According to the satellite maps available online, Pennsylvania still has some green left. Most of my memories are green and lush with creatures under every rock. Summer evenings where you don’t notice the sun going down until suddenly there are fireflies everywhere and a rising chorus of crickets, cicadas, and katydids. I remember the mosquitoes and spiders, but I remember it being beautiful anyway. I think lot more things are beautiful when you aren’t itchy.
A lot of school was about what was easily accessible. Many class assignments were things like “what kind of leaves can you find” and school trips to different places with trees. Here’s some trees. Here’s some trees with sap you can eat. Here’s some trees with BEES. IT’S BEES. RUN. Here’s a field where people were cold and died trying to murder other people, etc. If enough people died somewhere, they make it a national park like Valley Forge or Fort Necessity (two scenes from two different wars where George Washington was involved in a lot of carnage).
My favorite of these places, from yet another war, is Gettysburg. (Americans are, shockingly, super into war.) If you aren’t up on your United States history, the battle of Gettysburg was the bloodiest battle of the American Civil War that ended with 50,000 soldier casualties and the Confederates getting pushed out of PA. Confederate flags weren’t reduced to reenactments and museums in Pennsylvania after that, though. The first week I tried high school, there were pickup trucks with confederate flags in the parking lot. It’s a major symbol of white supremacy and there’s a lot of that around.
Gettysburg is mostly a weird, little college town just west enough to have Sheetz instead of Wawa. It’s got plentiful antique stores and fudge shops (there was at least one antique shop with a fudge counter when I was there) that get a lot of income from tourists coming to learn about some bloody battles and/or ghosts from said bloody battles. The morbid shit we turn into entertainment is bizarre, but you can’t say it isn’t fun to learn about history through stories of ghost hospitals and haunted battlefields.
The first time we took a weekend trip to Gettysburg, I was around 11 years old and my father actually came along. Notable, as I don’t remember us getting into any fights. I remember dinner at one of the places in the town center where the American flag flies in the middle of a round-a-bout while it was raining and going through the museum, I don’t remember any meltdowns. Dad must have had just the right amount of chemicals that weekend. But after that first trip, it was always just me and my mom.
I wouldn’t tell you I believe in ghosts or that Gettysburg is haunted. But Gettysburg is has a… vibe? (Have I lived in California too long, oh no.). The landscape is like most rural places in southern PA: green fields and forest with the occasional rock formation or hill. But sitting on a rock in Devil’s Den as the sun goes down feels like an experience. It’s as though all the energy has been drained out of the place and the quiet is an extra quiet. Most of the areas around Gettysburg are like this. It’s not spooky, it’s just a loud kind of silence.
One year for my birthday, lucky 13th I think, my mom booked a weekend trip including a “haunted” fancy dinner and walking tour around town. October is peak ghost tourism season; it’s when all the ghost hunters and “historians” release their books, and all the tours based on the ghost stories are in full swing. I was thrilled. I would be thrilled now.
A popular place on these tours is to the Jenny(ie) Wade House which should be called the Ginnie Wade house because her name was Ginnie, but we live in a universe where people named Ginny(ie) will forever be called Jenny because no one listens or, according to my emails, can even read the name Ginny without it being translated to Jenny in their head. Seriously, people will address emails to me as “Jenny” like, who the fuck is Jenny and the email you are sending to literally has my name spelled out in it what are you doing??
Anyway, Ginnie (who was also a seamstress like myself) is the only recorded civilian casualty of the Battle of Gettysburg. She was minding her own business baking bread when the home she was in was shot something like 150 times, one of those bullets piercing through multiple doors in the house before piercing Ginnie’s heart and exiting out through her corset. The house is now an attraction you can visit and look at all the bullet holes. You can also go into the basement where her body was kept and look at a weird dummy under a blanket on a bed, because that’s normal.
All of that was very interesting to people with my name. Everything becomes 100 times more interesting when it’s about someone with your name if it isn’t very common. People named, like, John or Mary probably aren’t enamored as much by their namesakes.
I’ve known people who lived and work in Gettysburg and would swear on their life that their house is haunted, or at least have one story of what could have been a ghost. Even my house that was not in a known haunted town or battlefield had a dead soldier ghost.
The house was built in the 50’s, and not well. There were step sounds that came from the attic, probably from any sort of animal that could make its way into the unfinished half of the second floor. Our front door would sometimes open and shut on its own (we didn’t bother keeping our doors locked until I was older) but it was obviously a wind/vacuum sort of issue. And there seemed to be a strange, rolling fog that would shift down the street late at night because we lived in Pennsylvania at the bottom of a hill in the woods, of course there’ll be fog sometimes.
But then one day my dad was walking in the woods (because when you live in the woods there’s really not that much else to do) and he came upon what seemed to be a grave marker in the ground. It was definitely old, but not exactly an easy thing to get information on. (Pre-Google times.)
So one afternoon when I was maybe 12, my dad and I were sitting in our living room talking about this grave and how if there was a ghost, it’s probably whoever was buried in the woods. And as we were discussing it, our doorbell rang. My dad went to answer the door and stepped outside to talk to an older gentleman in khaki pants and a polo shirt. After a few minutes, my dad popped back in the house, grabbed his shoes, and with a look of both confusion and amusement said, “I’ll be back in a bit,” and left with this man.
30 or 40 minutes passed and my dad returned, alone. He came inside and began to tell me a tale.
The man who came to the door was looking for the grave. My memory of this is that it had something to do with keeping track of veteran’s graves, but regardless, this old dude just showed up at the exact time my dad and I were talking about this grave to ask if we knew of any graves nearby.
It turns out that the grave belonged to a soldier in the Civil War. He had found out that his wife was either sick or pregnant and deserted to be with her. He was tried for treason and hung in Philadelphia, and then brought out and buried in the woods near my house.
So if there was a ghost, he probably had good reason to be upset.
The Gettysburg trips were as close as my mom got to specifically encouraging any of my interests. I was in every advanced class in my elementary school, and in both the selective vocal ensemble (as opposed to mandatory chorus) and the selective talent art class. History was one of my lesser interests when I was younger. I was in love with theater and film and singing and creating things.
Mom and I shared a love of musical theater. One of her friends had a daughter a couple of years older than me who participated in their local community theater. We attended their performance of Music Man when I was 11, and we knew that they accepted children at 10 years old. I started getting my hopes up that Mom was going to let me join the theater somehow. But it never happened, no matter how much I belted book numbers from my bedroom.
We were lucky enough to have a sewing machine in the house, so a lot of my creative energies went into that until we got a computer. I was never sent to a camp or any extracurricular classes. I socialized with other kids in school until the homeschooling started. My interests were kept to solo activities I could do in the house.
I don’t think it was because my mom didn’t know what I wanted to do. I just don’t think she could invest the time and money. She was overwhelmed with keeping herself, her daughter, and a drug addict alive, on top of dealing with 26 other children 5 days a week plus who knows how many obnoxious adults most days. She couldn’t drive me to some theater thing 3 times a week on top of whatever it cost while also having time to grade papers and plan lessons and keep an entire household running.
I got the “you can do anything you want” encouragement. A lot of American kids grew up being told some variation of “you can be whatever you want to be.” Once you study history for a bit, you learn how much most of us aren’t given the option of doing much of anything besides being in constant fear of being shot by an angry white dude, sometimes while you’re just trying to bake some bread in your kitchen. We haven’t made much progress since the Civil War.