Our 6th grandchild, Carolyn, was born yesterday. We will be going to see Carolyn on the 22nd and then heading back to Tampa.
We are guests of Ann and Andy this week. We play 3 or 4 sets of doubles tennis every day with them at the country club. In the evening we go out on the pontoon boat and swim in the darkened lake.
It's nice to swim without worrying about gators or sharks for a change.....Let's rethink that.... I have no regrets, nothing to change...I think I'll start walking the inner city streets again at 3 AM when we get back to Tampa. I like to wear all black clothing, black gloves and a black hood and stand by the docks in the AM shadows waiting silently for passerbys. The future Phred will have no regrets. I hope to see many more sharks and gators soon. And the next time we pass an amusement park, I'm going on the big waterslide. That's it...my only regret...waterslides passed.
The war had dragged on for less time than the current one in Iraq, but had produced 630,000 casualties.
On April 1, 1865, General Robert E. Lee and the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia retreated west from Richmond and Petersburg. He led his army toward Appomattox where three supply trains with rations and ammunition were waiting.
Lee’s army, once invincible, now was “fought to a frazzle”, starving, gaunt and ragged.
The Union cavalry, commanded by George Armstrong Custer, swept around and captured and burned the waiting supply trains on April 8. Lee had one chance left. There was another supply train waiting further west at Lynchburg if he could brush aside Custer’s cavalry.
The Union Army of the James, made a 30 mile march over a 21-hour period and arrived in time to support the cavalry and sandwich Lee’s forces between two superior armies.
The situation was hopeless and Lee accepted U. S. Grant’s terms. The surrender was made in the small town with the curious name “Appomattox Court House”. Gentlemen of the day customarily conducted business in a residence. The Wilmer Mclean residence was selected. At one time, I thought that perhaps the surrender document was taken to the courthouse to be recorded, but this was not the case.
On April 10, 1965, Lee arrived in an immaculate uniform. Grant wore a dirty private’s uniform and, nearly overcome with emotion, found it difficult to come to the point of the meeting. Grant began to discuss their previous encounters in the Mexican-American War. Lee brought the meeting back to the subject.
The surrender terms were generous. Lee’s men were allowed to keep their horses and mules to help with the Spring planting. Officers were allowed to retain sidearms and baggage. 22,000 parole documents were printed and signed, allowing the confederates safe passage though union lines for the long, hungry walks home.
The McLean Home and the town were dedicated after WWII as a National Historic Park. Attending the dedication in 1950 were American generals Robert E. Lee IV and General U. S. Grant, both grandchildren.
We board the yacht Celebrity in Alexandria at 5 PM for the wedding. The white-haired Captain performs the wedding ceremony on the Potomac River. There is an open bar. Dinner is served after the ceremony. The boat cruises slowly toward the sea and then turns around and passes Reagan International Airport and the Washington Monument as darkness falls.
We don’t know the bride well although we have been friends with the mother of the bride for many years. The father of the bride, a more recent friend, Bruce, wears his tuxedo with all the medals he earned in four tours as a Navy SEAL in Vietnam. He has his silver star on the right-most side of his bank of medals. HBe tells me that the medals were insisted upon by the bride. He's not sure wearing them with a tux is legal. I try to imagine someone with the balls to challenge him and fail.
The bride, we learn, has taught in the American University of Beirut. The groom has served in the Peace Corps in Tonga and Zimbabwe. At one point a very energetic dance breaks out with Tonga music and eight young people who have served in Tonga dance with the bride and groom.
After the garter and bouquet tossing and the cake cutting, the guests are all issued yellow rubber ducks to salute the newly married couple on the dock with faint squeaks.
I was very impressed with these two young people who represent the best that our country has to offer. Eagles mate for life. My hopes go with this young couple. May they do as well as eagles.
The igneous granite and metamorphic rocks in this area date back a billion years. I wrestle with this number while walking down the trail and work out in my head that if a billion years was compared to one year, each second in a year is equal to more than 30,000 years.
The mountains here are old and worn down by erosion from streams and glaciers. The dinosaurs walked here about September 30th. The glaciers from the last ice age receded and the great sloth and wooly mammoth became extinct less than a second before year end. Man came on the scene 11,000 years ago, about 1/3 of a second before midnight, December 31. We started seriously using fossil fuels 1/1000 of a second before midnight. Mayflies suddenly have a new relative longevity.
The trail goes downhill three miles to a waterfall. There is an elevation drop of 915 feet. We meet a German on the trail. He has a black curly moustache and looks Italian. He tells us excitedly about a black bear at least “two meters” tall. We end our short conversation with a long guttural laugh, a shared universal language
We meet an older couple on the trail. They have also seen the great bear. They’ve been married over 50 years. They look good physically and have had their furniture in storage for the last five years while they cruise North America.
