Cycling the Boston Post Road

Perhaps it comes as a result of too much Whitman and Kerouac in the bloodstream but ever since I was a kid and I learned of it snaking its way through the city I’ve been intrigued with the Boston Post Road, the Indian trail that, higgily piggily, became the oldest highway in America. It was not, of course, the car strewn thoroughfare paved of bituminous macadam found everywhere in the USA that I was moved to see, but rather the ghosts of that first, fabled mysterious road.

Or whatever remained therein.

I wanted to get a glimpse of the road that Paul Revere had ridden to warn of the coming of the redcoats, that General George Washington had fought to secure during the Revolutionary War, that President George Washington had lit out on for his first presidential tour, and all the rest of that early American boyhood school book stuff.

My interest was piqued considerably by a chance discovery of The King’s Best Highway by Eric Jaffee, a beautifully written and witty history of the road which I’d recommend to anyone who has an interest in the thing.

With the coming of spring I set out to see what I could see and, with trusty Trek in tow, boarded a Metro North New Haven line train to Stamford, Connecticut. My intention was to slowly wind my way down to New York along the Boston Post Road.
This I did, beginning with the nightmare of corporate architecture that is Stamford on through pretty Cos Cob and Greenwich, past working class Port Chester into pleasant Rye, Mamaroneck, New Rochelle and straight into the industrial entrails of the Bronx. Sadly, I saw no ghosts, only an odd plaque or two commemorating the way or some forgotten battle or general. But I did encounter a lot of beautiful architecture, a tiny old theatre where some great rock and roll bands once played, and a road that, like life, was seldom straight.

Here are some pics I took along the way.

Enjoy!

Statue of Jackie Robinson who lived in Stamford.

Entering the kingdom of Conde Nast

Along the way.

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Graceful Greenwich

Entering Port Chester

Capital Theater

Lifesaver’s Building

Boston Post Road leaving Port Chester

The BPR entering Rye.

Along the road in Rye.

BPR near the town of Rye.

Monument for Rye Firefighters.

Sign in a window in Rye

Smoke Shop

Rye High School

Doorway of Rye High School

Whitby Castle in Rye

Good deal!

A family business survives

The BPR in Larchmont

Larchmont

Entering New Rochelle

Roadside cemetary

Modern

Empty Building

BPR leaving New Rochelle

Leaving New Rochelle on the King’s Highway

King’s Highway in Pelham Manor

The BPR over the Hutchinson Bridge

A view of the Bronx from the BPR

A view of the Knucklehead from the BPR

Dyre Ave and the end of the journey.

An Inkling of the Vastness: Cycling from Baltimore, MD to Doylestown, PA

On July 30 I joined a couple of thousand fellow teachers, parents and activists from across the country who traveled to DC to attend the Save Our Schools rally to demand an end to the  use of  children as political pawns, the  demonization of teachers, and the whole  disgusting, cynical and ruthlessly anti democratic corporate takeover of public education that has damaged this  nation for over a decade now.

Despite the almost unbearable heat, it was a good day.  Highlights included passionate, informed speeches by education war horses Jonathan Kozal ( who, recalling marching with MLK in 1968,  did not disguise his  disgust at the corporate reformers hijacking the mantle of civil rights ) a fiery  Deborah Meier  and a defiant Diane Ravich.  Actor Matt Damon also spoke and did so with articulation and intelligence, a welcome surprise.

The next morning I was to set out on my bike for the 300 or so mile ride home.  It wasn’t to work out exactly as I  imagined it to but…it was good.  Over the past few summers I had made a few long distance expeditions  — twice cycling both the Erie Canal and the Great Allegheny Passage – but they were both largely on bike paths which are a different kettle of fish altogether from road cycling.  They tend to be flat, there are no cars or trucks to contend with and the route is  mapped out for you.    This journey was to be the first I undertook that was laid out almost entirely on roads and I will admit to an unfamiliar feeling of  apprehension before setting out.   In retrospect, I would have planned far better and researched the terrain of the roads with scrutiny so as to choose which ones to take more intelligently. But…this is how I learn.   I am grateful to my friend Ben in D.C. who showed me all kinds of things that Google maps could do that are potentially of great value to a cyclist. Next time I will utilize them more intelligently.

