The heat of last week seemed like a good reason to stay inside and sort through junk. 

Amongst the piles of stuff, most of which ended up in the dumpster, I found a treasure, a true historical oddity, something you don't find any more: A stack of letters, some hand-written, others typed. 

The stack was fully an inch thick. It consisted of dozens of letters sent to me while I attended a summer session of college in England as a 21-year-old in 1986. 

Full disclosure: I became so home-sick when I got to England that I spent the first week writing postcards to anybody and everybody back home about my bravery and exploits. The return address was prominent. 

It was clear I desperately wanted mail. My friends, relatives, neighbors and even customers rose up to the call. 

Mom typed weekly updates on the summer activities of the visiting cousins at the farm.  

Dad wrote about the state of the machinery which was, because I was in England and not at home burying tractors in the swamp, much better than usual. 

Kid brother, then 12, scratched out a letter on a blue Airmail mailer which began: "I want you to know that I write you entirely out of guilt and obligation." 

Kid sister, then 19, reported on the social scene of local-kids-home-for-the-summer from college, a rowdy group to which we both belonged at the time. 

Apparently, some of the guys were out drinking beer and decided that it was high time they drag a refrigerator around the back roads with a log chain. 

Twenty miles they dragged that poor fridge, never thinking that if you're going to cruise the back roads drinking beer, a fridge bouncing around on the end of a log chain is not the best way to avoid detection. 

Roughly the same group, gathered at the bar a while later, wrote me a dozen messages, the sort you'd find in the back of a high school annual, on a paper place mat which one of them mailed to England. 

Grandpa typed weekly letters in his no-frills telegraphic style, freely mixing baseball news, horticultural updates and scripture quotes: 

"Twins lose in ninth. 

 

 Hrbek strikes out, bat on shoulder.

Lo how the mighty have fallen.

All the millions can't buy a hit.

Or happiness either.

Movie stars addicted to booze. 

Much better to raise apples.

Good crop this year.

Pies a bonus.

Grandpa."

Neighbor Bernice wrote an account of the successful Daily Vacation Bible School, with a somber addendum about a local who died in a late-night crash. 

It was sad news, but I was relieved there was nothing in there about a fridge. 

The summer of 1986 was only twenty-four years ago, but how times have changed. 

Will anyone eventually find a stack of handwritten or type-written letters left from a memorable summer spent abroad in 2010? 

No way. 

Letter writing is dead. 

Oh, we communicate, if you can call it that, on email. Instantly. Badly. Thoughtlessly. But frequently. 

A while back, I called a friend on his cell phone and we were well into the conversation before he casually mentioned that he was in Sweden and it was midnight there. 

Travel, too, has become commonplace. 

But the experience of mail call at breakfast on your first heart-wrenching trip from home since Bible camp, of hoping there's a letter for you, of glowing brightly for hours when three arrive in one day--that experience is gone. 

Also gone is the touching thrill when you realize friends and family took the time to put pen to paper on a letter which required postage, which wouldn't arrive for a week, and which might last forever. 

I was more touched when I found those letters last week than I was the first time I got them. 

Not so with today's communication. 

Where will our emails be in twenty-five years? Hidden on a hard drive somewhere. 

Decades into the future, nobody will sit on the living room floor, mess strewn about, paging through old emails, laughing, remembering, sneezing from the musty paper. 

There will be no quiet spells in the cleaning frenzy when a particular letter launches you into five minutes of reverie about a time you had almost forgotten. 

We've never had more than we have today. But we've lost an awful lot, too. 

And there's no getting it back. 

 

 

Willis Haviland Carrier invented modern air conditioning in 1902. 

Although Mr. Carrier probably doesn't deserve a national holiday, an occasional moment of silence in his honor wouldn't hurt, especially after last week.

Sure, we don't live in Phoenix or Atlanta, hot places where air conditioning alone has been responsible for huge population booms after World War II. 

But it can get muggy and miserable enough on northwestern Minnesota's prairies, especially for bodies more used to shivering than sweating.  

