Vic Socotra

24 September 2009

Go Ahead (and Tread)

(Culpeper Minutemen Flag)

I took my thermos-cup of coffee and lit up a Luckie as I walked out of my gravel driveway onto the narrow black-top of the farm lane. The stones crunched under my sneakers. The sky was blue and the temperature just on the verge of sweater weather.

I was wearing a white t-shirt with only a small logo, and clean jeans. My sneakers were neither old nor new. If I had considered it, I would have said I was neutrally dressed.

I had only chosen comfort, not statement. I started early that morning, since there were chores to be done. This was not one of them, but I had never seen this many vehicles on the little lane, certainly not a long line of work-trucks taking half the road stretching from the adjacent property almost to my mailboxes.

It was just about a hundred yards into a different universe.

Starting the morning at Big Pink, I was in my element. The green tarp that covered the pool signified an end to one pattern of living and the start of a new one.

The direction I pointed the nose of the Bluesmobile was not so much a question of distance as much as the quality of the roads. The Virginia routes are always fine. It is the interstates that hold the commuter nightmare, and this early on a Saturday, there was clear sailing all the way.

This morning I had chosen the long way, down I-95 to the Germanna Highway and then east. The road used to be known as the Orange Turnpike, and it pierces the heart of the Chancellorsville and Wilderness Battlefields.

It is peaceful in a profound way, once you get past the sprawl of development at Fredericksburg.

Luck of the draw, I hit a red light at the Ely’s Ford intersection, and since I had to slow down anyway, swerved off and into the empty parking lot behind what had been the Chancellor house.

It is a park now, and there is no “Chancellorsville,” per se. Only a couple cannons facing southwest and the foundations of an old brick building protruding from the green sod.

I parked the car haphazardly and walked with my fifth cup of coffee around the low foundation. This was Lee’s greatest victory, the one where he counted on the ineptitude of Federal Commander “Fighting Joe” Hooker, and divided his forces to triumph over a force twice his size.

I read the sign on the way out. In five hours at this place more than a hundred thousand soldiers collided, and 17,500 of them were killed, wounded or captured. It helpfully pointed out that it was the equivalent of a man being shot dead every six seconds for the whole time.

I paced a quiet tread on ground made sacred by sacrifce.

Stonewall Jackson got shot just up the road- I saw the sign as I accelerated back out onto the Germanna Highway and onward toward the Farm.

I guess I was ready to be in a pensive mood, and maybe the sudden concentration of people in a place normally so empty struck a chord.

I stubbed out my smoke on the road under the tread of my sneakers before I walked up onto the lawn to join the scattered knots of people examining the possessions of the dead guy.

The Dead man’s life was laid out in neat lines next to the modest farmhouse. Two large tube televisions leaned together on a pine bed, sagging the mattress underneath. Chairs and cheap mismatched bureaus and several camp tables covered with kitchen detritus.

Clean; nothing to convey anything except a mild sense of honest modest means.

The good stuff- the antiques- were a couple curio cases with glass fronts leaned up against the side of the house, under the watchful eyes of a stout woman with deep calculating eyes and her daughter who were collecting money for bidding numbers.

The auction is an old tradition here, and an honorable one. We city folks don’t have much to do with the custom, but here, the event combines a social and fiscal rite along with the quiet contentment that it is someone else and theirstuff going under the soil and the block.

It did not take much to make me feel like a visitor from space, even if I was treading the same ground. There were three kinds of people looking things over. Foreigners, the men in nice shorts and shirts their wives had picked out. Local men, farmers and workers,were dressed in sensible work clothes.

They spoke a deeply accented English that was nearly unintelligible to my ears, and closer to Elizabethan English than mine.

Hardy Scots and Irish stock, with a leavening of the Midlands. They all knew one another, and to them the auction was as close to going to church as it is possible to be on a Saturday. Then there were the speculators, the carrion crows of death.

I learned a lot about the dead guy from what I could make of the English. There were generations of things on display. An odd watercolor, nicely done, that featured a man at a printing press with a small Stars and Bars on the wall over his shoulder.

A pen and ink of a 1966 Camaro. A table of glass oil lamps, most completely intact.

Electricity is a relative newcomer here, after all, like indoor plumbing.

Then tables of tools. Mechanic, he was. A 327-cubic inch engine awaiting rebuild. Hoists and tackle to pull motors, and all the wrenches and ratchets to disassemble autos.

Three lawn tractors and an outbuilding with NASCAR-themed calendars featuring tools and young buxom women.

I realized quickly that I could not bid on anything here. It would bring a ghost to my little place, even if I could have used the weed-whackers and log-splitters and shovels and axes.

I do not think it is possible to be of this place unless you sprang from its soil. I am the foreigner, even if I own a piece of it, and I will never be a local.

The dead guy was. Two men in overalls commented on the “B” carved on the lid of an old sea-chest of WW II vintage and they knew who had once owned it.

This place is as old as America. The Culpeper Minutemen were organized on 17 July 1775 under a large oak tree in "Clayton's Old Field" on the ancient Catalpa Estate, just a couple miles from here. I’ll show you when you come down. Those Massachusetts rebels have nothing on Culpeper, I’ll tell you.

The company flag of our Minutemen is famous today, even if you might not recognize where it came from: a white banner featuring a rattlesnake, featuring the phrases "Liberty or Death" and "Don't Tread on Me.”

At the time, this County was considered frontier territory, and the Culpeper Minutemen, many of them hunters, preferred the rifle to the musket. They were the predecessors to Daniel Boone, and the next generation that went over the mountains just to the west.

As I walked back to my little piece of earth I wondered about the American Mystery. I knew the name, history and associates of the dead guy, and his antecedents.

I could have bid on some of his earthly belongings. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I don’t think I want my stuff mixed up with his when the Auctioneer comes to sell the stuff carried out on my lawn, you know?

But don’t worry. By then I won’t care, and ya’ll can go ahead and tread on me.

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