I was to set out at dawn the next morning out of Washington but…. alas, due to a series of mishaps, miscalculations, and bad maps, it was not to be. Fortunately, friends were kind enough to transport me and my bike to the outskirts of Baltimore where I began my journey proper.  It was not immediately auspicious.  Within an hour of moseying around the city, I had tire trouble.  Luckily, as I struggled to make things right I was happened upon by a Baltimore firefighter named Keith who, having worked in a  bike shop,  set me  straight in a few minutes.  A good soul and a good  sign. Keith also warned me that Baltimore was an extremely violent city and I would be well advised to avoid certain areas.  I avoided them.   Baltimore has gone to some pains to make itself into a bike friendly metropolis with dedicated bike lanes (and, like apparently every city in the US except NYC, buses with bike racks) so I meandered happily hither and thither. I wound up at the brilliantly constructed Camden Yards, home of the Baltimore Orioles and one of the most beautiful ballparks in the US of A. The team was away, so  like many an American boy to whom baseball was once almost a religious experience, I joyfully peered through the bars unto the green grass of the field and took my time taking in the monuments outside the park, reveling in the feeling of being 10 years old that baseball, almost uniquely, seems to induce among many American males who once played the game. As evening set in, I set out to Cockeysville, a town some 15 miles outside of the city where I had booked a reasonably priced room for the night and where there was also a 20 mile rail trail leading in the direction I wanted to go. On the way I spent a good deal of time cursing out the map makers of Rand McNally but, eventually, arrived at my destination which was situated on a strip mall populated by Subway, Dunkin Donut’s, Pizza Hut and the like.   Herein lay one of the many crimes of corporate America: the place was utterly indistinguishable  from  tens  of thousands  of other places, utterly devoid of character, like a airport or a corporate middle manager. Alas! The next morning at dawn I was riding  the very pleasant Northern Central Railroad Trail heading north toward Pennsylvania.   At Monkton I left the trail to check out the still extant station house and there encountered  two volcanically enraged unemployed middle aged white guys;  Tea Party members who had somehow convinced themselves that the absolute destruction of all vestiges of the  social contract was, in fact,  a good thing and would somehow give them back the jobs and the dignity that they were so painfully missing.     I asked them –   very politely – how this war of  all people against all other people was to benefit anyone but those on top and if they were aware that the billionaire  Koch brothers bankrolled their Tea Party.  I asked them – very politely –  why they did not mention the  fact that their country had spent the last decade engaged  in two criminal wars.    They looked at me as if I were mad.  But they listened and the confab ended amiably enough.  They felt betrayed; betrayed by the Democratic Party of which they were formally supporters; betrayed by corporate America; which had exported their jobs to slave wage earners in  Micronesia or where ever; betrayed by a mass media who were nothing more than   entertainers and purveyors of ideology and idiot distraction. And  they had every reason to feel so.  It would not be my last such encounter along this little journey.         That day’s ride would be one of the most physically challenging experiences in recent memory.  Most of this was due to my own foolishness in not discerning the lay of the land.  I.e. hills.  Many, many hills made that much hillier by the scorching temperature. At any rate, I made it up the hills and made the best of it and followed Route 138 through tiny villages called Black Horse, Shawsville, and Drybranch into  Whiteford and Route and the border of PA.  Somewhere in there I crossed the Mason Dixon line. My goal was to cross the Susquehanna River using the Norman Wood Bridge at Holtwood where I would not have to pay someone to carry  my bike and me across the bridge in a van as is the case in most bridges.  Sometime in early afternoon, I turned on a road which bore a sign reading “Norman Wood Bridge / Seven Miles.”    The road went downhill and I before I knew it, I  realized with a  start that I was crossing the Susquehanna and had not pedaled for the entire seven miles.

Yippie!

