I don’t know what I expected — in fact, I’m not sure I even had a preconceived notion of how Gettysburg would look — but the actual place surprised me. The battlefield is huge, for one thing, probably several square miles across (although I admit to being lousy at estimating distances; my dad has long been frustrated by my tendency to think three inches look like one of them). I guess I must’ve imagined it as a modest hay field like the ones I remember growing up. It turned out to be a fan-shaped plain bounded by two ridges (well, they call them ridges, but they’re not dramatic vanes of rock bursting out of the earth like the ridges around here; they’re actually more like grassy linear hills). And I also figured it would be empty and solemn, with nothing but strands of grass to catch the fickle breeze. Instead, the place is lousy with monuments, statues, and cannons, and every rock where a general sat or rested a boot has a marker on it.
But that gives the wrong impression, makes the place sound vulgar or crass, and it’s really not. It is, in fact, beautiful. The whole area is, with rolling hills and thick woodsy patches and more green than Utah will ever see, short of an atomic explosion in a local paint factory. I found it quite soothing, actually, even with the knowledge of what happened on that field 145 years ago, of how many men lost their lives in three days of brutal fighting and how much blood must have soaked into that soil.
I’ve been wracking my brain trying to figure out how to shape a narrative out of my quickie Pennsylvania adventure, but the fact is, there just wasn’t much of a story there, so I think what I’ll do instead of telling a story is just offer up a few highlights. In bullet-point form! Because everyone loves bullet-points…
