Sacred Ground

As many of my friends and family know, I've recently started my internship at Gettysburg National Military Park with the National Park Service. Honestly, when I got this internship, it was a dream come true. I've been studying the Battle of Gettysburg and the Civil War since I was in grade school. I was and am still beyond honored to have this opportunity. As an interpretive intern here with the park, I will be developing educational programs for visitors to help them understand the story of what happened on those three days in July in this sleepy little town. I will admit, I've been hitting the books pretty hard to make sure I punch out a good program. My first presentation will be a talk on Pickett's Charge (I prefer to call it Longstreet's Assault, as it's a little more correct, but for simplicity's sake...) where I essentially give visitors an on-site overview of the tumultuous events of the third day at Gettysburg.

In the midst of all this research I've been conducting - hours in the park library, poring over volumes of battle minutiae and fumbling my way through file drawers of participant accounts in search of the perfect information - it's often easy for me to lose touch with exactly what it is I'm trying to evoke. I've always loved military history. Nothing thrills me like following the evolutions of Col. Such-and-such's brigade as it endeavored to escape its enfilade by Maj. Insert-name-here's batteries on Ambiguous-landform Ridge. I revel in studying after-action reports, ordnance expenditures, tactical treatises, and casualty figures. Sometimes I get carried away and forget that those paragraphs and numbers I'm soaking up - particularly the cascading reports of x killed, y wounded, and z captured in action - aren't just some collection of ink on paper in some silly wargame. These are stories. Stories of men. Men who died. Died horrific deaths. That always stops me cold and makes me think, "Ya know, I think it's time to take a break from the research and take a walk..."

The NPS has generously given me housing on the grounds of the Samuel Cobean Farm up north of town. Though the Cobean Farm wasn't an epicenter of battle, this place saw its own forms of hell. In the fields by the long farm lane, a Confederate artillery battery was set up and rained fury upon their enemies. The little farmstead itself - solidly behind rebel lines after the first day - acted as a collecting site for Federal prisoners of war. I can imagine the fear-stricken uncertainty of some of the boys of Oliver O. Howard's Eleventh Corps as they were prodded at bayonet point into makeshift stockades in the once beautiful, now trampled fields. Can you see them? Anxious and frightened as their captors harvest their valuables and taunt them with thoughts of prison camps? Can you hear their whispered wonderings of where tomorrow would take them? Whether or not they'd make it out of this? Whether they'd ever see their friends - or even their homes - again? But I think the most horrible tale this farm can tell is its service as a field hospital. Wounded men filled this little farm, waiting for their turn on the surgeon's table as the agonizing pain of their bloody wounds sapped away at their strength. When they finally reached that table, anything could be destined for them: a path to recovery, the loss of a limb and all their livelihood, the removal of a warped and twisted bullet from inside their torn body, the beginning of an infection and a slow, festering death, or the simple shaking of the surgeon's head as he solemnly laments, "There's nothing I can do for you, son." And then the barn. Oh, God, the barn...  To signify its status as a hospital, from its roof was flown a plain red flag, as red as the blood that freely ran and pooled inside that place. The barn was filled not with grain and produce, not with livestock and implements; no, it was filled to the doors with wounded, dying, and dead men, sometimes piled atop each other like cordwood. The groans and screams of the poor men consigned to misery in that simple, unclean structure surely permeated night and day with gut-wrenching horror. On looking in the doorway to the threshing floor, now carpeted with broken men wallowing in gritty puddles of their own filth and blood mingling with the dust and dirt of the floor, I can't even imagine how someone could take all of it in and not think to themselves, "No... This can't be real. This can't be happening. Things like this aren't supposed to happen to people. This can't be real."

Though their bodies are now gone, we cannot forget
the blood that once stained these fields.