     

Dusk found me in the pretty little town of Strasburg in Lancaster County, Amish territory,  where Robert Fulton happened to be born.  At the outskirts of town I asked a women who was standing in her front yard if she knew the location of my motel.  She did.  And she also knew that I needed a big, cold  glass of homemade mint tea and insisted I stay put until she gave me one.  She did that too and it was delicious. A good omen. Strasburg offers you something you rarely see in our increasingly and hideously corporitized nation: a confrontation with another  view of the world, another way of  living.  Strasburg is a town where cars, trucks and Amish horse drawn buggies share  the road harmoniously.  At first it’s unsettling, like watching two different centuries unfold at the same time.   Most of the buggies were carrying straw-hatted or bonneted Amish children who would wave to you when they passed.  Every time I saw one of these children I could not help but remember the murderous rampage that took place in an Amish schoolhouse in 2006,  in which the America that this community had gone to such pains to keep out came blazing in.    When it was over 10 such children were shot and five such children were killed. The killer then turned the gun on himself.  More to the point, I could neither forget nor truly understand the almost divine magnanimity the Amish people as a whole displayed in the wake of the horror:  they not only immediately forgave the murderer of their children but also comforted the murderer’s family. That day as I cycled slowly past Amish farms on silent roads with names like Paradise Lane I would see Amish men (all of whom looked almost ridiculously healthy) working their fields or hear the hooves of their horses approaching behind me, I was filled with the blessed sensation that somehow in the end all would be well.

There seems to be  little if any separation between what the Amish  say they believe and how they live and treat each other.    They breathe what they believe,  and who among us can say the same ? Even as I could never be one, I could not help but admire these people for their faith, their compassion and their tremendous integrity.

By early afternoon I had reached New Holland,  and, munching on fresh blueberries and nectarines I  bought at road side  stands,   rode Route 23 straight on through the villages of Goodville and  Churchtown  and the depressingly touristy St. Peter’s Village on my way to Phoenixville,  some 60 odd miles from Strasburg.

Phoenixville’s claim to  pop culture fame is that part of the goofy 1958 sci-fi horror film The Blob was filmed in the still  functioning Colonial Theater.  Indeed, for the past decade the town has held an annual Blob Fest in which movie viewers flee the Blob infested theater just like Steve McQueen and the teenagers did in the movie. (www.thecolonialtheatre.com) Sounds like fun.

It remains  a beautiful theater. Like all  Pennsylvania postindustrial towns, Phoenixville is a town reeling on its heels, filled with interesting and even beautiful architecture but struggling to survive.    Some sections are simply squalid while others, such as Bridge Street where I stayed, are doing their best to breathe new life into the old town with the typical fare of  bars  and restaurants.    I wish them luck. That night as I ate my dinner in one of those restaurants I could not help but over hear from the table next to me two women engaged in an intelligent if angry discussion of Obama and American politics including the debt ceiling farce, the exporting of jobs and the endless wars.  I was heartened enough by their conviction and intelligence that I piped in about the rally I attended in DC some three days before.   I was dismayed to discover that these decent, reasonably informed, intelligent,  Left leaning folks had  no grasp of what what really happening to education in America and had bought into the Time Magazine/ Arne Duncan narrative of failing schools, bad teachers, impossible parasite unions and redeeming charter schools, lock stock and barrel.    They were astonished, however, to find out  that charter schools were publicly funded but privately run, accountable to no one but their board of directors. Like most Americans I’ve spoken to about it, they were equally astonished to hear  of the immense roles of non elected billionaires like Bill Gates, the Walton family and Eli Broad and others in imposing their will on and outright making public policy in the highest offices in the nation. But they listened and they said they would look into it.  And I bet they did.  And I bet they are well pissed.

The last day of my journey began with a spin around Phoenixville before pedaling over to the Schuylkill River Trail, which runs from Valley Forge all the way to Philadelphia. My destination, albeit not to be realized on two wheels,  was Milford, New Jersey by way of Doylestown, New Hope, and Lambertville, N.J. . My first stop on the way was the scene of the Valley Forge Encampment where   General George Washington held together the Continental Army during the long savage winter that the English occupied Philadelphia. It is mostly green space, a 10-mile circumference with a monument here and there.

