Ocober 6, 2006; Migration

It has been over two months since we have added to our blog!  Since I last wrote, Madeline went to Florida for a three-week sojourn to visit her son and his family, returned, and we started our annual migration east. I will try to give you a run-down on our life since my last writing.

While Madeline was in Florida, I moved the RV up to Estes Park for about 8 days, in order to spend a little time in the mountains. I took several beautiful hikes. Unfortunately my photographer, Madeline, was not there, so I don’t have pictures to share. One hike was up Boulder Creek. This hike was very steep and strenuous. The creek had numerous little water falls and cascades. The hike ended up on another trail so, I could follow it back to the road, where a bus returned me to my car on the road to Bear Lake. Another hike started at Bear Lake, went up a couple of miles to about 11,000 feet, where one could look down from a height, viewing Odessa Lake. This is part of the trail to Fern Lake which is the locale for the book, “Hard Truth”, by Nevada Barr. I was a little proud to be able to hike, albeit slowly, at 10,000 to 11,000 feet.

When Madeline returned, we started our journey east. We stopped in Iowa a couple of days and visited our friends, Tom and Liz. They are our friends, formerly from our Saint Louis. While there, we visited the Athens battlefield. This is a battlefield during the Civil War in what was once a town on the Des Moines River. The town has since disappeared, but several houses remain, maintained as a state park. The battle occurred early during the Civil War, and consisted of Home Guard units fighting --- two groups of guerrilla really – rather than regular army units. It is interesting to reflect on the violence in the Border States during the Civil War. Missouri, in particular was racked with fights, killings and acts of terrorism, which were many times undertaken by vigilante gangs. (In fact, Jessie James got his start with one of these gangs.) It was impossible for people to not take sides. Families that did not take sides would be terrorized, robbed, and likely killed. They had to choose a side, in order to gain protection from some group. The parallels between this and some of the activates in Iraq are obvious,

After Iowa we journeyed on to Van Wert, Ohio. We went there to attend the rally of Escapees, which is the name of our RV club. There were about 700 RV’s and about 1400 people attending the rally in the Van Wert fairgrounds. We volunteered to help, and were assigned to the team helping set up the parking area for the RV’s in the fields, and then assisting with parking on opening day. This was a lot of fun. Although it was ostensibly work, in truth, there was a lot of socializing, with pot luck dinners, visiting, and a social hour (drinks, snacks as well as socializing) every evening. The actual Escapee meeting was interesting, with seminars and booths by venders. Following the end of the meeting there was a day and a half work shop for computer users (Madeline attended) and genealogy buffs (Dan attended).

After the meetings we drove on toward Virginia. We spent a couple of interesting days in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. Harpers Ferry is in that little corner of West Virginia, wedged in between Maryland and Virginia, where the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers meet here. Thus Harpers Ferry is at one end of the Shenandoah Valley – a good agricultural valley west of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Although Harpers Ferry is just a small village now, with perhaps a population of three or four hundred people, in the early eighteen hundreds it was an important industrial center, because of the abundance of water power. It was a center of arms manufacture and consequently had a large armory.

Now Harpers Ferry is largely a National Historical Park. The town was devastated during the Civil War, changing hands a number of times as the Union and Confederate armies moved up and down the Shenandoah Valley. By the end of the war, the town was in bad shape, with many of the buildings burned, and most of the population gone. A series of floods petty much finished the job of ruining the city and its economy. The area was made a National Historic Site. In recent times many of the building of been rebuilt or renovated; so much of the town is a big museum, demonstrating how people lived in the early eighteen hundreds during the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

Harpers Ferry was also the site were John Brown with a small group of men tried to occupy the city, in order to get rifles to start a war to free the slaves. I reflect on John Brown and wonder if he is to be admired as an idealistic though perhaps an ineffective abolitionist, or to despise him as a terrorist, with a history of planning and engaging in murderous terrorist attacks in Kansas. (Bleeding Kansas occurred when abolitionist and pro-slavery people tried to populate the Kansas. which was to choose or reject slavery by popular vote.) At any rate, John Brown became a martyr for the abolitionist. I was raised in New England and taught that John Brown was a hero to the cause of abolishing slavery. (I suppose we would call that cause human rights, today) Of course, many raised in South were taught to despise John Brown. Who is right? Where would we stand if those circumstances were to occur today?

Following our visit to Harpers Ferry we moved down to the Richmond area to visit our son and his family. We are having a good time. We will be moving on South soon. Our next stop will be to South Carolina and then on to Alabama to get work done on our rig.