Adam's Ambles

The Great Mid-Atlantic Roadtrip, Ch. 12

You know a town has an identity crisis when it sports a Confederate monument down the road from a Nepalese/Tibetan buffet.

But to my surprise, I guess I like some identity crises. I’ve been conditioned as a Marylander not to like Charlottesville, Virginia. It is the home of UVA, the University of Maryland ’s biggest rival. It’s the cradle of the Virginian aristocracy that always manages to look down its nose at us Old Line Staters. It’s a way better college town than College Park (UMaryland’s surrounding city) too; “C-ville” is full of theaters, restaurants, cafes, bars and music venues. College Park has Ratsie’s and a Wawa’s.

Dammit, I couldn’t help liking Charlottesville. On an early evening in spring the main promenade was overflowing with attractive young people, couples and professors sipping wine and coffee under a blanket of perfect blue weather. Watching them all (and later, the drunken frat-fest that is UVA at night), I very, very badly missed school in London.

I’ve been trucking down the Shenandoah Valley since, a beautiful slice of Virginia that cuts between the Appalachian and Blue Ridge Mountains. Besides being the prettiest part of the state, the valley is filled with all-girl universities: Sweet Briar, Mary Baldwin, Hollins. But this area was also almost exclusively settled by uber-religious, fiercely independent Scots-Irish frontiersman, ripped from the marches of England and Ireland and resettled here, the westward border of colonial America. Ever since then the locals have been suspicious of government, proud of their homesteads and single-family farms, and protective as hell of their liberties. Which means guns. Flipping through the valley’s radio stations, I was always caught between Christian rock or an advertisement for firearms dealers. They’re big on God and Guns here.

So you wouldn’t think one of my first stops was to watch Shakespeare in tiny Staunton , VA. Life throws you curveballs; the American Shakespeare Company is based here, working out of the cozy, impressive Blackfriars Playhouse, the world’s only replica of the original Blackfriars Theatre used by the Bard. I watched “Midsummer’s Nights Dream,” last night, a seriously refreshing injection of culture after a week or so of driving around the Virginia backwoods.

The next morning I dropped by the birthplace of Woodrow Wilson and the museum dedicated in his name. At the entrance, I tried to get the reduced entry ticket by saying I was a student.

“Where at?” asked the ticket lady. “I’m doing graduate work in diplomacy and international studies at University of London.” She perked up, said “Oh excellent,” called over the museum director, and before you could say “Wilsonian democracy laid the groundwork for international Civil Society,” I was being introduced to Arthur S. Link III , documentary editor of the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library.

Arthur was a youngish guy, and I think we both felt a little awkward at out rushed introduction. “Feel free to ask anything you want about Wilson’s contributions to diplomacy,” said the director, walking off. Arthur and I stood staring at each other for a long half minute. “Come upstairs,” he said finally. “We can look at some of our archived material on the third floor.”

Inside a cramped office was an ancient wooden lockbox and golf clubs, diaries, journals, and official papers that belonged to one of Wilson’s contemporaries. On an opposite shelf were 69 huge volumes, the official Papers of Woodrow Wilson — compiled, I learned, by Arthur’s grandfather, the original Arthur S. Link.

“My dad was a doctor, though,” he said. Seeing as I was supposed to be studying for my upcoming diplomacy exams, I started asking Arthur about Wilson and the League of Nations, the president’s pet project and failed forerunner of the United Nations.

“It probably was an idea of Sir [Edward] Grey, the British Foreign Minister. But Wilson was the one who really ran with it at the Paris Peace Conference,” Arthur said. He had seen some evidence of the seed of a Leage of Nations idea in Wilson’s early letters and journals. But it was the aftermath of World War I that gave the president a chance to market the idea to a world reeling from bloodshed.

“I think at the time the other European leaders were wrapped up in getting terriotial indemnities. Wilson didn’t have a dog in that fight. He was trained as a lawyer, though, and always believed in the rule of law. So I think the idea of an international legal body really appealed to him. He also,” Arthur added after a minute, “probably thought of it as a divine mission.”

Wilson wasn’t the first (and certainly wasn’t the last) American politician to believe his policies were inspired by God. The son of a Presbyterian minister, the president always kept God close to his sleeve, and his Southern Christian background seemed to always be creeping into his politics. “Wilson grew up in the Reconstruction South,” said Arthur, referencing the period when the old Confederacy was rebuilt from the Civil War’s ashes. Arthur thought that was partly why Wilson pushed for less German reparations after the Great War — he had witnessed the rise of “Lost Cause” vicitmization-think and seen how over-triumphant posturing on the part of a war’s victors could enflame losers’ bitterness.

Wilson was also an avowed anti-colonialist, who was apparently deeply touched by $200 willed to him by a dying Filipino leper who had settled in California. But he was also, as Arthur said, “A man of his times,” who insisted on segregating white and black units during World War I and thought the French army allowed its African units too many freedoms. As Presbyterian clergy, Wilson’s family had not owned slaves — but they did lease them as church property.

As for Wilsonian anti-colonialism, was that based on a true belief in the rights of colonized peoples, or was it shrewd realpolitik? After all, the less colonies Europe possesed, the more powerful America would become. “That’s a good question,” Arthur said, and by way of an answer added, “and I’m a cynic.” But he also thought the League of Nations concept was at least sincere, and not devised with the idea of the US acting as Team America.

“This is a gut feeling, but I think Wilson saw the League coming,” from before World War I, Arthur said. “But I don’t think he saw American becoming world policeman. He did want us to take our place among theworld powers though.” Then again, Wilson kept the country out of World War I to win re-election in 1916.

Actually, Wilson sounded like one big contradiciton to me. As governor of New Jersey, he ran as a Progressive, America’s early-20th century watered down version of socialism. Yet as a national presidential contender he responded to Theodore Roosevelt’s leftwing “New Nationalism” with laissez-faire “New Freedom,” saying at the time, “Now here is the choice: on the one hand, accepted and regulated monopoly, on the other, hard regulated competition which will prevent monopoly.”

He objected to literacy tests that kept new immigrants from voting and vetoed bills that restricted immigration, yet he initially opposed federal child labor laws. He supported women’s suffrage, but not black voting rights. And while he always opposed European colonialism — part of his reasoning for not joining the Allies in 1916 was protest against the brutal British crackdown on the Irish Easter Rising — his adminsitration oversaw military interventions in Mexico, Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Cuba.

Finally, I could see via primary documents and otherwise the very different era that was the early-20th century. The presidency seemed practically a monarchy; “There is a new First Lady of the Land! All society is rejoicing!” read one newspaper on Wilson’s second marriage (his first wife died in 1914).

But it was a newly dangerous time too; posted in one room of the museum was a warning, posted by the German embassy in an American newspaper, against traveling by sea around Britain; “…travelers sailing in the war zone on ships of Great Britain or her allies do so at their own risk.”

A good if dated example, I thought, of a “function of embassies,” one of my potential exam questions this May.

The Great Mid-Atlantic Roadtrip, Ch. 11

The parking complex dug into the grounds of the Virginia Commonwealth University Medical Center in Richmond is one of the most disastrous public spaces I’ve ever driven through. You have to double back, drive up, and then flip under a labyrinth of one way roads and detour avenues before you reach the massive concrete garage. It was painfully slow finding a space, and I was just trying to get to a museum. God knows how frustrating the process was for the vast majority of drivers trying to get to the hospital.

I, on the other hand, was late to meet Megan Miller, media flak for the Museum of the Confederacy. It, and the former Confederate White House, are both located in the shadow of VCU Med Center. The twin grand icons of the Confederacy are eclipsed by the massive superstructure of hospital facilities and crowds of doctors and patients representing Richmond’s racial milieu: whites, blacks, South and East Asians, and Hispanics.

Richmond, former capital of the Confederacy, now seems like a poster-city for melting pot America. Interracial couples are everywhere. The Virginia Historical Society is just down the road from the Elegba African Folklore and Heritage building. The city has one of the most vibrant black communities I have seen outside of DC/Baltimore. In Jackson Ward, a historically black district, I bloated myself on a “fish boat” at Croakers, soul food’s answer to fish and chips: a plate of fried whiting fillets smothered in hot sauce, onions and peppers, with cheese grits and cornbread on the side.

That said, the attractive veneer of diversity cracks soon enough into some ugly income disparities. Jackson Ward and other black neighborhoods, from what I could see, were pretty depressed compared to upmarket white areas on the East and West ends of the center. And just how race, memorials and memory intersect seems like a perennial issue. In the mid-90s Monument Avenue, the grand public parade of Richmond, lay at the center of a New South storm of controversy. At issue: whether to erect a statue of Arthur Ashe, black tennis player, philanthropist and native son (who hated his hometown) at the end of a promenade of statues dedicated to Confederate heroes: Jeb Stuart, Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, etc. In the end, “after much controversy” according to the guide given out by the city tourism bureau — a description that stood in stark relief to the pamphlet’s otherwise bloodless, inoffensive language — the statue went up. I drove by it, Ashe in his tennis shorts standing astride one of the wealthiest, whitest neighborhoods in the city.