The fact is that that was indeed reality, not just on the Samuel Cobean Farm, but all across this place. After that horrible battle, the vicinity of Gettysburg was called, in the words of 15-year-old Gettysburg citizen Tillie Pierce, "a strange and blighted land." Strange and blighted land... What more can you call a place like that? It's not even a town anymore. It's not even a place fit for living. It's a massive, miles-wide butcher house, hospital, morgue, and... hell - what more can I say but hell? - all rolled into one. This once-beautiful and plentiful Pennsylvania farmland for three July days bore witness to some of the most hellacious and heart-rending sights known to man. I've read about how during the fateful Confederate assault on the third day, a captain in the 28th Virginia watched his own son be shot down before him. The father, weeping, knelt down and kissed his son before struggling onward with his company to the fiery wall beyond. In the gruesome accounts of what people found on the field after the guns fell silent, I found that a local man, exploring the shattered and splintered forests of Culp's Hill on the Federal right flank, came upon a smashed, shell-struck mass of tissue, blood, and viscera that was once a man. Intermingled in the gore were fragments of a daguerreotype photograph of a wife and child. What sort of place is this? What sort of world is this that contains such horrible and mind-searingly brutal events? We in the present have the luxury of viewing all this at a distance. To us, we can brush them off as nothing more than stories. But no. Reality is not kind enough to permit them to just be legends and folktales. No, all this death and destruction actually happened, and the scars of it are still evident today. Many homes and buildings in the streets of Gettysburg still bear pockmarks and furrows where they were struck by bullets. In the upper floor of the Cobean house, a shell still sits buried into the wall. And on Culp's Hill, deep in the forest where visitors never roam, you will find faint and weathered remnants of long depressions and pits in the earth. These pits were burial trenches, the site of mass interments of dozens of Confederate dead and their shallow resting place until Southerners attempted to return them home years after the battle.

This place is more than some hokey tourist attraction where one can buy cheap souvenirs from capitalizing vendors downtown. The people who frequent such places are unknowing of what truly happened here. But can you blame them? Even history textbooks can't convey the true horrors and tragedies of this place. Relatively few of us can comprehend the sheer magnitude of bloodletting across these rocky plains and hills and valleys. It can scarcely be conveyed to us today by the pristine beauty of the park that now encompasses this battlefield. But the fact is this: this place is haunted. I don't mean by specters and apparitions in the night. This place is haunted by pain. From the northern reaches of the Cobean Farm to the rugged heights of Little Round Top, from the embattled lines at the Lutheran Seminary to the bouldered slopes of Culp's Hill, and all the places in between, this place - this sacred ground - exudes the pain it once watched. Even the dirt we walk on this field breathes the despair it once absorbed. Undoubtedly in our traverses of this field, we have stood upon the very spot where a beloved father of three little children back home gasped his final labored death rattle as he clutched his little ones' picture for dear life. We have walked over the ground where a young boy with hopes and aspirations of a long, prosperous, and beautiful life had his entrails torn out in a sudden burst of shrapnel. And for all we know, we have tread upon the very ground where an adored son, once proud and sprightly as summer clover, bled away his life's blood and still lies there beneath his own little patch of blood-soaked sod, neglected and forgotten by the reinterment efforts and by all of time.

Think of all this the next time you come to this sacred ground. As you sit out in the gloaming darkness of the approaching summer night and you watch the fireflies flit effervescently across a quiet field, know that those luminous little insects dance to the songs of misery and horror sung by this very ground. This earth has supped full with horrors and it begs for you to hear its cry.

Bitter Winter

This winter will mark my nineteenth year. It's been an unusually cold winter, a frigid veil being drawn over me here at University Park by the bitter effects of the twice-appearing polar vortex. As cold as it may grow and as briefly as the radiance of day may shine in these bitter months, there is something that has always been alluring to me about winter. Some people may concur with me, may also be drawn to this recess in nature's conviviality, but for different reasons. Yes, it is natural to love winter for the beauty of the snow, of the wind-whipped drifts that festoon the yards and fields and sidewalks and forests. I won't be so crass as to say I don't love it. I have a soft spot in my heart for the beauties of winter. But that isn't what I feel now.

There's something about winter that brings tidings of a harsh yet bucolic, brutal yet beautiful solitude. There's something in the shrieking lashings of the wind and the frozen roughness of the soil that allows the soul to turn inward in a sort of nature-driven introspection. Just as the biting temperatures of winter force us indoors when they come, they too have the power to force our souls deeper inside ourselves, deeper into the recesses of our minds to a place where we may study ourselves against the backdrop of reality.