There is a fine visitor center containing artifacts of the encampment and many illustrations.

Further on down   Schuylkill River Trail there  was a sign for the Betzwood Motion Picture Studio,  a strange thing to encounter in PA.

The next destination was Norristown, a forlorn and seemingly forgotten place that I wanted to get out of as soon as I got into it.   Sadness and defeat hang over the place like a shroud. Here and there one saw the shells of former  mills, factories or  breweries  but most of all one saw fast food joints and boarded up storefronts.  Unable to find a smaller road, I  took Route 202  out of town as fast as I could.

I  stayed on that miserable road far longer than I should have,  passing  massive shopping mall after massive shopping mall with big trucks zooming way too close for comfort. Toward afternoon, I could see rain was coming.  This  was not how I wished to spend my  last day on the road.

Somewhere in a place called Gwyneed, I called a friend who works in Doylestown and asked him if he knew of better routes.  He did. The routes  — Evan’s Road and Upper State Road – were great improvements over 202 and allowed me to enjoy what turned out to be the last couple of hours of my journey.

By afternoon, just as the rain  began falling I rolled into Doylestown, a lovely little city of  winding streets and beautiful architecture that has somehow maintained its heritage without becoming a toy town for the rich and poisonous.

They even had a monument for a public school that had  burned down, an unimaginable tribute in a time such as our where a handful of idiot billionaires seek to end public education altogether.   Margaret Mead and James Michener grew up there and had attended the school.  Fortunately for them ( and us ), their teachers were not forced to contaminate  them with standardized corporate induced idiocy.

As I set out for my  trip from a rally defending public education, I took the monument  to be a good omen.

I stopped into a café in the center of town to have a coffee and watch the rain. The café owner asked me how far I had traveled and when I told him he refused payment.  A sweet gesture.  I  decided that it would be foolish to go on in the rain so I called my friend who worked in town and with whom  I would be staying with that night and asked him to pick me up.  He did so and I spent a pleasant evening with him and his family in Milford, N. J., arriving there on four wheels rather than two but arriving safe and dry.

My litte journey had ended.   I had accomplished most of what I had set out to do and I had learned a bit about doing it better the next time I do something of the sort. I felt grateful I had the opportunity and the wherewithal to undertake the trip and grateful too that I had been provided another  inkling into the vastness of this immense, pained, perhaps yet-to-be-born  even as it  is dying nation.

A great thank you to Setareh and Ben as well as Carl and Betsy  whose kindness allowed  this little journey to take place.

Cycling the Old Croton Aqueduct Trail: A Pleasant Ride Through History

Some 150 odd years ago in the opening page of his magnum opus Moby-Dick, Herman Melville wrote the following to explain why his character Ishmael was, in lieu of a more reckless or destructive act, occasionally moved to set out to sea:

Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off- then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship.

Indeed.  I know the feeling.

But since it is not 1840 and I have no idea what “hypos” are, nor any inclination to knock hats off people’s heads for fear of getting my own blown off, and since there are no whale ships to sign up on,  when ever I feel  that “November in my soul”  I  set out to do something a bit different than poor Ishmael.

I ride my bike.

And I ride it as long, as hard, and as often as I can.  Or at least until my hypos cease having the upper hand on me.

Happily, there are interesting routes near enough by to do so.

For those New York based cyclists who like myself appreciate both a little history and a little variety in a hearty ride, they could do worse than take on the more than 150 year old Croton Aqueduct Trail which runs from Cortland, New York to Van Cortland Park in the Bronx.  (Or, for the more literal and adventurous, through upper Manhattan, through Highbridge Park and on to Bryant Park, the original site of where all the water led and, for  a time, from where all New Yorkers drank.)