That was the first of my Richmond surprises. Megan Miller was the second. I’ll be honest; I expected the staff at the Museum of the Confederacy to fit my stereotype of angry reactionaries a little more than the perfectly bland, un-accented PR cliché who greeted me in the museum lobby.

“Here’s a press packet, and in an hour you can meet Dean, who’ll take you on a tour group of the Confederate White House,” she said with a drawl — not a Southern one, but the monotone drawl of the “like, so, whatever,” MTV generation. Behind Megan was a bloodstained handkerchief used as a tourniquet on Stonewall Jackson, splotched with dark copper spots. “And we’re happy to validate your parking for you,” Megan added. I noticed one of the women working the ticket booth had the Great Seal of Virginia tattooed on her arm. I made out the motto, ‘Sic Semper Tyranis,’ or “Thus to all Tyrants,” which John Wilkes Boothe supposedly shouted after he shot Abraham Lincoln. A black delivery man entered with a package and exchanged a friendly greeting and some “how’s your family” banter with another ticket collector.

I spent 40 minutes perusing the museum’s small but impressive collection, mainly of personal effects of Confederate soldiers, from the most famous generals to no-name grunts. In fact the whole affair seemed more like an attic than a museum; there wasn’t much of a thematic thread to the main exhibit, just a timeline of battles and their associated hats, boots, swords and guns. Most of the pieces, I later learned, were donated by the descendants of Confederate veterans. Other special exhibitions put more of a traditional emphasis on context and explanation — on Confederate Art and the Confederacy’s place in Virginia’s history, for example — but the main gallery was like looking at grandpa’s war stories in an air-conditioned cubicle.

At 2pm I met Dean Knight, a tall, slim Richmond native who also had no accent to speak of. He was psyched when he learned about my Lonely Planet connection; in the ‘90s he had worked in a London hostel and guided people around the city using LP books. The supervisor of the Confederate White House was young, friendly, and apparently the opposite of a Civil War buff growing up.

“I was never that interested in it as a kid,” he said, after showing me the reception room of Jefferson Davis, where the Confederate president dealt with the notoriously un-cooperative politicians of the CSA. “But I wanted to learn more about it and my city, so I got a job here.”

He gestured at two crossed flags over a mantelpiece placed under a painting of George Washington; the latter was considered a founding father by the Confederacy in much the same way he is regarded in America today. The rebelling states thought they were following in Washington’s footsteps by severing political bonds with the North; the official seal of the Confederacy was a mounted Washington over the motto “Deo Vindice,” ‘With God as Our Defender.’

I asked Dean about the flags. One was the standard we all associate with the Confederacy, the Stars and Bars ‘X’, but supplanted on a white field. The other flag was a banner that looked like the American flag with two stripes and 11 stars.

“Those were the two national flags of the Confederate States of America, but that one, “ Dean said, pointing at the 11 star flag, “looked too much like the regular American flag. Troops couldn’t make out differences between the two in battle. And the other one had too much white; it looked like a surrender flag when it drooped.”

So why, I asked, was the flag we associate with the Confederacy the infamous Stars and Bars?

“I don’t know. It’s a striking design, I guess. But also probably because that’s the banner people associate with the Army of Northern Virginia, Lee’s flag.” The Stars and Bars was the war flag of the CSA, and the memory of the Confederacy, after all, is one of its fights and generals, not its politicians and state structures.

I asked Dean about this, the way the museum and a lot of Confederate memorializing seemed to be based around claiming a personalized memory rather than a historical whole. I figured this was because remembering the Confederacy as a whole meant remembering the basis of its social system: slavery. But Dean pointed out another factor: the founding of the museum and the first statue to go up on Monument Avenue, of Robert E. Lee, both occurred in the 1890s, at the height of the ‘Lost Cause’ movement. The South had had 30 years to recover from the war and managed to Jim Crow racial reconciliation into the background of public discourse. The wounds of the war were fresh enough to remember, but old enough to romanticize. Under the Lost Cause myth, the North had started the war through coercion, the Confederates had fought virtuously for states rights, not slavery, and only been defeated by overwhelming force of arms. In other words, a victimization story was born.

“And at first, the Museum of the Confederacy was more a shrine than a museum,” said Dean. “People called the artifacts ‘relics.’ This was a monument to an ideological cause,” he said, quickly adding, “But now I think we’re an educational institution, which is why I work here.” People could interpret facts the way they wanted when the Confederacy was a cause, rather than a piece of history. It didn’t have to include the bickering cabinet of Jeff Davis and his semi-American national flag; the fighting boys of Robert E. Lee were their legacy, memorialized on Monument Avenue and in the Army of Northern Virginia’s battle flag.

Except the Stars and Bars embraced by neo-Confederates wasn’t the flag of the Army of Northern Virginia, Dean added with a smile. It was closer to the flag of the lesser-known Army of Tennessee, but even that was actually a square banner. The rectangular Stars and Bars, fiercely defended by so many ‘Southern Rights’ groups, is actually the obscure Confederate Naval Jack.

I laughed when Dean told me that, and he joined in after a second. I wondered about Dean, and asked him more about why he worked here. Did he have family in the Civil War?

“No,” he said, chuckling again. “Actually, my dad is a history professor from Connecticut and he hates the Confederacy. When I told him I was working here we were supposed to meet a bar for a drink. He was quiet, then said, ‘Well, I guess you’ll be the one in the gray.’ But he’s come here since and has been pretty impressed with the museum and the white house tour.”

“How do other people react when you tell them you work here?”

“Well, first of all I never hide it,” Dean said. “I don’t mumble, ‘Uh, yeah, I work at a museum.’ That shows I have something to hide if I get defensive. This is a neutral museum that tellls perhaps the single most important story in American history. I’m talking about the Confederacy in a historical, rather than an ideological way.” He also, he admitted, was influenced by living in Richmond, despite ignoring the war as a child. “As an adult, you’ll inevitably feel it more. You pick up a Richmond newspaper and the war will be in it in some way.”

Were the people who visited obsessed with the Civil War? Yes, Dean said, but not necessarily in a pro-Confederate or even personalized connection to the war kind of way; after Virginians, the biggest group of visitors to the museum came from California.  Just then I saw two large guys in camos and immediately assumed they were good old local boys--until I saw the Australian flag patches sewn into their shoulders. British tourists were well-represented too, apprently, but when I asked Dean if he got black visitors, he sighed and said “No. It’s too bad, because I think they’d get a lot out of it.”

We walked into Jefferson Davis’s bedroom. “Everything is accurate, except for the mattress. We got that at Sears.” Dean then showed me some personal items owned by Judah Benjamin, the Jewish Confederate Secretary of War. “We think he was gay too.  Well, not officially, but I have my suspicions.”

I raised my eyebrows. Benjamin is one of the more colorful characters of American history; the first Jew to openly serve in the U.S. Senate and a North American cabinet, but also a West-Indies born lawyer who practiced as a Queen’s Counsel in England after the war. But gay? Benjamin had married into Louisiana aristocracy, after all, when he wed Natalie St. Martin in 1833.

“Yes…but,” Dean said. “The marriage may have been more of an attempt to get at her brother” I raised my eyebrows again. “Natalie eventually ran off the Paris and started a series of flagrant affairs, as if to get back at him.” In the meantime, her brother fell ill and was cared for by Benjamin, who referred to him in affectionate, childlike terms — even though the two were the same age.

“Also, Richmond ladies described him as a ‘quarter man’ or ‘half man,’ and as ‘safe,’” Dean said. Benjamin also apparently enjoyed a lot of private time with Jefferson Davis’s wife, which Davis was aware of — a pretty notable break from accpetable beahviour at the time, which suggested Benjamin had his superior’s full confidence with his spouse. “It’s really interesting to think of the second-most powerful Confederate politican as a gay Jew,” Dean said. We both laughed again, and then I realized I had lingered overlong. I thanked him for the tour and made my way through the hospital back to my car in the enormous VCU garage.

I shared an elevator with an expensively dressed black woman. As the lift doors closed, someone yelled, “Hey, hold that!” in a thick Latino accent. A brown-skinned family of four rushed on and started joking loudly in Spanish. They did not turn around and see what I saw, the black woman fixing them with a withering stare that was, I realized, the sort of glare I magined a white woman would have given her a few decades ago.

