... "idyllic," that's the word to describe this scene ... a spot for a man to sit, his girl tucked beneath his arm as he reads poetry ... a place for a picnic, mom and dad relaxing as the kids run in the field trying to catch crickets ... perhaps, even, where a very old man can stand in the shade, reflecting upon how the tree was just a sapling when as a boy he passed it on his way to skip stones across the little stream that runs through the cool darkness of the woods a the bottom of the hill ... there is peace to be found here, in the serenity of the shade, and in one way or another, i believe, all of us wish we could, if only momentarily, be enveloped in its timeless grace ...
... on the 17th of september in 1862 almost 30,000 men fought in this little field ... back and forth, back and forth, the field changed hands perhaps sixteen or seventeen times ... after several hours, when the battle had moved on to other parts of the landscape, left behind were over a thousand dead soldiers ... over 9,000 had been wounded, many to the point that for the rest of their lives they would suffer ... decades after the war had concluded, in an entirely new century, there would be tired old men haunted by a lifetime of nightmares who looked forward to the darkness that would return them to the comrades they'd lost in this cornfield ...
... antietam ... a national battlefield monument ... a park ... a beautiful place ... an obscenity ...
... it's so neat, so tidy, so perfectly presented ... i wish that those who maintain the place could once a week go to a slaughter house and obtain a few barrels of cow blood ... then, after the tour busses and bicyclists, motorcyclists like me, even the hikers who roam the battlefield afoot, after all of them had been lined up along the fence the separates the road from the field, then the blood would be spread across the furrows and beneath the tree ... and a park ranger would come out in front of all, smokey the bear hat in hand, and say to the assembled crowd, "ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, that's the best we can do ... it's up to you to imagine the bodies, and the body parts ... it's up to you to hear the screams, the moaning ... you must listen for the prayers that suffering come to end, and the pleas a soldier makes to his comrades, that they bring merciful end to drawn out agony ... this battlefield, for those few horrific hours over a century ago, it was not a place of ideology or philosophy, or even political partisanship ... it was death's abode" ...
... i drove comfortably onto the antietam battlefield as a tourist ... i left in great haste, and, for several hours, looked and thought of absolutely nothing but the road in front of me ...