We hesitate to complain about the heat. One year ago the summer was so cool that the corn and tomatoes barely ripened. 

But this summer made up for it. Thanks also to timely rains, the garden and the crops are almost a month ahead. 

After toughing out thirty-some years in houses and apartments without the corrupting influence of air conditioning, I finally gave in to luxury and equipped my house with central air. 

Only a few years later, I consider air conditioning a necessity, as basic a need as food and probably more important than clothing. 

As a kid, I had one of the coolest bedrooms a boy could ever have. By cool, I mean fun. 

After enduring three years on a bunk bed in the same room in the trailer house as my sister, I hit a bonanza at age five. Mom and Dad moved the trailer back to the farm and slid it next to the old bunkhouse, which until that time had housed hired hands. 

Now, the bunkhouse was mine. Separated from parental tyranny by a door, an entryway and two steps, I had my own little fort with its own little furnace. 

But when the summertime heat came, the bunkhouse sweltered. My room had one little window. With no cross ventilation, the bunkhouse itself turned into a furnace. 

Oh, the long, sticky nights spent hoping for the slightest breeze, trying hide under the sheet from the whining mosquitoes that snuck in through the screen!

It was a comfort to hear rubbery cottonwood leaves outside rustle a little for it meant that a whiff of a breeze might flow through the window and bring enough relief to sleep. 

When baby brother arrived, the trailer and bunkhouse became too small. I ended up in the basement bedroom of a spanking new split-level. 

The basement room was cooler than the bunkhouse, and the ground-level window allowed what cool air there was to pour over you, but a person could still cut the summertime dampness with a knife. 

During those years, the coolest experience of a muggy day, in more ways than one, came at sunset when I roared down the field road on my mighty Honda 50. 

Down south, the road curved, dipped down to swamp level and took you through a pocket of cool air as refreshing as hard, cold well water drunk from a garden hose. 

You couldn't slow down or the mosquitoes would get you, but that smooth dip in the road on the Honda was just plain cool. 

Then came the sweltering dorms and college apartments and more hot, muggy nights spent tossing and turning without the weight of a quilt to coax a person into dreamland. 

By now, I had an adjustable rate fan. Its drone helped bring on sleep as much as the air it moved, and the soft roar obscured the annoying whine of the mosquitoes. 

Today during hot spells, central air bathes me in cool air night and day.

I enjoy the dry, Arizona-like air produced by the air conditioner so much that I run the thing all summer, needed or not. 

The windows stay shut. No rustling leaves, but also no mosquitoes or ragweed pollen.

It used to be that two weeks per year, one in April and one in October, separated the heating season from the cooling season and visa versa. 

Now the two overlap. On a cool October morning, it is awfully nice to have the kitchen floor warm on the feet when I come down for breakfast. 

Yet, to keep the humidity down, I keep the air conditioner on during the day. 

Pitting the two systems against each other probably isn't sustainable, green, responsible, cost effective, earth friendly or any of those virtuous things. 

However, after those sweltering, miserable nights in the old bunkhouse, I'd rather be cool than correct. 

 

Last week, almost one year to the day after I purchased my latest vehicle, the odometer turned over to 30,000 miles. 

Well, it is a green display light that changed to 30,000 miles. Saying it "turned over" is no longer accurate. 

The car, a 2009 Ford Taurus, has done everything asked of it. 

It rides like a dream. 

The stereo rocks. 

The interior is classy. 

The trunk could hold a piano. 

The view from the driver's seat is beautiful. 

But I don't like the thing! We haven't bonded. In fact, my car bores me to death.

I still miss my Ranger, which sits up in the yard, forlorn and forgotten despite its obvious beauty, used only for field duty, made dirty by people who view it as a mere chunk of metal.

I feel twinges of guilt and regret every time I drive past. 

So nondescript is my new car that twice in the last year I have gotten into the wrong vehicle after coming out of a convenience store. That's fine in the small town, but not in Tucson. 

The car is painted silver. So is everybody else's. It is like going back to the era when everybody had a black Model T. How did they tell them all apart after the square dance on Saturday night? 