Built as a response to both the devastating fires and epidemics that, due to a chronic shortage of water and contaminated wells, ravished 19^th century New York, the aqueduct was rightly considered one of the great engineering achievements of the 19^th century.  Riding upon 26 miles of it’s trail  — as you snake through Cortland, Ossining, Briarcliff Manor, Sleepy Hollow, Tarrytown, Dobbs Ferry, Hastings-on Hudson and Yonkers — you can easily see why.  It was a work of both genius and grueling labor and one that transformed the city for the better forevermore.

To begin at the beginning of the trail,  one can purchase a $5 lifetime bike pass at Grand Central ( no good during rush hour ) and board a Metro North Train to Croton-on-Hudson.  There is something beautiful about setting out early in the morning and sitting on a train watching the sun come up on the Hudson.  From Croton-on-Hudson you need  mosey up Quakerbridge Road   two miles or so ( up hill !)  to the New Croton Reservoir which, in itself, is a sight to behold.

Once on the trail proper, you will from time to time, find water ventilators that look like giant rooks from a giant chessboard.  From these structures the water that moved down underground from the reservoir to the city “breathed.”

Also from time to time the trail will be cut off and the cyclist will need to do a little road riding as one does through Tarrytown,  but this too is a pleasure.

Caveats:   For anyone interested in this ride, there are one or two areas where the trail is difficult to find without a map. The first time I rode it, I depended on a map I downloaded from the internet and that proved a foolish move.  I strongly suggest purchasing the Old Croton Aqueduct State Historic Park map, published by Friends of the Old Croton Aqueduct and available at Urban Center Books in NYC.  The map also includes a brief history of the Aqueduct as well as brief descriptions of historical sites along the way.  Another  fine source is the Official Rails-to Trails Conservancy Guidebook for New York which includes the Aqueduct and many, many other excellent trails in the state.

Be warned that the trail at Yonkers is riddled with glass and it is strongly suggested you move to the street once  you enter that sad, abandoned  little city.

Also, finding the trail from Yonkers to Van Cortland Park is tricky and can be confusing.  On this  last outing, my friend and I  found ourselves lost until we encountered a huge, blonde, hatless, uniformed policeman wearing mirrored shades and jackboots standing inexplicably alone on a tiny dead end street staring into nothingness like something out of a dream or a David Lynch movie.   Anyway, he told us how to get out of Yonkers and for that we were grateful.

What follows are some photos from my last journey along the trail which I hope you enjoy.

Cycling the C & O Canal and the Great Allegheny Passage: Reflections on and of a Little Journey Part Two

Beckoning

The following  photos were  taken here and there on the Great Allegheny Passage.

On the Mason-Dixon Line

Built for the railroad

Mystery

A fellow traveler.

Eastern Continental Divide

Mural of George Washington as a British soldier in the French and Indian War.

Train mural.

Approaching Big Savage Tunnel

The doors of Big Savage

Big Savage, 1911

A shelter

The ghost of a refinery

Another ghost

Canadian Geese ( identified by leading Goose specialist Dr. A. J. Reeder, PHD.)

Coke ovens

Rockwood, PA

Building, Rockwood, PA.

From a bridge

Above a river

Above the highway

Dawn

Awakening

The Yough

Almost silence

One of the five defunct train stations that once served Connellsville, PA

Former railroad arch transformed into the front of the Bigg Six Bar, Connellsville, PA

Formerly a public school, currently Karen's Hair Fashions, Connellville, PA.

The Yough flowing

Dawson, PA

The Cochran House, built by coal baron Philip G. Cochran, Dawson , PA.

The Philip G. Cochran Memorial United Methodist Church built for coal baron Philip G. Cochran, Dawson , PA. in 1900.

Washington Bank, Dawson, PA

Red house by the railroad tracks, Dawson, PA

The Yough through the trees.

Site of the Darr Mine Disaster, 12/19/07 which left 239 dead.

Layers

West Newton

More layers

Site of the Port Royal Mine Disaster, June 10, 1901

A bridge to somewhere

Sutersville Moose Lodge/ Friday Spaghetti/ Welcome Home Josh

And even more layers.

McKeesport, PA, as of now the end of the line.