We have lunch at a reflecting pool below the falls and wait quietly for an hour to see the bear. It fails to appear. This park has 516 miles of hiking trails and a road that runs 100 miles along the crest of the Blue Ridge Mountains. It was built by the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and completed in 1939 under the direction of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Tropical storm Ernesto is due her tomorrow with 40 MPH winds and 12 inches of rain. We play scrabble in the afternoon. I quit game two in disgust after Mrs. Phred places an “X” on a triple letter space and makes 25 points on an “ex” in one direction and another 25 on an “ox” in the other. Our campground is in the clouds and rain. More rain is expected for the next four days. A ranger tells us we may need to evacuate. I make halibut for dinner again.
Mrs. Phred and I have decided we may spend the winter in New Orleans as volunteers to help build housing for low income residents, then move north to Alaska.
We drove up to a high overlook on the Blue Ridge Parkway last night to pick up cell signals for the phone and the laptop. In the dark, I drop the inverter into a cup of cranberry juice and tonic water. When I plug the wet inverter into the cigarette lighter of the Toyota it blows the 15 amp fuse. We need the Toyota lighter receptacle to power its braking system air pump when it is under tow. The fuse is impossible to fix in the dark. In the morning I locate the fuses (bless Toyota for including a fuse puller and spare fuses) and buy a new inverter at Wal-Mart.
We drive the Blue Ridge after dark for nearly 100 miles and catch dozens of deer, badgers, a possum and a skunk in the headlights. The speed limit on this beautiful road is 45 MPH…no commercial vehicles allowed. I took some shots of Roanoke after dark from a mountain top. The 500 mile road was constructed as a make-work project on orders from President Roosevelt during the depression. It’s lined with hardwoods which must be even more spectacular in the fall.
We saw the National D-Day memorial in Bedford today. It can’t compare to the roses, white crosses, sea view and statuary in the American cemetery in Normandy. More boys from Bedford (per capita) were lost from the 116th infantry division than from any other American community.
We drive on to Lynchburg. Mrs. Phred asks me innocently if the name comes from lynching people. I hum "Strange Fruit" by Billie Holiday. But I suspect that the town is named for a man…probably a man who made a difference. There is almost certainly is a man named Lynch in the city history…The local High School football team possibly carries on his name as the “Lynchburg Raiders” or the “Lynchburg Patriots”. Maybe he operated a tavern for tired travelers….perhaps a bawdy house… I hope he is not a banker or a merchant…or a tobacco planting slave owner. I imagine a Colonel John Lynch raising and training a local militia and organizing an insurgency with hatchets and flintlocks against the hated redcoats, sowing the local roads with improvised explosive devices; or maybe a Doctor Thomas Lynch fighting tuberculosis and yellow fever with soldiers from both sides in a quarantined hospital in unimaginable conditions during the Civil War, sawing off blackened gangrenous limbs and comforting the dying.
We visit a winery in the remote hills of Appalachia. The wines are what one would consider dessert wines, made from a variety of fruits and even hot chili peppers…personally I prefer Sauvignon Blanc, but I buy six bottles of pear, blueberry and apple wines. They still fly a tattered Confederate flag here and display other politically incorrect symbols.
Here are some pictures from the 2,175 mile Appalachian walking trail…I didn’t walk the whole thing.
We are staying with retired friends on Smith Mountain Lake in western Virginia. The pace of life here is very slow. We spend days watching the bird feeders, playing tennis doubles, swimming in isolated coves and drinking wine in the evening.
The sensation of floating on your back with submerged ears and looking at blue sky and tree lines upside down is strange and disorienting. It’s like laying on your back with earphones and watching a lover's face move while they talk. It's hard to get used to the mouth being where the forehead belongs or the weightless, soundless feeling that makes you think you might fall upward forever into the blue sky. The lakes grow colder as we move north.
One of the birds here (a house wren) has severe flight control issues. It lurches toward the feeder, overshoots, backpedals, folds it wings and makes a crash landing on the feeder lip. It scared me badly by flying into the back of my leg while I was on my cell phone and by flying into my knee while I was reading. I watch its progress daily but there is no improvement.
We played three sets of doubles yesterday. I take turns with different partners. In the last set I partner with Mrs. Phred and actually win. It feels good. My first tennis victory. She wins with all three of her partners.
The fireflies put on a light show at dusk on the lake-shore. A rapid blink rate is a prized male characteristic for the females waiting in the grass below. They like flashy males.
We went into Roanoke, 45 minutes away, today, and we happened upon an Indian festival (the kind from Asia. The market was full of vegetables, fruits, jugglers, Indians in bright dress and bearded blue grass musicians. The town has a laser light show twice a day with Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin music and a poetry Open Mike on Sundays. They were holding the monthly silent peace vigil in the town square today…a lovely small town. Open coal cars fill the rail yards…the Blue Ridge Parkway has an entrance on the edge of town.
We watched “RV” last night. It may be a good thing Robin Williams is going into rehab. He only made me laugh once with the line “Whenever I hear banjo music, it makes my cheeks pucker”. I give Ann and Andy my hard-copy of “Deliverance” by James Dickey from our RV library.
