Man's Inhumanity

One of the Andersonville POWs at the end of the war.

It was a perfect day to visit Andersonville Prison in the back roads of southwestern Georgia. The drizzling, dreary day was the backdrop to this terrible place. For it was here that the Confederate Army created a POW camp for Yankee prisoners during the Civil War. It was here, in this 26.5 acres of open land with a filthy, bacteria-laden stream running through it, that 45,000 Union soldiers were incarcerated. And 13,000 of them died of disease or starvation.
We came here not to be uplifted, but to feel the pain of war and man's inhumanity to man. This terrible place now is a National Historic Site. It contains a museum honoring all POWs. This, on its own, is a bit overwhelming since it adds layers upon layer to the horrors we and others have perpetrated.
But it forces us, again, to confront our terrible history.

“My heart aches for these poor retches, Yankees though they are, and I am afraid God will suffer some terrible retribution to fall upon us for letting such things happen. If the Yankees should ever come to southwest Georgia and go to Anderson and see the graves there, God have mercy on the land!”
A Southern woman who climbed
a guard tower and looked down upon
the stockade in 1864.

The Southern captain who was in charge of the prison was hanged in Washington after the end of the war. His explanation: “I was following orders.”

Thirty miles away is Plains, Georgia, the home of President Jimmy Carter. We drove down there after lunch and spent time in the Peanut store and in the Plains High School that now is another historic site where Carter is honored. His brother, Billy, had a gas station in town and it has been turned into a museum. Billy died back in the 1980s.
Before we headed here – just 100 miles north of the Florida border, we stopped off in Atlanta to visit the CNN headquarters. I remember when CNN started back in 1980. My how it has grown. Even though CNN is not doing well in the ratings (coming in behind Fox and MSNBC among the 24-hour cable operations) it still is an impressive place to visit. We toured the multiple studios and our guide even took us to a mockup of a weather studio where we could see how the green screen works. He used three youngsters for the demonstration and made them disappear on screen when he placed a green cloth over them. The class clown, of course, had to raise his hand above the cloth and it appeared on the weather map as a disembodied hand.
CNN's International network had anchor studios in Atlanta, London and Hong Kong so they can track with the sun. CNN en Espanol is a massive enterprise, all in Spanish, whereas the International feeds are dubbed into around 40 different languages. All of this came spinning out of the brain of Ted Turner who conceived of the notion of have news 24 hours a day.

Buddha and the Bugs

I just came across this blog from 2004, written when Jo and I were in Siem Reap, Cambodia. It had been filed in a different place than the current blogs. But it made me laugh - again. Maybe it will have the same effect on you.


And the Lord Buddha looked down on Room 15 of Earthwalkers Guest House in Siem Reap Town and he saw the biting bugs climbing on the walls, all one thousand of those bugs. And he saw the bugs walking on the ceiling and on the floor of Room 15. And the Lord Buddha said, “This probably is not so good.”
And the man and the woman in Room 15, trying to sleep in the hot, sultry night, tried to make peace with the one thousand bugs. And they were queasy for the bugs they were not afraid, nor were they shy about biting the man and the woman. And, lo, there were three crickets in the room, placed there by the Lord Buddha so that the man and the woman might find respite from the biting bugs. And the three crickets sought diligently to reach out and eat each of the one thousand biting bugs. And they were sorely unsuccessful.
And the man said unto the woman, “Let us turn off the light that lighteth the room, for the light be the attraction for the biting bugs.” And so they did. And the man and the woman lay in the darkness of Room 15 and they felt the biting bugs jumping upon their persons. And the bugs did bite. And even as the crickets did their best to eat many of the biting bugs they were not successful. And the man rose up in the darkness. And he cursed the biting bugs and said he could not live side by side with the biting bugs.
And the man went unto the first floor of the guest house and spoke with the manservant, Narith. And the man said unto the manservant, “Get thee unto the Room 15 and slay the many biting bugs for it is impossible for us to lay down our heads and sleep. And the manservant picked up the spray can of insecticide and went unto Room 15 and slew the many hundreds of biting bugs, all those that the man had not slain and those that the crickets had not eaten. And there was a great cloud in the air and the man and woman left the room while the manservant slew the biting bugs, for the air was unfit for breathing.
And the manservant brought a broom and he brought also unto Room 15 a shovel and he cleaned the room of the dead biting bugs and even the dead crickets. For they had to be sacrificed so that the man and the woman could inhabit the room. There was no joy in Room 15 that the crickets had to die so that the man and the woman could sleep.
And peace fell upon Room 15. And in the morning, the manservant said unto the manager of the guesthouse that he had never seen so many biting bugs in one place. He said that he was sore afraid of the biting bugs but he had dispatched them and they would bother the guests no more. In the sun of the new day the man and the woman knew in their hearts they would return to the earth in another time and they would come as biting bugs for they had much penance to pay for the death and destructions that they had brought upon the community of biting bugs.