Iron City Brewery, Pittsburgh, PA

Cycling the C & O Canal and the Great Allegheny Passage: Reflections on and of a Little Journey Part One

On the Potomac

Cycling the C& O Canal and the Great Allegheny Passage:  Reflections on and of a Little Journey

Part One

On July 4, 2010, urgently needing a change of scenery from the toxic reality of teaching in Mike Bloomberg’s New York, the bottomless pit of the BP catastrophe, frightening (perhaps permanent) unemployment rates and two endless wars over God-knows-what, I placed my trusty bicycle as gently as I could in the luggage space beneath a 7 a.m. DC -bound Chinatown bus and set off to cycle the 344 miles of the Chesapeake & Ohio  Canal and the Great Allegheny Passage.

My desire was to be a pilgrim.   Circumstance conspired against  me,  forcing me to settle for being merely a traveller.  What to do, what to  do  ?

The bus cost all of $20 and all my fears — crazily unprofessional driving, holiday traffic jams, inane or intimate-yet-impossible-not-to-overhear-cell-phone conversations competing with  the paralyzing monotony of electronic drum beats seeping out of headphones 2 or 10 and 20 rows away — proved blessedly unfounded. Save the steady hum of the engine, the four-and-a-half-hour passage to the Capital passed in almost blissful silence. It was a most welcome silence.

My little journey would begin in charming little Georgetown (where pretty coffee girls with bizarre enthusiasm ask you your name) and end in dismal, defeated  McKeesport  (where with rather less enthusiasm no one asks for anything but change). Last summer I cycled from McKeesport to Georgetown but, having no idea what I was doing, had miscalculated the distances between cities and towns and consequently  had to rush through places and vistas well worth lingering over, well  worth pondering.

This time around I was determined to linger and ponder to my hearts desire and planned accordingly.  Over time, I have become a great believer in the wisdom of pilgrimage and try to engage in this practice as often as I can.   Even as I knew  that by sheer time and space  this trip was bound to fall far short of that noble word, I could not help but feel  it as such, could  not  keep  myself  from the expectation of some sort of transcendence,  could  not help but imagine.

This may be explained by the fact  that I’m Irish.

At  any rate, many years ago, more by despair than design, I found myself walking the thousand year old 500-mile pilgrimage trail called El Camino de Santiago de Compostella  from Rochenville, France, to the city of  Compostella in Galicia, Spain.   It was one of the most difficult and rewarding experiences I’ve ever undertaken, alternately terrifying and deeply inspiring.  El Camino was terrifying, because removed from all external stimuli — newspapers, books, movies, all of the numberless diversions we employ to hide from life as we entertain ourselves to death— I was forced to look square in the face my of my  impoverished existence.

I did not like what I saw but having nowhere to hide had no choice but to see it.

Yet, because of the small but extraordinary kindnesses I repeatedly received from the people of that hard, lovely, living land — I was, truth be told, ridiculously ill prepared to undertake  such a  journey —  my experience was  also inspiring and even, at moments, exhilarating. In that  journey came  unexpected encounters  with  all  manner of experience: intimations of Otherness, epiphanal  flashes that told me in no uncertain terms that life is much larger, grander, more wondrous than my little eyes were allowing me to see and thus allowing it to be.

The medieval mind did not know a great deal about, say dentistry or the spreading of disease.  Still, it seems to me they knew a tad more than we know about certain needs of a healthy psyche, about certain requirements for a truly lived life.    They knew, for example, of the need for solitary reflection, of  the space and place  to  let go of one’s identity from time to time without being destroyed.

They knew about pilgrimage.

We have no such camino in the United States and we are poorer for it — that much more in the age of toxic narcissism in which we are forced to dwell.  But we do have the Appalachian Trail and, thanks to organizations like Rails -To- Trails, we also have an increasing number of former railroad lines that are now hiking or bike paths. And, because of the work of the late great Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglass whose efforts saved the trail from being turned into a parkway, we have the C & O Canal Path.

Memories of walking to Santiago de Compostella swanned through my mind as I rode the bus to Georgetown.   Too long for a bike ride, too short for a real pilgrimage, I saw my excursion as something in between. I saw it as a kind of small existential adventure with physical and historical components. I saw it as a very welcome challenge and change.  Whatever it was to be,  it would have to do.

