Gettysburg Weekend Part Two

This calf gets it.

23 October 2021

7:00: Wake up, wash up, make the coffee.

7:30: Breakfast in the room with the food I brought with me.

8:00: Jim and TEW arrive, and I fill them with caffeine. They've been awake since the wee hours, so this isn't their first shot of the day. They'd eaten in their room, but had ventured down to see what the hotel had to offer. "It was another superspreader event," TEW says.

9:00: Schedule my Moderna booster at CVS for November 4.

9:30: Meet in the parking lot by Tom's car for the day's ride.

The route will take us west to the Gettysburg battlefield and the Sachs covered bridge. It's an amalgam of a couple of the Fall Foliage Weekend's preset routes, with Tom's adjustments to get us onto the good roads.

There's a 40-something percent chance that we'll be rained on. The cloud cover is heavy over a pasture of black cows.

Around the bend in the road, at the top of the hill, we can see that they're grazing on what's left of the harvested corn.

Not many miles later there are sheep, and I promise I won't stop for any more livestock after this.

The roads here are perfect for cycling. The surfaces are nearly flawless, the views are expansive because it's almost all farmland, and the terrain is gently rolling if you aim in the right direction.

I feel a few drops of rain. Next to a masked calf statue, I stop to put my camera into a plastic bag.

And then I have to take it out again immediately, because there's a kitty in the field.

We only get a few drops of rain now and then as we approach the Gettysburg battlefield park. We turn onto a wooded drive and climb, getting overtaken by rental scooter-cart-thingies and a tour bus or two. Tom leads us to a bike rack, and we walk up to the precipice overlooking the field.

The place is swarming with people, mostly men, all White, some in Civil War regalia. I know little about the details of the Civil War. I'm not one to glorify mass slaughter. All I can think as I stand here taking pictures is that a second civil war is already upon us. This time it's being done with gerrymandering and vote suppression, broadcast fear and misinformation, a quiet war that will end with minority rule forever, White men telling the rest of us what to do with our bodies. The view is pretty; the war isn't.

We follow the winding road downhill, past a pile of rocks called the Devil's Something-Or-Other, which is a popular thing to call a pile of rocks, if the Sourlands nomenclature tells us anything. 

As we head west, the rain falls in earnest. We're damp as we reach the Sachs covered bridge.

We make the bridge our rest stop, sheltering inside with two people fishing and a pair of bikers approaching from the opposite end.

There are hundreds of crushed candy corn on the slats.

We watch the raindrops on the creek, waiting for them to go away. We're wet, the kind of wet that will take hours to warm up from.

After ten minutes or so, the rain peters out and we move on, over a road that gives us another view of the bridge.

At this point, I'm pretty much ready to go straight back to the hotel, but we're at the farthest point in the route, and straight back is the route Tom plotted in the first place.

It rains on us a little more as we re-enter the battlefield. The clouds are not letting up.

We push on, eastward. To the southeast, which is where we're headed, the sky looks threatening.

I don't even know what "Veg-A-Ery" is supposed to mean. Clearly there's an alternate spelling system out here.

Tom says we have twelve more miles, but that he's going to add a surprise for us at the end. "Is it edible?" I ask. I'm hungry.

"Yes," he says.

As we wind our way through the country roads, I come to the conclusion that, as pretty as it is out here, I am too far gone as an East Coast snob to want to live out here. I can't live in a White space. My skin color might match, but my morality doesn't. I'd die out here, from depression or some Proud Boy's bullet.

Tom leads us off-course, our GPS units beeping at every corner. We ride past another Utz factory, through a neighborhood where ostentatious houses have warehouse views, and turn into the parking lot of Bruster's ice cream stand.

Ice cream for lunch? I guess so! I'm hungry enough to ask for pumpkin. Yikes! 

This is the first ice cream I've had since leaving Bar Harbor, and it's really good.

Behind us, in the direction of the hotel, the sky is getting darker and darker.

We hurry back. I keep my eye on our shadows, which start to fade minutes before we reach the hotel. We're all safely inside when the rain begins, and it lasts for hours. 

Tom and I are going to drive back to the battlefield to see if we can catch the sunset. The cloud cover is down to about 30 percent now. It's worth a shot. 

After that, we'll order takeout from a diner. Jim and TEW will meet us with takeout from a steak house. Jack H and Dorothy will find us somehow. 

If there's a good sunset, there will be another Gettysburg blog post.

We're supposed to go on a short ride tomorrow, but, in all honesty, I'm perfectly fine with just packing up and heading home. Hiding out by myself in a hotel room for hours isn't much fun when the only view is of the parking lot.