On the Mountain Top

A fast-rolling river cuts through the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Elkmont, Tennessee.

“They carefully got all the mud and they laid it out on the rocks. And when it was dry enough, Grandfather threw it out into the water, and it became land. And the buzzard flew with his great wings. Each time when his wings went down, it would make a big valley. And each time the wings would go up, it would make a big mountains.
- Adapted from Living Stories of the Cherokee, “How the World was Made.” Kathi Smith Littlejohn


In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth....And God said, Let the waters under heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear. And it was so. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters he called seas.
- Genesis 1:1,9,10, The Bible, King James Version

It came to pass that we came into the Great Smoky Mountains to camp amid the mountains and the billions of falling leaves. The creeping walking pneumonia that I have been battling since sitting on a ridge in Reston, Virginia, is not better. But sitting in the national park lifted the spirits. Outside our RV on Tuesday night was a man with a sophisticated telescope. He had it trained on Jupiter so we watched that planet in the pristine night air. Four moons orbited around the planet and he said if we watched long enough we would be able to see gas trails coming off the planet. What a treat!

You have no electricity, running water or sewers or other niceties in the National Park. So it was a cold night: temperatures dropped to 36 degrees. Jo and I huddled under layers of comforters and blankets and the cat snuggled into the bend of Jo's knees. She was content to have us back in the rig after two nights when we luxuriated in the welcoming home of old boating buddies Terry and Susan in Banner Elk, North Carolina. Their home is perched on the side of a mountain and sends out vibrations of peacefulness. They took us up Grandfather Mountain. It's a mile high and the ice coated trees at the summit. But there's also a million dollar view up there and we loved watching the bears, deer and two cougars. This was a rare treat.

Now we are enjoying the beauty of the Smokies. But the road in, through Sevierville, Pigeon's Forge and Gatlinburg was the most horrendously commercial, filled with the ticky-tacky detritus of the worst of American consumption and gaudiness. It took more than an hour to drive 18 miles because of the nose-to-tail traffic.

So it was a spiritually uplifting moment to drive to the top of the Smokies and make our way to Clingmans Dome, a sacred mountain to the Cherokees, where the Magic Lake was once seen. The Great Spirit told the Cherokees that, “if they love me, if they love all their brothers and sisters, and if they love the animals of the earth, when they grow old and sick, they can come to a magic lake and be made well again.” My cough and rattling lungs were not healed by the climb to 6,600 feet. But I have faith that the journey in itself is the healing part.

This is where the Cherokee Trail of Tears began. You may remember, back in June, when we parked at the Trail of Tears Park alongside the Mississippi, we told a bit about the trail. This is the place where the Cherokees lived for thousands of years. And this is where the white settlers discovered gold and the fertile land they craved. So the Army pushed the Indians to the unexplored west.

A Ford van from Ohio pulled up alongside us and out stepped a gaggle of Mennonites. The men's pants don't have much in the way of pockets; they had a single button that held a triangular patch that, when closed, acted as a pocket. The ladies were in their white linen hats. All spoke in old German. They, too, came to feel the spirituality of the place.

Meeting George Washington

George Washington rides out.