Only recently was the C & O Canal Path and the Great Allegheny Passage wed so as to be a single entity.  The C & O begins in the center of Georgetown and runs 184 or so miles to the little city of Cumberland, Maryland.   (Where, I assure you the spires of that city are a most welcome site, that much the more so after 60 miles of cycling on unpaved paths in 95-degree heat when you have run out of water.)  If you leave from Washington, you will find the Potomac, glorious and rushing, flowing with history, always on your left. The Great Allegheny Passage begins shortly after the C & O ends when one crosses the mountains into Pennsylvania.    The Passage plows through forest and mountain almost to Pittsburgh. Along it  I met the Youghiogheny River (pronounced Yock-a gain-ee) and its many, many tributaries.  The sound and sight of lapping water was often near.

Throughout the ride, I came upon all manner of things, cultural and natural, historical and not, mundane and sublime.   But again and again and again I encountered memorials or vestiges of two epic struggles: the American Civil War and the rise of the American Labor movement.

Two major episodes pf the Civil War (and countless lesser ones) took place along or very, very close to the C & O. The first night of my trip I slept in Harper’s Ferry, site of one of the great catalysts of  the great war: abolitionist John Brown’s October 16, 1859 raid on the Federal Arsenal in Harper’s Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia).  The arsenal, which still stands, contained 100,000 muskets and rifles. Brown’s “army” consisted of 16 white men, three freed blacks, one freed slave and one fugitive slave.

Brown hoped in vain that his act would spark an armed slave revolt that would spread throughout the increasingly divided nation and bring an end to the abomination of slavery.  Instead, on October 18th, Brown was met by a detachment of U.S. Marines under the command of Brevet Colonel Robert E. Lee of the 2nd U.S. Calvary — he who would soon command the Confederate Army against Lincoln’s Union Army a few miles down the road at Antietam.    Lee quickly overtook the arsenal, wounding Brown and several other raiders in the process, and the insurrection was over. Brown was tried for treason in nearby Charles Town. He was found guilty, hanged and instantly immortalized in legend and song.  Across the Union abolitionists and later  soldiers would sing as they marched:

“John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave,

John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave,

But his soul goes marching on.”

Witnessing Brown’s hanging was future assassin John Wilkes Booth. On the morning of his execution Brown wrote what time proved a horrific prophecy: “I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but by blood.”

Less than 20 miles south of the insurrection, in the fields of the sleepy little town of Sharpsburg, Maryland, in the second major event of the war to be taking place along the trail, Brown’s purge would come to pass in a heretofore-unimaginable fashion. We know it as the battle of Antietam, a name that gives pause to all those who know what occurred there. On September 17, 1862, in a 12-hour encounter between 100,000 Union and Confederate soldiers (led by the same Robert E. Lee who captured John Brown) that began at dawn and ended at dusk, 23,000 men were killed, wounded, or went missing. Lee’s army retreated over the nearby Potomac. The Union prevailed. Victory allowed Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation and thus reshape the war, freeing slaves in states in rebellion and providing the war effort with two goals: preserving the union and ending slavery. It remains the bloodiest day in American history.

The killing fields have been preserved. They are green now and spread out for miles. Monuments to battalions mark various battles.  Cannons sit perched on hills.  Above all there is  silence.  Miles and miles of silence.

It is humbling and disquieting to walk among these fields.

I came across many other sites of import to the Civil War but none as jarring as Harper’s Ferry and Antietam.  I also came across signs that seemed to show for some, the Civil War has never really ended.  In rural Maryland, indeed on the very road that led to Antietam, I passed homes flying both American flag and Confederate flags. In Virginia, I saw several bumper stickers bearing the “Stars and Bars” with the legend, “IF THIS OFFENDS YOU IT JUST SHOWS YOUR IGNORANCE.”

These were sandwiched in between others that read  ”YOU LIE !”  and “GUN CONTROL MEANS BEING ABLE TO KILL YOUR TARGET”  and “SOCIALISM IS DEATH!”