In the garage itself I wandered around, unable to find my car. As I did, an Oldsmobile driven by my stereotype of a nasty old Southern woman pulled up — granny under a tight head of helmet hair, thick glasses, beady eyes. She rolled her window down; consious of my own brown skin and aimless wandering, I braced for whatever she had to say.

“Don’t worry honey, you’ll find yer car, I git lost here all the time!” She laughed, a light trill, and drove off.

The Great Mid-Atlantic Roadtrip, Ch. 10

I drove on through Richmond and Petersburg to tiny Dinwiddie County, Virginia, with the sun setting slowly over green hills that hardly seemed touched since the 19th century. In Dinwiddie I was looking for Jimmy Olger’s Country Store, which was described by Horwtiz as a holdout for one of the last great American eccentrics in “Confederates in the Attic.”

Jimmy Olgers was sitting on a rotting armchair on a wraparound porch with three of his friends as I walked up to his store. Except he wasn’t really sitting. He was sprawling, sprawled, all 320-lbs (over 145 kgs) of him spilling into the space of the store he has lived in since he was born here, in the days leading up to World War 2. When he saw me he leapt out of his seat — and I mean leapt, and that was a lot of man leaping — and took my hand.

“Hey now, I’m Jimmy and this is my store! How are you? Won’t you come inside? Where you from?”

“Maryland.”

“HOOO- EEEE !” he shouted, looking at his friends with a grin that took in most of his outsized head. “Ain’t you come a long way! Come on in, then, you know what they say, Olger’s store is worth the best education you’ll ever have!” almost quoting himself from “Confederates in the Attic.” Inside was a lifetime of oddities collected by quite the oddity himself. A signed autograph of the Cisco Kid. Toy collections that would have made a child of the 1950s srceam in envy. Clippings from local newspapers announcing the beginning and end of World War 2, the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the first man on the moon. They were arrayed around a life-sized statue of Robert E. Lee, assembled from junk and spare parts and spray-painted gold. An animal jawbone hung from the ceiling, along with a pair of women’s knickers that could have patched up a large, broken window. “Largest bloomers in the world,” said Jimmy.

“Who owned them?” I asked.

“Don’t know; never met her, wouldn’t want to.” In another room was the dirt and wood floor Jimmy had slept on when he was four years old. In his entire life, he told me, he had never truly left Dinwiddie County or this store, which he and his parents had run for 80 years. When the store finally closed in 1988, Jimmy Olgers converted it into this Museum of Generally Weird Stuff, but it was the end of a small-town era. Ironically while I was driving here I spied, less then a dozen miles up the road, not just a Walmart, but an entire Walmart warehouse complex.

Jimmy accidentally knocked over a small bible with his enormous waist in one room.

“Young man, can you do me a favor and pick that up? I can’t bend over.” I obliged; as I did Jimmy rambled on in his molasses drawl. “Just got back from the hospital, see, and they had to take a—“ and here he said something I could not understand.

“A what?”

“You know, one of those growths that done come out yo’ rectum. Goddamned if I can bend over an inch now.”

“Sounds like the hospital wasn’t kind to you.”

“Hospital was great. It’s my ass that’s killing me!” I didn’t argue the point but pointed to a picture of a younger Jimmy, still enormous and broad shouldered but a little more solidly built, if possible, with his arms around a pretty young woman in a blue dress. “Your wife?”

“No sir, that there is an Australian penpal who come visit me some years ago. Australia! Can you believe that? No, my wife is picking me up in an hour for a cookout. How old are you, son?”

“Twenty-six.”

“You married?”

“No sir.” I was about to add something about, “When the time is right,” thinking that sort of thing would go down well here, but before I could Jimmy slapped me on the back (and damn could he slap) and yelled, “Good for you! Don’t never get married, boy! I got four children and ten grandchildren and they are the love of my life, but it’s too much goddamned trouble gettin’ married still.” Then he laughed, a strong, lovely basso, and we walked outside.

“Sit down,” Jimmy said, gesturing at a porch chair. “Most famous porch in the world.”

I took him up on the offer and began chatting with his friends, who had the strongest accents I’ve yet encountered on this trip. Their drawls were nearly impenetrable to my gentrified ears.

“I gotsa daughter m’ried a Merlin boy, yep, ‘n they move d’n to M’rtle Beach. I’m d’n thur s’m’ch I mightsa well jes’ move thur mehs’lf,” one said. I nodded through as much as I could comprehend.

“I do wish you could stay till tomorrow,” Jimmy said. “Got so much time for myself and stuff to show people. I’ll cook you a meal, boy, like you never had. Friend just shot a 20 pound wild turkey and I’m gonna fix it up real nice with some corn bread and cracklin.’ You ever had cornbread and cracklin’?” I shook my head. “That’s when I take the backskin of the pig and the fat and sprinkle it over the bread till it make a nice a ol’ crust. Oh my God boy, you ain’t lived till you had that and then you might as well die anyways ‘cause it tastes so damn good.”

It sounded good. It sounded really good. But I had to make Appomattox Courthouse, where Lee surrendered to the Union Army 142 years ago on April 9, 1865 . I bid a fond farewell to Jimmy and his porch pals. “Good luck!” yelled Jimmy as I drove off. “Drive safe and come on back anytime, y’hear?”

I was listening to Ken Burns’ Civil War documentary on tape as I drove through the skein of backroads that marked Lee’s last retreat. The sun had turned the trees that lined the road into flaming reds and purples; crickets were calling between the cool spaces in the grass; insects hopped against the parachute seedlings of dead dandelions, the flora and fauna forming bursts of pulsing white clouds hovering just over the fields that stretched to the indigo-dark crests of the Shenandoah Mountains. The narrated history of the area pushed me to each stop on Lee’s retreat. I once read about a cop who said he derived the greatest pleasure in life from the simple act of chasing down criminals. For me this act, of exploring a new, beautiful landscape and finding my way from one previously unknown point to the next while hearing the story of how the area was shaped and formed, is my pleasure, my act of fulfillment.

By the time I reached Appomattox night had well and truly fallen, but I could just make out the marker stone dedicated to the surrendering Confederates: “Here, on Sunday, April 9, 1865, after four years of heroic struggle in defense of principles believed fundamental to the existence of our government, Lee surrendered 9,000 men, the remnant of an army still unconquered in spirit.” The Lost Cause mythology that romanticized the losing South was entirely encapsulated in that one passage.

I ate country-fried steak in a nearby diner, where the racial politics of the Civil War seemed laid to rest, for that evening at least; a gay black waiter bounced the toddler daughter of a white friend on his knee, while a young white man in urban rapper gear — shorts to his ankles and “Dutch” tattooed on his neck” — played Nirvana on the jukebox and bought a soda for his girlfriend, a Hispanic looking girl with a butterfly inked into her shoulder blades. As I paid my bills the black waiter and the white gangsta started chatting with me. “Just driving around?” asked the waiter. “Yeah,” I said. “I came all the way from DC today.”

“Goddamn boy!”

I laughed. “Anything much to do in Appomattox ?”

“You’re looking at it,” said his white friend. They laughed together; I bid them farewell and drove back to Appomattox Park. I pulled over to the side of the road at one point, just to admire a scene that was so beautiful it felt imaginary: a low-lying field under a perfect sky of blue stars, a black-silhouetted treeline, and an impossibly bright crescent moon and morning star.

A historical marker was set in the ground. I peered over; this spot was where Robert E. Lee rode back from Appomattox after surrendering to Grant. His soldiers had stood on either side of the field in front of me waiting for the return of their commander, knowing surrender had finally come after months of retreat and starvation. When Lee road into sight he doffed his hat; his troops surged towards him, some saying goodbye while others, too overcome with emotion to speak, simply passed their hands over the white flanks of Lee’s horse, Traveler.

This scene has always struck me as one of the saddest in American history. Not because I sympathize with the Confederacy in any way; its death was the rebirth of our nation and the first chance we had at giving the whole “Liberty and Justice for all” thing a worthwhile crack. But maybe a sense of defeat, especially defeat after so much dedicated struggle, is a quality lacking in the generally optimistic, cheerful American demeanor. Maybe we require a little humility, a little reminder that while victory exults us, defeat can also unite us in strong, surprising ways. George S. Patton once said, “Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser,” but Patton’s own grandfather was among those soldiers who surrendered with Lee on April 9, 1865.

Also among those soldiers was Jimmy Olger’s grandfather. He had fought with the Army of Northern Virginia till the very end of its days, and then walked back home 85 miles to Dinwiddie, where his family would open the shop and the porch I had sat on hours earlier.

The Great Mid-Atlantic Roadtrip, Ch. 9

Disclaimer: I am a big Civil War nerd.

Second disclaimer: No, I mean it. I am, like, a *big* Civil War nerd.

