Leaving Today

The Governor's Palace is in the background as this carriage passes by in Williamsburg, VA.

American history and current events collided on Monday when Jo and I stepped back in time on a visit to Williamsburg, Virginia. There we were, walking on cobbled streets of earliest America. Outside on this perfectly balmy day the Twitters and news channels were dissecting the death of Osama bin Laden. It was a good day.

We crossed the bridge of time into Colonial Williamsburg. I liked the plaques embedded in the bridge, telling us with each step we passed through the building blocks of our own history:

"1776. You are a subject of King George"

"1790s. Your latest news is more than one week old"

"1865. You know people who own other people"

Colonial Williamsburg was brought to life in the 1920s when John D. Rockefeller provided the funds for a vision by a local minister who believed this old town could become a showcase for America's early history. They pulled it off.

Carriages, pulled by teams of horses, sauntered along the streets. Women with bustles and linen clothing stopped to talk with us about life in their town.
We stepped into the Governor's Palace, built in a show of power by the Brits. Lord Dunmore, the governor was not at home. But his entrance hall was pretty impressive. Hundreds of Scottish swords (Dunmore came from outside Glasgow in Scotland) were arrayed on the wooden walls. Several hundred muskets and pistols were arranged neatly to intimidate visitors.

A servant of his lordship, in character, walked us through the palace which took 14 years to build. He explained there was a party planned for the evening, hence the scurrying up and downstairs of the maids. I sidled up to the manservant and asked politely about the delicate state of King George's mental health back home in London. He was a little startled but recovered quickly. "His majesty has his good days and his bad days," he said. "We in the colonies feel he might live another three months." His majesty, as you probably know, went bonkers and had to be removed from the throne.

When we stopped by a carpenter working a spokeshave as he created cedar shingles, I wanted to know what he did with the mountain of shavings that piled in front of him. "Oh, we just throw it out. We have no real use for it," he said. I remarked that that seemed to be the very start of America's wasteful, throw-away culture and he smiled and said, "We have endless woods, sir. We will never run out." Yeah. Right.

In the smokehouse, we came upon a Negro slave who was pulling the sides of salted and smoked pigs out of the brick smokehouse. He explained the process of salting and then slow smoking that cured the meat. We were impressed with the almost lifelong storage of meat this permitted. But it also was a lesson in how important salt was in this process. That's where the tax on imported salt caused a hullabaloo among the Americans who still, at that time, thought of themselves as Englishmen.

Six hours of wandering through the town made me realize the huge improvement in my creaky back. A knitting friend of Jo's, back in Florida, had hooked me up with her husband, a doctor of osteopathy, who relieved my pains and freed up my muscles with his remarkable hammer. I call him "Ray the Hammer" because his incredible tool opened up my painful back muscles and gave me renewed hope of remaining functional. But it was more than the electronic hammer that he used on me. He also had the remarkable ability to lay his hands on my knotted muscles and feel the causes of my pain.

We ended the day outside the Raleigh Tavern on Duke of Gloucester Street. There we heard from a local newspaper publisher who was pushing the causes of independence for the colonies. The Virginians were not big fans of the Massachusetts terrorists, freedom fighters, insurgents (however you might wish to describe them). But they stood with them in protest over the import taxes demanded by England. They stood as one, men and women alike, by refusing to wear the finer cloth you could only buy from England. Instead, they began wearing clothing made from the coarser homespun cloth they could spin and weave on their own. It brought home to me, again, how history repeats itself. Gandhi did exactly the same thing when he taught Indians to give up the fine cloths of England and to spin their own cotton and weave their own cloth as part of his push for independence from the British Empire in the 1940s.

The next day, we rolled north to the outskirts of Washington and luxuriated in the welcoming warmth of old friends Richard and Jane in Fairfax Station.

Now we sit on our hill at Lake Fairfax County Park. Because we are a stone's throw from Washington, we are enjoying excellent television reception on a rainy day. This is the only city we have ever come through where it is possible to receive programs over the airwaves from Russia, Japan, China and even Al Jazeera English language TV.