If there is ever a time to feel lonely, to feel lost, to feel broken, to feel bitter, it is winter. When the autumnal equinox passes us by and the Earth commences its forward-bending march to and through winter, all the greenery and foliage of the landscape retracts into the ground below us. Color retreats, life goes dormant, and for a time all is still and colorless. When I was in the ninth grade, I had to read the novel Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton. That book has changed the way I observe winter, and I can find no better descriptions of the perennial retreat of nature.

"... a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of its frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface… in a depth of moral isolation too remote for casual access.”

"About a mile farther, on a road I had never travelled, we came to an orchard of starved apple-trees writhing over a hillside among outcroppings of slate that nuzzled up through the snow like animals pushing out their noses to breathe. Beyond the orchard lay a field or two, their boundaries lost under drifts; and above the fields, huddled against the white immensities of land and sky, one of those lonely New England farm-houses that make the landscape lonelier."

There's something about winter that has the potential to make me withdraw within myself and to view the world in a way very similar to that of a hermit, living high on a snowy mountain overlooking a pastoral valley made barren by the occupying cold. I've always been the sort of person to be absorbed in thought. Take it as this: winter only facilitates further capacity for thought in me, and from a greater distance than before. Don't think of me as distant. Just think of me as a man who sits out on a stump on the hill as the evening clouds settle in, letting the snow gather in tufts about his shoulders, breathing his steam into the sharp air, and - above all - thinking.

I leave you with this song, a song I always thought would serve well as a companion piece to not only scenes of Ethan Frome, but of your own sort of introspection in the dead of winter.

The Swell Season - Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova

My sincerest regards,
Brandon

A Poem - Untitled

I heard a bird singing out my window this morning.
It sang the song of revolution.
The call of one, both small and meek,
Shouting out to the bigger ones for help.

It sang the song of long-suffered pain,
Sang the song of the ardored worker.
It sang the song of the starving child,
Sang the song of the loving mother.

It sang the song of mankind's struggle,
Sang the song of the life-long slave.
It sang the song of the wishing follower,
Sang the song of an aspiring leader.

I heard a bird singing out my window this morning.
It sang the song of evolution,
The call of many, myriad and strong,
Shouting proudly to their ancestors before them.

A Poem - Kishacoquillas

This is a poem I wrote quite a while back for someone I once knew. It was based on a dream that I awoke from late one night. I picked up a notebook and wrote it on the spot. "Kishacoquillas" is the name of a creek, a tributary to the Juniata River, that runs through Mifflin County, Pennsylvania. The name is a Lenni Lenape phrase meaning "snakes in their dens." There's a certain spot along that creek in near the town of Burnham that this poem is based on.

Kishacoquillas

We stand alone among the stones,
Just you and I together.
The swollen creek flows on before us
To a watery blue forever.

We take apart the rocky bank,
Taking it stone by stone,
And toss it all into the creek
As we stand together alone.

No one else is watching us
As we stand on the stony shore.
The only thing we have is each other,
And could we ask for anything more?

Not a word is spoken between us
As we stand side by side.
We skip the stones across the water
And sink them in the tide.

And in this heavenly dreamscape,
Not a thing makes a sound,
Nothing but the flowing creek

And the smooth stones we've found.

How long could we stand here, my friend?
Could we ever be dissevered?
But if we ever left, I pray
I'll only be remembered.

How calm we are as we stand alone.
Sometimes after a while,
With a stone in my hand and care in my eye
I give you a gentle smile.

Any troubles that we've had before,
All have been forgotten.
And as we stand alone by this creek,
"The snakes are all in their den."

I see your beautiful face
As you raise another rock,
And as you smile, my spirits rise
Like thundering waters at a lock.

Where will we go on from here?
Will we leave our special place?
Should the waters ever drive us out,
Remember me just in case.

Should life ever break us down,
And time eternal kill us,
I'll wait for you on the stony banks
Of our cold Kishacoquillas.