I guess it started when I was 12 and, instead of doing normal stuff for my age like kissing my first girl, I started watching the Ken Burns documentary “The Civil War.” Then when I was 20 or so I read “Confederates in the Attic” by Tony Horwitz, which set, for me, the Gold Standard in travel writing and semi-inspired me to take up that profession. It also helps that I grew up 10 miles from Point Lookout , Maryland , where over 3,000 Confederate soldiers died in a prisoner-of-war camp under guard by black Union soldiers, a fierce warning to potential secessionists in the pro-Southern part of the state I was raised in.

A lot of the Civil War was fought in Virginia, which happens to be one of the states I am covering for LP. So inspired by a similarly titled road trip taken by my idol, Tony Horwtiz, a decade ago, I set off on my own “Civil Wargasm,” a tour of every site of Civil War significance I could find in Virginia. But Tony took a week to complete his ‘Gasm. I lack the staying power of my favorite travel writer; I decided my Civil War climax would be finished in two days. And so, on the morning of April 22, I set out from Georgetown, Washington DC, for the battles that Oliver Wendell Holmes once said “touched our hearts with fire.”

After a brief side trip. On my way I stopped in Centreville , VA , birthplace of Seung-Hui Cho (the VTech murderer) to look at another, un-Civil War related death-dealer: The Enola Gay. The B-29 super-fortress that dropped the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima is housed in the Udvar Hazy Center a few miles outside of DC.

An Italian tourist stood next to me as I stared at the plane. “Whatta thees eez?”

I pointed at the informational placard. He peered over and raised his eyebrows. “Ah, si! Ah-TOHM-ee-kah.”

It took about an hour driving through the tangled knots of suburban sprawl that vomit across Northern Virginia to reach my first destination: Manassas, a city so over-developed in the mid-90s that Horwtiz called it ‘Manasshole.’ Today it is still overrun with gas stations and strip malls, but the forces of conservation have occasionally prevailed.

In the early 1990s, the Walt Disney Company was stopped in its efforts to create an American History-themed day-park in nearby Haymarket. The land developers argued their case on the basis of local governance and property rights, the same argument the Southern states used to justify the institution of slavery a hundred years earlier. Ironically, the inheritors of the Confederate states-rights ideology found themselves opposed by a slew of opposition groups, including Confederate heritage preservation societies that could not stomach the idea of Mickey Mouse cheerfully waving over the bodies of their ancestors.

Disney’s America would not invade the site of the Battle — actually, battles — of Bull Run . What did invade this area was 35,000 men of the Union Army, in July of 1861 (and August of 1862). What they saw must have approximated my own view of the battlefield, a stretch of gorgeous countryside that has survived the predations of Northern Virginia ’s real estate developers: a soft, curving green hillscape sectioned into fuzzy fields of tall grass and wildflowers by strong, split-rail wood fences. Facing the Union were some 32,500 Confederate soldiers, as untested and fresh as the Northern Army. After a series of charges and countercharges, the Southerners were driven back — all except one line led by Thomas J. Jackson, an evangelist Virginian who sucked on lemons and rode into battle with one arm above his head to balance his bodily ‘humours.’ Gen. Bernard Bee yelled at his own soldiers, "There is Jackson, standing like a stone wall,” although whether he was mocking or praising Jackson’s immobilty is unknown — Bee was killed later that day. But the deed was done: “Stonewall” Jackson was born.

Confederate reinforcements arrived by train, the first time that had ever happened in the history of war, and the Union was beaten back. Both sides realized a long, hard war was at hand and called up thousands of troops. European powers watched nervously; in a matter of weeks, the largest army in the world was the Union Army of the Potomac. The second biggest was the Confederate States of America Army. A year later, at the Battle of Shiloh, 24,000 men were listed as casualties — more than all the accumulated casualties of every previous American war combined.

My next stop was Fredericksburg, where the Union Army attempted a massed charge across open terrain at an entrenched Confederate position. Edward Porter Alexander, a Confederate artilleryman, looked at the field and uphill slope the Union forces had to cross and told a commanding officer, "A chicken could not live on that field when we open on it." Sixteen charges resulted in 6,000-8,000 Union casualties; it was one of the last, full-frontal assaults in American history, a lesson European armies did not pick up on until well into World War I.

Today Fredericksburg is a pretty, compact town that has been developed and modeled to look like extactly that, an almost overwrought cliché of main-street, small town America. I snarfed a Turkey Reuben in the Wine and Cheese deli (Christ, what a fucking yuppie I’ve become) while I chatted on the phone with my buddy Phil, a Navy veteran, about my time in Hampton Roads (Phil: “What did I say? Never go there.”).

In nearby Chancellorsville, Confederate General Robert E. Lee pulled off one of the great victories of military history when, outnumbered two to one, he *split* his forces and attacked both flanks of the Union army. The audacity of the move caused the Northern force to crumble and flee across the Potomac yet again, but the victory was a costly one; in the course of the fighting, Stonewall Jackson had his arm shot off by a nervous Confederate sentry. The wound was patched up, but Jackson went on to contract a fatal dose of pnemonia. He was taken to the next stop on my tour: Guinea Station, Virginia, where Stonewall died, surrounded by his family.

The site is still run by the National Park Service, but it retains the name — Jackson’s Shrine — given to it by Southern sympathizers who venerate Jackson, along with Lee, as one of the holy martyrs of the Confederacy. The “Shrine” is a small white cabin set against attractive Virginia horse country, overrun with hanging sprays of purple flowers, daisy fields and trees tied up in the thick, poisonous strands of gypsy moth nests.

On May 10, 1863, a Sunday, Jackson’s family gathered around him as a doctor told his wife that death was fast-approaching. Jackson was lucid as his wife broke the news; he told her, “Good. I have always wanted to die on a Sunday.” Then he slipped into a delirium, and began shouting orders at generals who were not there. After a series of long, pained ramblings, he fell silent, then looked up with a smile, and whispered what may be the greatest last words ever: “Let us cross over the river and rest in the shade of the trees,” before he died.

The Great Mid-Atlantic Roadtrip, Ch. 8

Its 3:19 in the morning and the Virginia Beach Waffle House I’m writing this in would make Edward Hopper weep with joy. Johnny Cash’s “Walk the Line” is fading into “Folsom Prison Blues.” A grey-mustached vet in a bomber jacket and a Vietnam-era service hat is smoking a backwoods cigar at the table across from me. A black guy in a flat cap is sharing the counter with a redneck in camos and a dangerous squint. The waitress calls me one thing, and one thing only: Honey. America is as she should be.

I’m writing now because I’ve had one of those nights that puts you in a Waffle House at 3 in the morning, as well as for the novelty of cracking open my laptop among the late night crowd. They don’t mind. The vagabonds of humanity wash up on these shores, and I’m just another shell on the beach.

Three hours ago I pulled into the seediest bar I could find in Portsmouth , a seedy suburb of Norfolk , a seedy naval base that’s only eclipsed in size by Vladivostok. “Mudflaps” was pumping hard rock and pink neon through its tinted windows, and I was feeling restless. I should have guessed it was a tit bar.

Except it wasn’t really; the girl on stage was so turned-off to the bleary-eyed crowd she had stopped dancing and instead sat on the edge of the runway, chatting with a customer. And the bar, like Hampton Roads, was packed with sailors. The war has figured heavy in this travelogue, but I hadn’t talked with active duty servicemen yet. I sat next to two Mexican American sailors and offered them a smoke.

“Where you from, man?” one asked.

I lied, not feeling like explaining where “St. Mary’s County” was, and said, “Baltimore.”

“Is that better than here?” I looked around. The bar was full of guys who were either too drunk to see or too horny to care if the one girl dancing wasn’t. “You mean for girls, or for bars?” The sailor was quiet.

“Anything.”

I conceded the point. “Yeah, its better.”

Baltimore , hell, Vladivostok is probably better than Norfolk , Portsmouth , Suffolk and the string of navy bases that connects them in Hampton Roads. Better in terms of women, for sure; Norfolk consistently ranks at the bottom of Forbes’ “Best Cities for Singles” lists, which is unsurprising given how many sailors are on shore leave here. Something was needling at me while I walked along Granby Street , Norfolk ’s main bar strip of bars, on a Thursday night. In an hour of walking, and popping into four or five bars, I had seen a total of four females.

“The bars are better, for sure,” I added. The sailor’s friend, a stocky Latino, laughed.

“Whatever man, this kid’s only 18 anyways.” The first sailor smiled shyly, and through his crew cut and pitted skin I saw the truth in that; a nervous, questioning youth behind big brown eyes and nervous tics, like spitting on the bar floor when he thought no one was watching. He rubbed out the latest lugie with his feet and started talking, the sort of monologue a teenager away from home is apt to launch into.

