Capturing History

We just got back from a long weekend at Gettysburg. I'm kind of a history geek and K is an avid ghost hunter, so Gettysburg offered the best of both worlds for us. Of course, both elements receive varying amounts of overkill in the town, judging by the number of tours and gift shops, but the idea of Gettysburg is really fascinating to me from a fiction standpoint. Here was a tiny town (pop. 2000?) of modest ambition suddenly overtaken by the blood and sweat of 150,000 men for three short days and now, almost 150 years later, is still saturated in it, drowns itself in it. There is no future there, only history. It is a photograph, an imprint, and the people who live in the town either hold the picture up proudly or get crushed by it.

Anyway, I've got some kind of story swirling around in my head but haven't grasped the particulars yet aside from a couple of paragraphs jotted down in haste: someone trapped in a history that is not hers. Maybe even just titled "History." We'll see.

In addition to the story, the reams of history, and the crisp new copy of Gettysburg: A Testing of Courage I picked up at our B&B's bookshop, I spotted a lot of interesting birds (my new hobby) in the fields and surrounding woods: a red-winged blackbird, a black-capped chickadee, a ton of sparrows, and my prize jewel, the eastern bluebird, which looks like a cross between an indigo bunting and a robin.

As for K, she took well over 200 pictures and did turn up some ghostly orbs in a good deal of them. There wasn't much action at the "haunted" B&B we stayed in, Gettysbury College, or the battlefields at daylight, but K did find a lot of paranormal stuff in the basement of the old oprhanage (now the Civil War Soliders Museum), so she's stoked.

Even if you're not a fan of history, the paranormal, or birds, Gettysburg is a striking town: manicured, quiet, quaint, fragrant, picturesque. It is worth one weekend or a thousand.