Hard Times Come Again No More

There's an old song people used to sing in days when things were scarce and spirits were low. It's a sorrowful song, all ragged with pain. The lyrics go:

Let us pause in life's pleasures and count its many tears,
While we all sup sorrow with the poor;
There's a song that will linger forever in our ears;
Oh hard times come again no more.

[Chorus:]
Tis the song, the sigh of the weary,
Hard times, hard times, come again no more
Many days you have lingered around my cabin door;
Oh hard times come again no more.

While we seek mirth and beauty and music light and gay,
There are frail forms fainting at the door;
Though their voices are silent, their pleading looks will say
Oh hard times come again no more.

There's a pale drooping maiden who toils her life away,
With a worn heart whose better days are o'er:
Though her voice would be merry, 'tis sighing all the day,
Oh hard times come again no more.

[Chorus]

Tis a sigh that is wafted across the troubled wave,
Tis a wail that is heard upon the shore
Tis a dirge that is murmured around the lowly grave
Oh hard times come again no more.

[Chorus]

It's been a song that's been in my head in the recent past. I suppose here I'm going to give an update to anyone who may have been curious of how I've been doing in my recent fights with depression. Admittedly, over the past few weeks, it's been rough. I could manage to get through my days (except for the daily need to sleep an extra 1.5-3 hours in the middle of the day), but at nights I'd just fall apart and collapse into a pile of scrap metal. All sorts of emotions would enter my mind: jealousy, anger, frustration, loneliness, sadness, desire for solitude, desire for even the meagerest company. Things could fly all over the place. At times I'd beg the world to leave me be. Sometimes I'd go for a walk out to a grove of trees and just sit there until the feelings passed. Other times, I would desire only not to be alone. I'd text anyone to ask if they wanted to get together and spend some time that evening. Sometimes it worked, other times it was just not meant to be. Of course I could never tell anyone directly how I was feeling. Aside from this blog, word of my depression almost never meets air. I suppose I'm ashamed of it in a way. Perhaps it denotes weakness in me. A man doesn't post about his feelings on Facebook or tweet about sadness... do they? What's more, I never wanted to be a burden on anyone. I never wanted to post something and have someone get bummed out because of how I was feeling, or talk to someone and make them also feel it. Thus, I've kind of painted myself into a corner. I sort of locked myself into my head with only a few tiny cracks left for me to breathe through. It wasn't a particularly enviable arrangement. Sometimes when I was low and finding little escape from it, I'd think of this song and let the chorus play over in my mind. "Hard times, hard times, come again no more." It was a wish I'd sing to fate. Over the past week, however, things have been getting better. My doctor and I took a few measures to get things back on track, and fortunately now I've been considerably more stable. I'm able to get through my day in good spirits, I don't have to sleep around midday now, so now I can get even more work done, and my nights remain stable and strong. At last, I feel like I can get around to doing what I need to do and knocking out the problems that approach me in this life at college. I still internally sing that song, I will admit. "Many days you have lingered around my cabin door, oh, hard times, come again no more." However now, I don't sing it as a dreading and begging wish. Now, I sing it as a hopeful wish for days to come - almost as if to shake my fist at the hard times that may come.

Home - Change

This is a continuation on my previous entry. Forgive me for how long it's taken to write this up.

By the time I returned Friday night from a lovely evening with my old friends, it was roughly 11:30 PM. Since arriving back in Juniata County from school earlier that evening, I still hadn't been to my house. When I returned home, it was almost like stepping into some odd, distorted world: one that resembled a world you once knew well, but it now stood foggy, misshapen in a way. Things still held their general shape and size, but small details had changed upon my entry.

• There was an inordinate amount of children's shoes lying helter-skelter in a pile by the door, all unorganized and lacking any state of decorum or decency.
• Dirty dishes abounded across the counter by the sink. I could tell who had accrued the most of them too. My 12-year-old brother Christian has this odd penchant for putting a disposable plastic straw in every beverage he drinks. He also has the aggravating idiosyncrasy of never reusing a glass. He merely finishes one drink and goes on and dirties another three or four throughout the day. A fair amount of soiled glasses and plastic cups, all festooned with a colorful plastic drinking straw, held reign amongst the other dishes.
• Baby gates cordoned off each staircase in the house, a safeguard for my infant brother Quinn. He had recently learned to crawl, and at a vivacious speed, too.
• The blue-carpeted stairs which led to the Benner children's bedrooms on the second floor were cluttered and littered with the various belongings of Christian and my 7-year-old sister Addison. The two have a most perturbing aversion to actually taking any of their belongings to their rooms when they are told to do so, so they naturally lay them pell-mell across the bottom-most stairs. Many a toy and trinket have been shattered under my unsuspecting tread due to this practice.
• The floor of the upstairs bathroom was covered with a fair flood of Christian's clothing, tossed without regard to cleanliness or organization.