We've parked our rig on a hill overlooking the capital. We took advantage of our location to visit the home of George Washington at Mount Vernon in Virginia. And we took, among other things, a slave tour. We were left in awe about this rich farmer who managed more than 300 slaves by the end of his life. Our tour guide, a Virginia gentleman named Allen Sandler, did a super job of shining light into the darkness of slave life.
George, like nine other presidents of the U.S., first inherited his father's slaves when the old man died when George was aged 12. When he married Martha, a widow of one of the richest men in the the commonwealth, he picked up about 200 slaves through her dead husband's estate. Interesting to us was that he did not have any right to sell the slaves he had acquired through marriage.
After the war that resulted in independence for the colonies he began to rethink the moral issues of owning other men and women. He decided he never would sell his slaves on the auction block. And that, in itself, created a huge problem for him. It meant he had to feed and clothe these people as their number increased. Remember, when a slave got to be too old for work, you had to effectively put them out to pasture but still feed and clothe them. At one point he complained that the number of slaves could bankrupt him. The entire slave culture was a no-win situation. You had totally unmotivated workers who spent more time trying to figure how to avoid work instead of trying to accomplish tasks. They also spent much of their time trying the cheat and steal from their master because morale was not at highest priority. Then you had to have a class of overseers to push and prod them.
He actually included in his will that his slaves would be freed upon the death of Martha, assuming she outlived him. She in fact lived for more than two years after he died and told her friends that she lived in fear because so many slaves were awaiting her death. Could she really trust Lilly, the cook, for example, or the black ladies who cleaned her house?
We met up with a black re-enactor who was George Washington's riding aide. He did a grand job of explaining his life at the side of his master. I asked him why he felt loyalty to his master and he made an elegant and moving response about believing that his master's leading of the fight for freedom was like a small snowball at the top of the mountain. He said many of the slaves believed this snowball's fall down the mountain would eventually encompass the needs of the slaves. He said he and they didn't realize it would take 63 years after his master's death before the Emancipation Proclamation would be signed by President Lincoln.
We wandered through Mount Vernon, a sprawling home that is quite spectacular. Washington designed it and redesigned through the years. It looks as though it is built of stone, the blocks being beveled and snugly placed row upon row. It turned out, however, that the huge home is built of wood. The wood was cut and beveled and then was varnished and painted. While the paint was still wet, sand was sprinkled on the wood resulting in the fake stone look.
It is situated on a bluff overlooking the Potomac River. It sits on around 5,000 acres. The land mostly was used to grow tobacco – the only crop that could be exported to Europe back then. But George changed that over to wheat and grains because he built a distillery and he could supply his own ingredients for the booze.
But it was labor intensive to farm that many acres in those good old days before the tractor. Hence the need for the Africans.
He also brought in many white indentured servants and Mr. Lee, his riding aide, made it very clear that these indentured servants were similar in many ways to slaves. They signed a contract that paid their passage over and they agreed to work for the master for seven years. But, once here, you began to owe your life to the company store and that, along with transgressions, extended the contract year after year. So the Irish and the Scots who worked his farm were there, effectively, for life.
George brought in a gardener from Scotland and he oversaw a large number of slaves because the master liked fancy gardens and kept a substantial vegetable patch. He also had trees planted, some of which stand majestically along the approach to the house to this day.
His greatest contributions, I think, were twofold. After winning the war of independence he resigned his commission instead of following the advice of some of his officers who suggested he should name himself king of the colonies. And, when he was elected the first president, he ran for only two terms. This set the precedent for all other presidents.
Jo was most impressed with a small exhibit in one of the museums. Inside a low-light room, inside a circular case, were his false teeth. They were not made of wood, despite the circulated myth. These fine choppers were made from human teeth, along with pieces of bone from a cow. They were set in a plate of lead so it is a bit of a miracle that the lead didn't affect his brain.

Restoring the soul

This fine fellow is dressed as an officer of the 42nd regiment of the Black Watch which was sent to New York in 1776 to put down the rebellion in the colonies.

There was a drizzle permeating the air as we rolled over Mohawk Mountain and came to the little village of Goshen in northwest Connecticut where we attended the Scottish Games. This was the culmination of a soul restoration program over the past month that had taken us deep into the backwoods of Maine.
We had canoed in the silent, still waters of Acadia National Park. We had fairly stuffed ourselves with awesomely cheap Maine lobster. Because of over supply, the price has fallen sharply and we were happy to the beneficiaries of the sweet meat at $3.95 a pound.
We had launched our canoe on Sebasticook Lake in the middle of the state where we stayed with old sailing friends. And we had criss-crossed Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont, admiring the screaming scarlets and magentas and orange leaves of the maple trees as they prepared to shed their beauty for the coming winter.
Now, on this drizzling day, we came to Goshen. The misty meadows seemed a fitting place for the Highland Games. And the visiting preacher noted the occasion by thanking God for making the day a "perfect replica of what we might experienced were we standing on the beloved old country."
We had come for the sheepdog trials and watched, laughing, as a woman shepherd called to her dog to "come by" and to "stay down; stay down" as he rounded up three geese and tried to bring them down the field. The geese were having none of it, though, and they had to be declared the winners.
Another dog did a great job of rounding up the sheep and bringing them home to the pen.
We watched rugged men and even-more-rugged women throw the hammer across a field. The women were hefty and did a pretty good job. But it took a powerful black man in a plain dark blue kilt to win the event with an awesome throw of 124 feet.
In one of the tents, Jo held up a silver goblet and asked me what it was for. I told her it is a "quaich" and that it's formally used for toasting friends. The owner of the tent spoke up: "You're the first person whose ever pronounced that correctly," he said. I explained I was a native of Scotland, which led to the questions about where. It turned out he and I were from the same town, Inverness. He wanted to know where in Inverness and I told him Haugh Road. He not only knew the road but knew the old grocery shop over which we lived 60 years ago. He and his wife told us they had come over from Scotland 10 years ago. She said Inverness is the fastest-growing town in the whole of Scotland because of a huge spurt in jobs from a medical supply manufacturer.
We wandered over to Camerons, the pie-maker. We bought our Scottish meat pies, some sausage rolls and Forfar bridies. These will be used slowly as we wander south to the warmth of Florida.