Grit Test and The Last Prayer at Gettysburg

This July I took my youngest son, a preteen, to Gettysburg for a small rite of passage challenge. He was unaware it was unfolding. 

The challenge began the day before visiting the battlefield with a nine mile forced march with full pack to a primitive campsite deep in the Michaux State Forest northwest of Gettysburg. 

Immediately arriving, I asked him to clear the area and make camp, split wood, fetch and boil water for the evening all while I “supervised.” Finished, it was then a steep climb sans packs to a rocky overlook and then to a small lake and back, a mile and a half each way.

Complaining of any kind, including about the flies, mosquitos, and intentionally meager dinner was not something I was going to correct but was the very thing I was particularly watching for. The entire day was punctuated with questions about life and what he saw his role in it might be. 

I woke him half an hour before sunrise and told him it was to break camp and hike back but now it was “important” that we beat our time by 20% (he had to calculate what that meant in real time). “Protein bar and drink if you must, but it will be as you hike.” A light rain began which only made the already humid air worse when it stopped. We hardly spoke on the way back.

A hundred yards from the trail head and the vehicle, we stopped. I looked him in the eye and explained what was going on. I told him it was a grit and integrity test and that he passed, “Well done.” He nodded and told me we had to keep going if we wanted to beat time. 

I am proud of him for not just keeping up with what worked out to be an adult-level pace over uneven terrain with a pack but for having the right attitude and thoughtful answers all without knowing he was being scrutinized. Without saying so, but inferring from his many questions afterwards, it is clear that he recognized that the experience, structured not to be pleasant, had been in service to a higher purpose that he appreciated.

I’ve done this grit test with similar effect with his siblings. I had seriously debated at one point reading passages from Seneca and The Prince all the while. I think it was a mistake not to have incorporated this. 

Gettysburg as the “reward” was chosen this time because it tied in well to my son’s challenge, presenting so many opportunities to make the past tangible and to read aloud reflections from those who fought. Lessons about valor and courage, but also about the stupidity and waste of the war, what the fight was really about and the great tragedy of the South’s defeat. 

The Unexpected Lesson

Few things are as enjoyable as an indulgent meal after really working for it, so we went to a prominent restaurant (not a dive) on the center square. It had been five years since being in the town of Gettysburg and there were indeed changes. The full extent of the decline was revealed over the next several hours. 

With the exception of a kempt girl greeting people, the wait staff were either lisping men frankly too old to still be waiters or trashy looking women. Our waitress was tatted up with a blue stone the size of an almond impaled in the center of her tongue leaving her with a speech impediment. It was a nauseating distraction: “Does she ever not drool? Is this drool infected because she has a rotting abscess in her mouth? Would is be safer having the gay guy handle my food?”

Leaving lunch and walking the main streets spoking out from the center of town, the new pride flag (the embarrassingly childish mash-up of the rainbow flag and South Africa’s) easily outnumbered both the Confederate and Union flags hanging from storefronts and windows. The marquee on one of the community theaters aggressively proclaimed their undying love for diversity and all things transgressive. 

At a crowded sidewalk ice-cream shop, patrons were watching as a thirty-something married couple entertained an audience with an over-the-top and repulsive performance of sharing their oversized waffle cone as a threesome with their immaculately groomed purebred English Boxer. No child in sight.  

White-collar dentist-by-day but full-patched suburban weekend biker clubs (the point 1%ers) riding high-end Harleys were so numerous and so loud that there were precisely zero seconds without the din of their aftermarket straight pipes making street-side conversation impossible. I asked if it was always like Sturgis here and was told for the last several years, yes indeed and that more and more “bikers welcome” bars were opening all the time in the area.

The Pagans and Warlocks are bikers. I have a healthy respect for bikers. These are not bikers. These are human cicadas continuously emerging from hell.

We ducked into a hatter’s store. No baseball caps and tourist apparel here. Instead, handmade riding caps, thick leather brimmed hats, felt and real beaver bowlers, and of course meticulous historical recreations. Obscure baroque music was playing and it smelled like pipe. It was an oasis. The proprietor was a craftsman and the real deal. We got to talking and he got to ranting. He was sick of it all, sick of what was outside his door, sick of the country, sick that the Union won. 

He wanted to know if I thought Trump would run again and if the Supreme Court would finally “do the right thing.” No, I really don’t think any of that is possible, sir. I wished him well and my son and I left colliding into a pod of overweight women sucking on soda bottles like mutant hamsters. 

Nothing about the town improved.

The Abomination of Desolation 

Standing at Cemetery Ridge, if you allow yourself to be still and to be quiet, it is possible to be there that hot and humid July. It is possible to truly be standing and looking not at a memorial battleground but at an unspoiled field moments before it all began, to know that thousands of you, far away from your beloved homes and family, will today test your grit and integrity for a cause you know is righteous and good. These thoughts are prayers and they are possible to make. They are just and deserving to offer.

The mindless roar of another poser gang of weekend fools on their Fat Boys and Soft Tails shatters this moment. The statues were weeping. I knew I would never return to Gettysburg.  

Driving back through rural Pennsylvania with the many Trump/Pence signs still in yards I asked my son one more question: Do you think the men would have fought each other at Gettysburg if they could have been with us today?