“I’m from Cali , homes. I been here a week. Most guys, they stay on ship, but I gotta get out there, you know? I probably seen more than guys on the base who been here for years.”

“Looking for action?” I asked, looking around skeptically.

“Nah man, I’m engaged.” I took a drag on my cigarette to mask my double take. “She’s tryin’ to move into my parents place,” he went on. “That’s cool, ‘cuz my parents love her. She’s the kinda girl you can bring home to your parents, you know?”

“Same age as you?”

“Nah, older. She’s 19. She’s talking about quitting school and starting a business…” etc.

The kid was from Santa Anna (“They’s always stuff to do there, not like here, word?”) and it was his mother’s birthday; he had called her earlier from a bowling alley and lent money to his little sister and girlfriend so they could buy her presents. It was his first time away from home.

“Your mami must miss you,” I said.

“Oh, fuck yeah. We talk about everything.” He paused. “I didn’t tell her or the girl I was coming to a place like this though.”

Unfortunately, there’s not much else to do here but go to the kinds of places sailors go. Of all the Hampton Roads, Norfolk may be the most cosmopolitan, and that’s not saying much. The city has installed arts walks and prominently advertises ballet shows and galleries, but it all seemed like so many drips of water trying to erode the rock of Norfolk ’s identity: a place to go for a good time. The waterfront is packed with sports bars, Hooters (natch), and the usual family restaurant chains you catch everywhere in America , a million clones of the same “Sante Fe McDublin’s Neighborhood Grill — now with mozzarella sticks.” And fair enough. After six months of patrolling the Straits of Hormuz, a sailor is entitled to some cheesy Americana and winsome lasses stuffed into orange hot pants.

I asked my companion when, and if, he was shipping out. “I don’t know man, they don’t tell us.”

“Could you go to Iraq?” “Maybe; I could be anywhere. But even in Iraq, I mean, I’m in a ship man, I ain’t gonna be in a place where I’m gonna get dirty. ‘Least I don’t want to.”

I didn’t want him to either. His friend came back from ogling the dancer, who was lounging on stage, completely dead to the dozen or so men in Mudflaps. He slammed a vodka shot.

“Man, I gotta keep drinking, otherwise I’ll be asleep for six o’clock muster.” Muster is when the men of a given unit or ship have to stand at attention for review in front of their officers. I checked the time. “You’re going to muster on three hours sleep?”

“Nah man,” he laughed. “I just keep drinking, that way I don’t fall asleep.”

I took that as a good point to say goodbye, so I did and drove through the late night pathos of Hampton Roads in what I like to call the “truck hours,” the time when big rigs are the only things on the road. The black lines of warships and cranes were visible in three directions of the river, silhouetted against the thick orange smoke spewing from the docks. I still felt restless. Late night food and thick coffee beckoned.

The Great Mid-Atlantic Roadtrip, Ch. 7

The road into Hampton Roads always seems clogged with traffic. Every time I cross from Newport News into Norfolk or back or anywhere around Virginia ’s Historic Triangle some accident has backed cars up into frustrated lines all along the interstate.

But frenetic activity has always seemed to characterize this part of America. It’s thick with a history of settlement, conflict, and presently, gridlocked traffic patterns. The Hampton Roads (named not for physical roads, but the confluence of the James and Elizabeth Rivers and the Chesapeake Bay ) have always been prime real estate, and thus, a place where important events go down. The Powhatan Confederacy fished these waters and hunted the finger-like protrusions of the Virginia coast for thousands of years before John Smith established the Jamestown colony in May of 1607.

Almost exactly 400 years later I looked at a melodramatic statue of Smith, erected over the muddy, grassy island that was the birth — and very nearly the death — of British North America. The Jamestown settlement, run by the National Park Service, is a scattered, quiet archaeological site that preserves the remains of America’s first British town.

The 108 English colonists who originally came here were armed with a charter from the Virginia Company of London , guns and cannon (which they figured they’d use against the Spanish, not the Indians), and apparently, not a lot of common sense. Almost half of them were “Gentlemen” occupying the lowest rungs of the upper classes. A third son of a third son of an Earl was basically a drain on his family in England, so a chance at adventure and “God, Glory and Gold” (sort of the Jamestown mission statement) seemed like a plush ticket out of obscurity. Two of these gentlemen brought their personal tailors with them. No one, including a large contingent of carpenters, thought to bring farm tools. Or farmers, for that matter.

The colonists didn’t want to piss off the Indians in their home country, so they purposely sought out land that looked uninhabited. This was about the only time they accomplished one of their stated goals; the island where the English set up was used as temporary campsite by native hunters, but the thousands of Indians of Tsenacommacah, the great tidewater empire, did not have permanent settlements there. This was because the water was brackish and undrinkable and the surrounding swamp bred malarial mosquitos. This, plus the lack of agricultural anything in the English landing party, meant hard times were ahead for Jamestown.

In 1607, Sir Walter Cope described his new home as a land where “in steed of mylke we fynde pearle…and gold in steede of honye.” In fact, what Cope and his compansions would soon find was starvation (and no gold; and also, doesn’t that passage reveal why Americans were right to invent their own standardized spelling system?). Five years of intense dying followed. The Indians occasionally fought the newcomers; at other times, they offered local knowledge (they showed the colonoists how to plant corn, which saved their lives; their eventual reward was being driven from their ancestral homelands or forcibly integrated into white society).

What they did *not* do was let Chief Powhatan’s daughter, who was 10 at the time, approach and fall in love with the 28-year old John Smith.

“The story of Pocahantas was invented by Smith a few decades later. To be fair, he made up all kinds of stories about princesses saving him,” a park ranger told me.

“Like, princesses from other countries too?”

“Oh yeah,” he laughed.

I’ve always wondered about the Pocohantas story. It seems to have a particular grip on the American psyche. On the one hand, it’s a total dude story — “Check it out, guys, I was about to be killed and this hot princess saved me!” There is also an element of romantic justification of colonialism — the native woman who succumbs to the white man reflects her native country, which must inevitably make a similar surrender.

“Powhatan may have threatened Smith, but only because that was a recognized way of establishing Smith as a subordinate chief,” the ranger said. Powhatan ruled his kingdom through a thick, complex series of tributary arrangements worked out through the Indians of the tidewater. He wanted the English as allies for their metal, a resource which was then controlled by Powhatan’s rivals to the south.

But conflict was always just about to break out; the Jamestown colonists, who needed farmland to live, tried to farm plots outside of their small fort. Powhatan claimed that land for himself, and for a long time, the Indians kept the colonists bottled behind their walls through a siege (a challenge, it should be noted, to the romantacized idea that Native Americans had no concept of property. They recognized a claim to their land and were prepared to fight for it).

Between 1609 and 1610, through one of the worst droughts in Virginia’s history (determined by botanists studying tree rings), a blistering summer, and a sharp, cold winter, over 80 percent of the Jamestown Settlement died a miserable, muddy death. Before he left for England due to a gunshot burn in 1609, Smith forced the entire colony, regardless of class distinction, to labor; his command “He who does not work, will not eat,” was as much a statement of fact as an order.

It was hard to imagine the modern Jamestown island as the site of so much suffering. It was positively idyllic when I was there, surrounded by a glassy, gray river and shaggy, wild orchards dotted with white flowers. Red deer calmly nibbled at the edges of the foundations of colonial buildings, the ruins of the town, while Canadian Geese huddled under a lopsided tree. Maybe nature was at peace after having nearly ground the humans here out of existence.

Relief from starvation came on June 10, 16 10 , in the form of a supply ship with a new governor, Lord De La Warr (who lent his namesake to Delaware ). De La Warr brought food, tools, and 40 halberdiers, professional soldiers clad in metal armor that made them all but invincible against the Indians. Punitive expeditions wiped out Indian villages up and down the James and Elizabeth rivers. But Jamestown was always star-crossed; a farmers’ revolt a few years later resulted in the torching of several buildings by angry mobs. The settlement never recovered, and the capital of Virginia was moved to Williamsburg.

As for Pocahontas, she ended up being kidnapped by the English, baptized “Rebecca,” and eventually married John Rolfe, the father of Virginia tobacco farming (about the only profitable activity the colony yielded for years). The couple had a son, Thomas, who accompanied them to England in 1616 for an audience with the royal family. The princess of Powhatan died in Britain a year later and is buried, appropriately enough, in Gravesend.

Thinking on the first modern American family — a mix of Native and European, which I find pleasing (ignoring the fact Pocahontas was kidnapped and her people practically wiped out) — I left Jamestown for the city of Hampton and turned north, from the site of the founding of colonial America to the place where it would forcibly assert its independence: Yorktown.