And most alarming of these:

• The toilet paper roll in the bathroom had been hung backwards.

As I grew from a young adolescent into a young man, I developed a strong sense of organization and cleanliness. I believe that each and every one of us have "obsessive compulsive disorder" - or a mindset resembling it - to one degree or another. Some people have it to absolutely no degree and are thus "slovenly" or "unorganized." Others have it to a highly prominent degree where it may actually be diagnosable as true "OCD." I believe, with tongue slightly in cheek, that I've developed a higher than average degree of OCD. I cannot stand a lack of organization in my house, especially resulting from my siblings. Maybe it's just me finding a subconscious way to pick on and harass them, or maybe it's a parenting instinct already making its debut in the world, but either way, their messes aggravate me to no end. When I was home and in high school, I would generally be the one to clean up after their messes and in our common living areas. However, since I'd gone, no one but my ever-busy mother and my work-taxed father could clean such messes. My poor neat-freak heart broke clean in two.

However, my worst shock was met when I entered my room. I found numerous things out of place, items moved and opened, and objects removed from my room entirely. A floor lamp was gone, as were campaign pins of Kennedy and Obama that had adorned my curtains. My curtains, also, were gone. Needless to say, my fury struck down on unwitting Christian and Addison with the vehemence of (insert some arcane and ominous sounding biblical reference here; Egyptian plagues, fire and brimstone, what have you, et al).

Once I'd finally gotten all settled and returned all my possessions to their rightful place, I settled down into my bed. It was uncomfortable compared to my bed at school. Most of my pillows were up at State, and I only had two now (I strangely enjoy sleeping with A LOT of pillows, like six or seven). Instead of sleeping under my usual comforter, I slept under a spare sleeping bag, all unzipped and spread out. It was not the good old home sleeping experience I once enjoyed. But as I laid there, staring at the ceiling and walls, attempting to repose in my uncomfortable resting spot, thoughts of other changes that I've seen began striking my mind:

• A girl who graduated before me, unable to manage her course-load, dropped out of college.
• Two of my classmates, neither attending college, both became engaged after the girl was kicked out by her parents. An awkward living arrangement was made with the fiancee living with her in-laws-to-be.
• A barn, one I always passed by and held as a common landmark, was torn down and destroyed.
• A strange, awkward, implicit relationship was being held between one friend and another.
• One friend had been sworn into the Air Force and was awaiting assignment.
• A boy I went to elementary school with but moved to a neighboring town in eighth grade was now in a local prison for simple assault.
• Many of the old groups of friends that I was once part of no longer associated or weren't quite the same.
• A favorite teacher from high school retired.

I know that changes happen. Everyone knows that. It's just striking when they happen so quickly, right before your eyes. Some are more sudden, yet more trivial. Others are more gradual, yet more fundamental. This, I suppose, is what time brings.

My sincerest regards,
Brandon

Home - Bliss and Joy

This past weekend, I decided to spend a little time at home, back in Thompsontown, PA and away from the college life at Penn State in University Park. My main reason was to attend a picnic held by the Perry-Juniata Penn State Alumni Association so I could receive their $500 scholarship they awarded me (hey, it'll pay for some books, won't it?), but I figured it wouldn't be too bad to just relax back at home for a little while before my final exams.