I took note and pedaled on.

Along the Great Allegheny Passage one finds sites and vestiges of a second epic struggle (albeit one barely remembered) where horrific human suffering and loss of life led in time to the triumph of another kind of union: that of the  American Labor movement.   On the Passage I passed through ghost-towns and near ghost-towns — Confluence, Connellsville, Dawson, Smithton, West Newton, Suterville,  – where mining disaster after mining disaster, death upon death, gave rise to the union.

Slowly, fitfully and against tremendous resistance and officially sanctioned violence, thousands of coal miners and steel workers who laboring and dying under the unspeakable polices of Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick (among others) forged into being those institutions the rest of us can thank for the eight-hour day.   (That and pensions, health care, contracts and so on.)

For 50 years, the labor policies of Frick and Carnegie were crystal clear and perfectly legal: Human beings are nothing but economic units to be paid as little as you can get away with, worked a minimum of 12 hours a day six days a weeks and summarily fired at the first whiff of dissent or dignity.  With no thought to worker safety, horrific and deadly accidents were regular occurrences. That was the pre-union reality just as sure as it is now becoming the post-union reality.

All that remain now are the forgotten ruins of  refineries and scattered   memorials to the dead. These, too, are humbling and disquieting, no less so to me, than those of Antietam.

As for partners Carnegie and Frick, outside of historians as conscious and humane as Howard Zinn, both have largely escaped condemnation as the slow-motion mass murderers they surely were.   In fact, both are now fondly remembered as titans of industry, benefactors of society and great philanthropists who in their later role endowed hospitals, art museums, parks and libraries. Indeed, I’ve been haunting Carnegie-built libraries since as far back as I can remember. But does that mean I need to somehow rationalize the fact the Andrew Carnegie made a 200-percent profit on steel, 25 million dollars a year, while the men actually making the steel made 15 cents an hour and died of old age at 40?    I think not. Apparently, and to his credit, neither did the dying Frick. In Henry Clay Frick, An Intimate Portrait, author Martha Sanger relates the following. After their partnership ended  acrimoniously,  Carnegie sent a mutual friend to the dying Frick to see if Frick would shake Carnegie’s hand one last time before the lights went out.   Frick responded that he would “see Carnegie in hell, which is where we are both going.”

Hard to argue with the man given all the facts.

Along the Passage, the ghosts of the industrial past abound.  But in between these two wars much beauty is to be found.

The small, once thriving, now impoverished ghost towns along the Passage are both depressing and comforting. Somehow they keep going. Their children leave to fight our wars – signs to that affect are all over the place — but everyone in the town, it seems, knows where they are and await their safe return.

And then there is nature.

There is something wondrous in an empty road.  There is something sublime in witnessing a forest awakening with the sun. There is something deeply, deeply calming in the  subtle sounds of  a  river,  of  unseen birds chirping, first one,  then many,  of crushed leaves as deer, chip monks, beaver  and who knows what kind of animal set out for their morning strolls through their pristine morning kingdoms.

Such moments invite reverie and our souls need reverie as much as our hearts need love as much as our bodies need oxygen. In one such moment, looking in 6 a.m. silence at an open, empty  road and trying to see, words of Yeats, long ago encountered, ever since elusive, flowed from somewhere in my memory into my mind:

“And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,

Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings.”

I was a child when I first heard those perfectly metered lyrics to life.

Such moments are moments of grace.

Such moments are tiny pilgrimages in themselves.

Such moments are life.

I tried to capture some semblance of my little journey in the photographs below.    I hope you might enjoy them.

(Thanks to K.O. )

Notes:  My journey was greatly enriched and enhanced  by  Mike High’s  The C & O Companion ( Johns Hopkins University Press ), and Bill Metzger’s   Great Allegheny Passage Companion ( The  Local History Company.)   Labors of love, both, any one undertaking this  passage would be well advised to read them before setting out and hold them near throughout.

The  words above are taken from “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” by William Butler Yeats.