The Great Mid-Atlantic Roadtrip, Ch. 6

I drove into one end of Virginia the day after the biggest mass shooting in American history occurred on the other side of the state. A massive gale, one of the fiercest Nor’easters to ever hit the East Coast, had toppled trees and power lines all along the peninsulas of the Virginian Atlantic shore. The winds were still going strong when I set out; the Freshcort was buffeted along the bridges that cross the Potomac and Rappahanock rivers.

In general, it didn’t seem like the best time to be traveling in the country’s oldest state, so old it is still, technically, a commonwealth. But in a weird way maybe it was a very good time to be in Virginia . Tragedies bring people together, give them a reason to wear a sense of community more openly on their sleeve. Across this state Virginians are as “Virginian” as they’ve ever been, if that makes sense, just as after September 11 Americans ran up more flags, sang national songs with more fervor, and donated blood in droves.

There are different ways of expressing patriotism, of course; in the weeks following 9/11 a Sikh convenience store owner was attacked by an angry gang (ironic, given the traditional animosity between Sikhs and Muslims). But in Seattle , where I was living at the time, a neighborhood association volunteered to act as a 24-hour watch *against* vandals at the Kabul restaurant, serving the best Afghan cuisine in Wallingford. At the time, I think some of the biggest public patriotic displays came from nervous minorities. It was easy to spot Muslim-American families after 9/11; they were the ones with the huge flags in their front lawns, sporting “United We Stand” bumper stickers on their cars. Frankly, I think most of them were very sincere about those displays, which made them all the more powerful.

In Virginia , there is no enemy to lash out at and a wound that is still too fresh. Flags fly at half mast and a church highway bulletin reads, “Pray for the Hokie nation.” The Hokie is a wild turkey, the sports mascot for Virginia Tech. That sort of line probably sounds corny to foreigners, and I’d lie if I said it didn’t sound a little cheesy to me too. But in a state like this, universities and their sports team provide a common meeting ground for VTech students, parents, alumni, and children of alumni scattered across small towns and big cities. Wherever they are in the world they recognize each other by the ridiculous “V” and “T” hand symbol and their maroon and orange scarves. When I lived in Laos I worked at the American ambassador’s residence, and even there, in communist Southeast Asia , the ambassador’s official car had a VTech bumper sticker for the ambassador’s daughter, who was going to school in Blacksburg.

The shooting is obviously all you hear on the news here. One of the bigger themes to the story is: why didn’t the school lock students in their classrooms immediately after the first shooting (which was a few hours before the second, deadlier massacre). A lot of people, especially students, seem to resent the press for taking on this line of questioning, and stress the need for solidarity with the university community. I’m strictly swimming in the realm of speculation here, but it seems a sort of collective shell against critical journalism has evolved in some Americans. These university students were in high school when Sept. 11 happened. They are from the teenage generation that was told to come together and unite behind their country when the towers fell. I wonder if they have developed a paranoia against media that questions institutional preparedness for a disaster, as opposed to media that tells them to stand strong after a tragedy.

In any case, the shooting story was on the air in Maryland and followed me into Virginia as I crossed the Potomac River Bridge into the old Confederacy. Virginia is as thick with history as North America gets; Jamestown is celebrating its 400th anniversary as a settlement this spring, Yorktown is the battle site where America first shouted “Fuck Yeah” to the world when it forced a British surrender, half the damn Civil War was fought here, and you can’t walk for tripping on a president’s birthplace.

Which kind of speaks to the class divisions that characterized early America ; a lot of presidents were born here because Virginia was a state full of very wealthy planters. In the 18th and 19th centuries this was the cradle of American aristocracy, as landed a class as any European Earl or Duke. These Southern aristocrats were as different from the mercantile industrialist of New England and New York as night and day — the Northeast was a land of immigrants and urbanization, the Southerners agrarian and homogenous.

But they shared great American values: a belief that religion and state should be separated (and yes they did, Mr. Christian Coalition — Americans don’t like centralized power, and power didn’t get more centralized than the church in Europe . Plus, Jefferson and Franklin were both deists). A belief in freedom of expression and the press, the better to slag themselves off with (Colonial newspapers were basically insult rags published by wealthy individuals). And of course, extreme paranoia of the government, which manifested itself in perhaps the most sincere sentiment of the American political psyche: hatred of taxes.

I mean, when you get down to it, I think the Founding Fathers did believe in the higher ideals of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. And it’d be great if those ideals were the main motivating force behind the Revolution. But I think they tapped into a lot of public anger just by saying, “Yo! George III over there? He’s taking our money all the livelong goddamn day…and he lives in England ! England !? How many of you have been to England ? Not me, that’s for damn sure — I’m born and bred New Hampshire . Let’s bust some heads!”

FUTURE AMERICANS: “Fuck yeah!”

FUTURE CANADIANS: “We’ll just go home now. Sorry. Try some syrup?”

Anyways, lots of presidential birthplaces here. Robert E. Lee, who came close to being the George Washington of the South, was born seven miles from the real Washington ’s birthplace. It’s a plantation marked by an obelisk like the Washington monument in D.C., but smaller (hey, he was only a baby).

Washington ’s original plantation is set in a pretty copse of trees and fields on the Potomac River . You get the sense of how wild this land must have seemed to the first Europeans, a dangerous but rewarding country of opportunity and quick death, from disease, starvation, exposure. Washington ’s great-grandfather and three generations of Washingtons are buried here, their tomb covered by a tree that was blown over in the weekend gale. Great-grandpa Washington was the first one here, a man who hacked a tobacco farm out of the dirt and turned it into a plantation.

That’s the American dream right there, a belief in wide horizons and the freedom to do with those horizons as you desire. A belief that anyone is welcome and can do as they please, an ideology that let my own family settle and grow prosperous here, an ideology that allowed a Korean permanent resident to attend a prestigious university, write disturbing, violent plays, purchase some firearms, and kill 32 of his classmates and professors.

The Great Mid-Atlantic Roadtrip, Ch. 5

I got the call from Ben while I was eating a Reuben in the Blue Plate Diner in Lewes.

"Where are you?"

I put down my sandwich. "Ever watched Wayne's World?"

Laughter. "'I'm in Delaware. Uh…yeah. Delaware.'"

I was indeed in Delaware, the First State, mascoted by the smurfish, poultryesque totem of the Blue Hen, a blip on the American map, out-sized (or under-sized, as the case may be) in reputation as the smallest state by tinier Rhode Island. Delaware's big claim to fame is being the first state to ratify the U.S. Constitution, and even that patriotic cred is shadowed by its reputation as a haven for Loyalists during the American Revolution. That, and its legal status as a tax-free haven; roadside outlet warehouses and a slice of the biggest credit card companies in the country are headquartered in little DE.

That's how I've always thought of Delaware, my prejudice magnified by its weird location, like an ugly outgrowth of three counties embedded in my home state of Maryland's flank and the stupid tolls you have to pay to cross the patch of Del. that links Maryland to Philly and New Jersey. But I gotta admit to having almost no on-the-ground experience here until this research trip.

So I was surprised — pleasantly — to find Delaware neat and attractive, home to some sound little towns, cozy countryside and decent, dusty beaches. Laying as it does between the North and the South, Delaware, like Maryland, is culturally a bit of a hybrid. But being just that much closer to Pennsylvania, and within the commuter orbit of Philadelphia, Delaware is also a little more Northeast-edged; subs are called grinders, cheesesteaks are sold alongside fried chicken and crabcakes, pizza is bigger, thinner-crusted and greasier, and folks wear their Italian and Irish heritage a little more openly on their sleeves.

In Rehoboth Beach, which doubles as a family and gay resort during the summer, the blend takes on surrealist pro A little north of Rehoboth I stopped off in Lewes, where this email began. From Lewes you can catch the ferry to Cape May, New Jersey; the South Jersey shore is visible from the Lewes beach. It was weird, standing there, seeing the next bit of America just out of sight of my research purposes. There, over the water and under the seagulls, was New Jersey. I felt like a hobbit spying Mordor for the first time.

Once upon a time Lewes was Zwaanendael (The Valley of the Swans), a pretty name for a small colony of Dutch whalers who worked the blubber market without realizing the whales of the mid-Atlantic swim in relatively warm waters and don't pack blubber fat. This was back in 1631, and at the time the Dutch shared the land with the local Nanticoke Indians. It was one of the latter who, one afternoon, accidentally walked off with a wooden standard of the Kingdom of the Netherlands and chopped it into firewood. This pissed off the Dutch, who then demanded the offending Indian be turned over for punishment.

The Nanticokes figured they'd do their neighbors one better. Assuring the Dutch the situation was in hand, they took the standard stealer back to their village and beheaded him, then brought the results to the Dutch the next day. The whalers were horrified; they'd wanted to punish the thief, but not to that extent. They sent the Nanticokes home without a 'Thank you.' The Indians felt slighted; had they killed one of their own for nothing? The next morning the Nanticokes returned, armed with axes and bows, and massacred the Dutch colony.

