinking about a fresh season in a new van could always bring me out of a funk. While I know that somewhere out there is a new season with a new company or perhaps a better option which I haven’t even considered before because I haven’t been forced to look for it, it’s taken a few days of mourning to reach that point.
In addition, it’s been a tough few weeks of watching the news and social media with everything which has been happening in the U.S. I find myself, as usual, torn when it comes to so many things. Over the last 20 years, I’ve traveled to all corners of the U.S. and met wonderful people everywhere I went of all shapes, sizes, shades, ages and backgrounds. Americans, generally speaking, are kind, hardworking people struggling to find a path forward and doing the best they can.