I spent Friday evening languishing away in my dorm until my mother, an RN at Lewistown Hospital about half an hour away, picked me up after her shift. On the drive back home, little was on my mind. I was sort of like a radio set to an empty station, kind of just receiving static instead of meaningful sound. That evening was the second-to-last night of the carnival in McAlisterville, a town just over the hill from my little village of East Salem (mailing address is Thompsontown). I'd scarcely had a summer in my life where I'd not gone to the McAlisterville carnival, running and gallivanting through the midway and kiddie rides with my youthful and effervescent friends. However, this year had been different from those of my youth. I'd already missed Dutch Days, another local carnival and tradition in a neighboring town. Whether or not it left a hole in the collective experience of my friends, I cannot say. However, for me, the effect was bigger than I let on with most. While I was here at State, I found myself wondering, "Do my friends notice I'm gone? Do they miss me? Am I still important to them?" This is nothing against them, it's just something I find myself wondering at times. To an extent, I figured my friends had managed pretty well without me, yet even so, I wanted to see them again.

Before I even went home, I had Mom drop me off in McAlisterville. As I made my way into the crowded and lively carnival grounds, all packed with the drawling geriatric inhabitants of old Juniata County along with their various generations of offspring, I looked how many would picture a college student. I was wearing black Adidas gym shorts, admittedly a bit too short. Under a thin blue hooded jacket, a blue tank top was emblazoned with the name of my new home: "PENN STATE." Beneath the frumpy and wrinkled cover of a sun-and-water-faded North Face hat (yes, I know, North Face is stereotypically college kid material...), my hair was a little longer than I would have preferred, somewhat resembling a disheveled brown mop. As I walked a walk with, I will concede, a little too much swagger than there should have been, I casually dangled an Arby's large cup of Sprite in my hand. I was probably the image of a freshly-into-college kid, back home for a bit, and all drunk on collegiate pride. Some days I look back at myself and I think, "Good lord, I'm a twerp at times." Eh, these things were comparatively small. Who am I kidding, I'm probably the only one who noticed... I'm too hard on myself.

I began scouting out who I could, letting my eyes wander through the crowds. With each little flick of my eye across the lake of faces, I'd catch underclassmen from high school, the odd volunteer fireman here and there, a few distant relatives, my beloved old chem teacher. This was old Juniata County. Doesn't matter how provincial and backwoods it may be, I love it. I love it so dearly, and it will always be my home. Home. That's a curious thing. How do you know a place is your home? Because when you come back, before you can even realize what's happening, you're practically tackled to the ground by the running embrace by a dear friend from years past. That's what first made my mind click in, "Ah, yes. I've missed this so much." With that first big bear hug, the endorphins in my brain clicked on, and for once in a fair amount of time, I felt some genuine happiness. With a true smile on my face, I asked her how her business venture, a small cafe in the area, was turning out. As she brightly replied as to its success and her friends around her attested to the delicious heaven that is the milkshakes she serves, her new boyfriend stood beside her and put his arm around her. I graduated with him, a nice fellow. I was happy to see them both together, genuinely happy. It brings me joy to see good people from a good place having a good life.

Giving my well-wishes and imparting a goodbye, I turned away and began searching the place for more of my old friends. I didn't have to go far at all to find them. Within but a few minutes, a whole group of them found me. Two that I used to spend a lot of time with began racing to me, trying to beat each other to hug me first. When one hugged me first, the other hugged me over and over again to even it out. I loved this all so much. I missed feeling things such as this. There are few things in the world that bring me more joy than getting a hug from one of my dearest and most trusted friends when we've not seen each other in ages. Friends abounded that night. Memories swarmed my mind, however, they were not the sort of bittersweet and sad memories I may have expected earlier. I instead felt a genuine happiness. There was a happiness that existed in seeing the joy in the face of Juniata County children as they ran and played amongst the carnival as I once had.  There was a tranquility that existed in hearing that sort of Juniata County drawl, a special sort of twang, though plagued by grammatical errors, that is only spoken correctly here in ol' J-County. There was a bliss that existed in playing manhunt again on the side-streets of McAlisterville at 11 o'clock at night with your closest friends from your high school years.

This was the happy phase of my time at home. I felt lighter than air, and all was sweet and gleaming. Yet such emotions were not quite meant to last in their entirety in my mind. However, that is for me to write about on another night.

Good night, all.

My sincerest regards,
Brandon