All but one: Thunis Willemsen. The above account came from him and a Dutch navigator, David Pietersen de Vries, who got his version of events from the Nanticokes themselves. The Dutch returned to Delaware eventually, but in smaller numbers, and were eventually driven out by the British. Unfortunately, they settled for long enough to establish a legitimate land claim by European colonial standards, barring Delaware from joining George Calvert's new Maryland colony — ere go, Delaware's weird location, almost a cut-out of the Maryland Eastern Shore. The irony must have been particularly galling to the Calverts, who were trying to establish a colony for Catholics in British North America; their haven had been shrunk by Protestants of the House of Orange, the denomination behind much of the Catholic persecution in England.

That was the story given to me by the nice old woman who guided visitors around the tiny Zwaanendael House museum, itself a tiny model of the town hall of Hoorn in the Netherlands. The museum, I soon realized, is *very* down with Holland. When I visited, a celebration of Koninginnedag (Queen's Day), the Dutch queen's birthday on April 30, was prominently advertised.

"We always get someone from the Dutch embassy in Washington to come here for that," she said with an enormous, satisfied smile. I could imagine the fun to be had by some junior consular officer, sent off in an orange arm-band to this backwater, pleasant as it was.

"The massacre of the colony here was a lesson: cultural communication is very important, and if we ignore it, as current events show, there can be terrible consequences," the guide continued, on a somewhat different tack. I detected in her spiel a not-so-subtle rebuke of a certain current administration's policy in the Middle East. She rambled on, which she had a penchant for doing; she was one of those old ladies that can spin off on a dozen tangents given half the opportunity, which I was happy to provide.

"My family has always been very close to Holland," she said. "I had a cousin killed at the Battle of the Bulge, you see, and his grave was tended to by a Dutch farm girl for years." I nodded, not realizing until later that if her cousin had been killed at the Bulge, he would have been in Belgium, albeit the Dutch-speaking half of that little nation. "We sent that girl clothes for her wedding when she grew up. I was young when that happened."

While I digested this, the guide derailed one line of conversation for a completely new one. "I was a child in a little town Pennsylvania, the town where the Russian baron Sikorsky moved and developed the helicopter. Our whole town worked at the original Sikorsky plant, building helicopters. I think that's why I didn't grow up thinking of Russians the way other Americans did during the Cold War." Again, that hint of criticism at blind jingoism, the current war and its accompanying prejudices.

The war, or thoughts of it, accompanied me as I drove out of Lewes. It followed me to the gates of Dover Air Force Base, where all of the war dead of America are flown back for registration after they die overseas. I wasn't sure how to incorporate this into my "sights" itinerary, but I felt like I should. After all, over 3,200 men and women, most of them close to my age or younger, have been flown to Dover on a ticket purchased on a lie told by my government. I felt like I wanted to be close to this, physically, this price we've paid for our democracy-building project.

For some reason the Air Force recruiting office, just outside the base gates, was open at 6:30 pm. I walked in. "Is it true this is where all the war dead are flown?"

The question felt awkward to ask, and sounded like it too. The recruitment officer looked at me from behind his desk and his gold-rimmed glasses.

"Yes sir." "

Is there something to mark that? A memorial or a plaque or something?"

"No sir."

And that was that. The officer had flashed me a look that asked me to be well on my way, and I soon was. But my thoughts were carried along to the Middle East by the radio news, announcing tours in Iraq would be increased past a year by three months, and that John McCain was defending Bush's surge proposal.

When the sun was low in the sky, I passed a highway turn-off sign: Home of the Brave. I slowed down, pulled a U-turn, and headed down that road. Home of the Brave? The name was corny enough to be kitschy, topical enough to be controversial, but what the hell was it? I pictured a sort of theme park to the American military, or maybe a Cooperstown/Madame Tussaud's-like Hall of Fame for soldiers. The Home of the Brave was neither.

It was what it said: a home for veterans, many of them homeless, who were trying to get on their feet and re-enter society. A Korean War-era sailor told me this in the Home's parking lot, puffing on a Marlboro in front of an old-school large farmhouse set off in a vista of softly-humped hills. Another elderly veteran crept out and sat on the Home's wrap-around porch, lighting a cigarette for himself too.

I introduced myself, and explained that curiosity at the Home's name had brought me to his doorstep. "Shit, as you can see we got Civil War-time vets at this place," he laughed, gesturing at the first vet. The butt of the joke laughed along, then headed inside as a heavy rain set in with the evening. The joking vet was from Baltimore, and old-enough to have a thick, old-school "Balmer" accent, slurred and drawly and charming.

"I don't want to keep you out here in this weather," I said, watching the rain explode in the driveway. "You'll catch your death." "

Tha's OK," the soldier replied. "I can always go back in. But what about you? You gotta car, right?"

"Oh yeah. I reckon I'll make Baltimore tonight."

"That's good. I'll sleep easier knowin' you gotta place for the evenin'."

He was from an older generation, and in his time that may have been a throwaway comment, a causal goodbye. But I was touched by it all the same.

"Thank you sir." I stepped off the porch. "You take care now."

"I will." He got up, walked to me, and gripped my one hand in both of his.

"God bless you."

"You too."

"He always does." He flashed me a smile as he re-entered the Home. "He always does."

The Great Mid-Atlantic Roadtrip, Ch. 4

Radio sucks these days, so I find myself listening to a lot of National Public Radio (NPR) when I’m on the road. The British are justifiably proud of the BBC, but I honestly think NPR gives the Beeb a run for its money; listening to a few hours straight always makes me feel a few points smarter.

From four to nine I caught: international news, national news, a show on cognitive processes (in this case, laughter), interviews with two authors, and a birdwatching show that proved even public radio can be unintentionally hilarious. Here’s how the conversation went.

INTERVIEWER: So, Alison, have you seen your favorite bird this April? The woodcock? How is your woodcock?

GUEST: Oh, my darling little woodcock!

INTERVIEWER: Oh no! What happened to your woodcock?

I had to pull over for a minute after that one. I’ve driven the length and breadth of the Eastern Shore and Delmarva (Delaware/Maryland/Virginia — get it?) peninsula these past two days. I worked here as a research assistant with the University of Maryland when I was 18 and fell in love with the Shore, and I’m pleased to say the area still seduces me. It’s got a very subtle appeal; this isn’t a region characterized by great mountains or crashing rivers. As a friend once said, the Shore has a “user-friendly beauty”: miles and miles of flat green fields overgrown with loblolly pine, cut everywhere with creeks, rivers, inlets and tributaries of the Chesapeake Bay. If you stretched out the Maryland coastline of the Shore, it would match the length of California.

The sites I’ve been reviewing tend to be Buppie (Bohemian Yuppie) getaways from DC and Baltimore. They run along similar lines: small town stuffed with Bed and Breakfasts, mediocre art galleries, old-timey movie or mainstage theater, “funky” coffee shop. It’s the perfect weekend retreat for the older couple (or younger couple with new child) that’s still into the arts, design, style, etc. but has given up on drug use. It’s cold and gray, but the beaches have a sort of lonely, wintry beauty at this time of year. My Austrian roommate in London told me there’s a specific word in German for what I’m trying to describe; my Deutsch is rusty, but maybe it was, “Koldensilentpretty.”

The further south I drove, the more rural and less touristy the Shore got (the notable exception is the town of Berlin , where “Runaway Bride” was filmed). In Snow Hill, Maryland, a village as small-town Americana as it gets, I stopped into the Julia Purnell Museum out of sheer curiosity. The woman at the front desk, a round-faced girl in her late 20s, looked shocked to see a vistior when I walked in and plunked down the two dollar entrance fee. But she recovered admirably and gave me a well-rehearsed monologue about Julia Purnell, embroiderer of architectural facades and Eastern Shore scenery.

As it is, the museum was more of a homage to everything Worcester County, containing 10,000 artifacts of local history. It was a pleasant if kind of odd place to while away 15 minutes, looking at furniture, clothes and toys donated by Shore residents through the ages. This has always been a pretty integrated area by American historical standards. Maryland is a border state between north and south, and was one of the few states where freed blacks lived side by side with slaves (Frederick Douglas became engaged to a free black woman while slaving in Baltimore). Obviously even free Maryland blacks had nowhere near the rights enjoyed by whites, and maybe it was that status, plus being adjacent to enslaved members of their race, that provoked the huge black Marylander enrollment in the Union Army during the Civil War. By the time of Southern surrender, black soldiers outnumbered white soldiers two to one on the Eastern Shore.

While old white/black tensions simmer, the new race issue here is immigrants. The Shore is the fifth-largest chicken farming area in America, and the fields here are dotted with hundreds of long, low-lying coops stuffed with thousands of heads of poultry. I walked into one of these barns eight years ago and still remember the smell of chicken shit, like rotten ammonia, slamming me in the face. You can guess who they employ to work these coops: throngs of low-paid migrant labor, a point that was hit home when I drove past a field of white kids playing lacrosse, and not a minute later a grassy pitch where two dozen brown boys were kicking around a soccer ball.

Which isn’t to say the Shore lacks a white working class. That still exists in the form of watermen who crab and oyster — nouns working as verbs for the act of catching said nouns (like “fish”) — along the Chesapeake Bay. I stopped into Gordon’s Confectionary in Crisfield, Maryland, where watermen come in for morning coffee at 2am before they set out at dawnbreak to set crab pots and fish traps. Gordon’s is a rowdy, homey place, where the guys still have a thick Shore accent, a strange mix of Southern and Cornish drawl (the watermen here are all descended from Devon sailors, and in their isolation, linguists say they retain elements of 17th century Cornish accents).

I was an outsider, seated at the counter munching a flounder sandwich, but there was hospitality even as there was wariness of a stranger. When a little local girl walked in all of the watermen, who looked like they could bend steel with their bare hands, yelled out, “How’re you, honey!” One of them sat by me; I gave him the standard greeting I was taught as a research associate here in 1999: “Whaddya say, captain?”

“Could use a damn sight more spring. The Lord’s blessed me an I’m thankful but I’d love a sunny day here, too.” He was interrupted by a friend who started complaining about the state’s newest licensing laws. These guys are fiercely independent, and have no love of government of any kind. When I was 18 I got into a debate with “Binky” Tawes, an ancient Shore captain, on the Crisfield docks. “I don’t see how the government can require a license to fish the water God gave us,” he said.

“C’mon Bink. You need a license to drive; can’t you see the need for one to professionally work the Bay?” But my heart wasn’t in the argument. Guys like Binky do the hardest work I can imagine, like oyster tonging. This back-breaking exercise involves taking 20-30 foot steel tongs and scraping them along the river bed for oysters. It takes enormous strength to open and shut the tongs, coupled with amazing grace to manipulate them up from the muddy Bay bottom. Doing it once sets your back on fire and twists the muscles in your hands into painful knots; Binky and his colleagues were doing it for 10 hours a day straight during oyster season — the winter, when the temperature dips well below 0 Celsius and the wind cracks your skin into a dozen bleeding welts. It’s very hard for me not to admire a man who can do that kind of work, and harder to argue against his livelihood. I should have told Binky the de-regulation he always argued for was letting in the huge Asian factory ships that essentially vacuumed the Bay floor clear of sealife; those were the real culprits behind the decline of the professional waterman.

I left Crisfield and drove to Chincoteague (shink-o-teeg) Island in Virginia and watched the sunset over the marshes. It was a good evening. The grass was fuzzy and brown, dotted with hunters’ duck blinds and caked with a dandruff of unmelted snow and dried seasalt. Mallards, Canadian Geese, egrets and Great Blue Herons skimmed the steel blue water that interlaced the sawgrass flats. This was the landscape of my youth, etched very deeply into my inner geography. I let the Atlantic wind crack my lips, and then headed north, towards Delaware.

The Great Mid-Atlantic Roadtrip, Ch. 3

I have traveled through a lot of depressing places. Jaffna, Sri Lanka . Puri , India. Cambodia.

But none of those war zones and poverty holes quite matches the pathos of Ocean City in the off-season. I mean…shit. Here you are, in “America’s Best Family Resort,” miles and miles of garish neon signs promising “cheap rates” and “breakfast buffets” at a hundred identical motels; crab houses, seafood houses, steak houses, Irish pubs and tiki bars drunkenly mashed up against one other; the empty, windswept boardwalk facing a frosted silver beach and a strong winter wind cutting over the purple ocean, and absolutely, positively, not a soul around.

I drove around, updating reviews here and there and quickly slipping into a deep depression, the kind that hits when you’ve driven hundreds of miles to a place where no fun can be had and last call was three hours ago.

Or so I thought. Till I saw the OC’s one open bar. There was a loud, low crowd inside, and on a cold night in a sleepy beach town they were doing what came natural: being drunk and getting drunker. Country music was playing; “Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy,” a song I can’t even like ironically, clicked on as I sat at the bar. Jagermeister was on tap. The clientele were all young guys with backwards caps and old guys in hunting caps, and they were all eyeing the two female bartenders like they were the last fertile women in Ocean City , which as far as I could tell from driving around, was the case. Rolling Rocks were a $1.50, the bar’s one redeeming feature. I looked to my right at the guy talking loudly next to me. He was yelling at one of the bartenders, a girl about half his age and a quarter of his size.

“Look, I don’t want to get things started but that fucker’s been winding me up all night.”

Ah, shit, I thought. I’ve walked into the eye of a redneck hurricane.

“I don’t need to get angry tonight,” my neighbor continued. Good, good, I thought.

“But if that motherfucker doesn’t shut the fuck up, I’ll shut him the fuck up myself!”

Ah, fuck.

The guy I was sitting next to had a pony tail and a clean-shaven face. The man he was gesturing at was bald with a short-cropped beard. As far as I could tell, they were fighting over the yin-yang like quality of their head hair distribution. Maybe they could have made peace based off their respective commonalities: tree-trunk necks and tattooed, ham hock arms.

Fortunately, one of the bartenders defused the situation by thrusting out a hip and purring, “C’mon honey, forget that and do a shot with me instead.” Sex momentarily won out over violence and male ego was sufficiently stroked; the place calmed down and I found myself admiring the bartender for so skillfully handling two large, violent men, either one of whom alone could have broke her neck. Then I imagined her playing through this scene with different actors every night of the year and got depressed again.

I was finishing my beer when a scruffer in his late thirties and a black leather jacket sidled next to me and ordered a Yuengling lager and a shot of Jack. I can respect that sort of purchase. I asked him if there was anything else going on in Ocean City in the off-season.

“Dude, this place is fucked right now.” He took his shot. “And I’m just trying to get fucked up with it.”

Eric Paul Levy is a rocker from North Wilmington , Delaware . He’s been playing up and down the East Coast since 1985, where he concentrates on the Baltimore-Delaware-Eastern-Shore/Jersey-Shore-bar circuit. He was friendly and gregarious and, within minutes, well on his way to achieving the evening’s one stated goal. We talked about the music scene in his home state, (“Dude, Wilmington can fucking rock! When it’s not fucking selling out.” ), the sights to see (“Dude, the Brandywine Valley is fucking gorgeous! Whole damn thing was owned by DuPont. He was some French guy, y’know.”), and the gay beach resorts Delaware is famous for (“Dude, I don’t have a fucking problem with it. People wanna do their thing, let ‘em. Just don’t let the kids see it, and that goes for the straights too. Families been coming to Rehoboth for as long as the homosexuals, so I don’t think either one has a problem with the other”).

He told me about his 42-year old brother-in-law, a Marine captain who was volunteering for his second tour in Iraq . The brother-in-law had told Eric and Eric’s father about his decision, and asked them not to tell his wife; he would break the news to her in the coming weeks. He felt, Eric said, an obligation to two countries, American and Iraq , and the soldiers in his unit. He sounded like a good guy. Neither Eric or I could figure out why he needed to risk death and a widowed wife, and neither of us had the guts to directly question his decision. But we sure as hell took it out on the president for the next ten minutes.

“I don’t have T.V. in my place, man,” Eric said. “Fuck that. Every day. 12 dead. 16 dead. 28 dead. 32 dead. And that’s just the ones they tell us about, the ones who die, not the poor fuckers getting their arms and legs blown off.”

I took this trip to see my country again and this is also my country, my country in wartime, I thought, and then I ordered another beer, feeling a weird mix of self-righteous, angry, and more depressed then ever. I asked Eric what he did for a day job and he showed me his card.

“The Amazon Herb company?” I asked, with what must have been raised eyebrows.

“We’re totally legal dude. We’re actually a really heart and soul business. The plants we sell are harvested by indigenous Amazon Indians, and then distributed here for health and recreation purposes, and a cut of the money is poured back into the tribes and locally run conservation efforts in Brazil .”

“That’s good,” I said. “Sounds like a cool company.”

“Also, the shit will still get you high.” I nodded.

I asked him about one of Delaware ’s only famous bands: George Thorogood and the Delaware Destroyers, who dropped the “ Delaware ” after “Bad to the Bone” took off.

“I mean, Springstein’s been playing up the New Jersey thing for his whole career,” I said.

“Yeah, well, Jersey is Jersey ,” Eric said with a bit of resignation. “ Delaware ? Dude. Delaware’s got no street cred.”