I bought the car because it was marked down and it had all the bells and whistles and it seemed like I no longer needed to drag a pickup around.

Mistake. I jumped in the Ranger and drove around the yard the other day and immediately my self-worth increased by 47%. 

The Ranger's engine roars like it is expending more effort than is needed, the tires howl on the pavement, the cab is dirty, the carpet has holes.

But driving it feels like home. 

Getting into a silver sedan makes it feel like I am going to bingo, or to a job in the suburbs that I hate, or to an annual meeting of the co-op to hope for door prizes, or too a square dance festival. 

Even the bells and whistles in the new car irritate me. 

When I yell at the stereo to play a certain tune, it always gets the wrong one. 

When the dome lights fade slowly down as if they are being dimmed by a stage manager instead of just going off, I feel like yelling "quit this foolishness." 

The fan control button has a delayed response, as if that is some sign of class. 

You get in a hot car and turn up the fan a couple notches and it does nothing. So you turn it up more and it goes up a little. 

Well, the thing is just catching up to you. As I put my hand back on the wheel, the fan keeps speeding up until it is plastering my face. 

So, I turn it down with a couple of bumps of the button. It does nothing. I hit the button a couple more times. The fan slows a little. I put my hand back on the wheel only to have the fan keep slowing down to a stop. 

Now, what possible good could come of that sort of feature?  

I have no time for such nonsense. When I push the button, I want results. Now. 

Another thing: To adjust the side mirrors, you can't just reach out and move them. You have to learn how to use this lever deal which, depending upon how you bend it, controls the mirrors on both sides of the car. 

Last week, the left hand mirror was off kilter and I spent a good eight miles trying to get it back in line before I figured out that I must have run into something that pushed the entire mirror around. No wonder the lever did no good! 

Another complaint: the windows get locked up all the time so they won't roll down and I can’t figure out how to unlock them. 

You say read the manual. 

Listen, any machine that requires that a person read the manual in order to run it is poorly designed and probably just too complicated. 

In 260,000 miles, I didn't open the manual on the Ford Ranger until I had to figure out the jack to change a tire. 

Now that's a good vehicle. 

 

 

As more people discover how to send text messages on their ever-present cell phones, we have become a nation of hypnotized zombies who stare into our phones while we drive into telephone poles, walk into trees, wander into fellow pedestrians, jam up traffic in the cereal aisle and generally tune out to what is going on right in front of our noses. 

Who ever thought that our culture would be taken over, not by robots, not by the Russians, not by rock and roll, but by little hand-held walkie talkies that send written notes of no more than 140 characters in length. 

It as if we've collectively returned to fifth grade when we learned the joy of passing notes. 

Oh, to get a folded up note! A message from an oracle! 

A note passed in class was magical. It was concealed. It was secret. As you opened it, you dreamed of the possibilities inside.

The content always disappointed, of course. The message was meaningless, stupid or incoherent. 

But for that moment when you held the note, knew it was meant for you and you only, a special drug took effect. 

That drug is hope, for it is always possible that an unopened note might contain the evidence you crave that you are special, loved, complete and whole. 

The fifth grade notes always fell short, but enough of the hope drug lingered in the body that the over-all experience was pleasurable. The next note was welcomed with the exact same exhilarating sense of unrealistic expectation. 

Like lab rats pressing a bar to get their pleasure zones zapped again and again, even at the  expense of food, water and safety, people are now passing notes to each other while 1000s of miles apart. Or while in the same car. 

Did we think it could get worse than people talking on cell phones everywhere? 

It just did. People now talk with their thumbs.

Actual cell phone conversations, even though they distract drivers and leave them sitting at stop signs while everybody else waits for them to go, still allow people to use their eyes. 

Cell phones used in restaurants for gag-inducing conversations about Grandma's colostomy, Ellen's weight issue or the dog's ear infection are merely rude. 

But text messaging, although bystanders are spared the agony of hearing the message out loud, occupies both eyes, both hands and all of one's attention. 

The people standing right next to you are left to wonder if you even know they are there. When the oracle from beyond issues a message of less than 140 characters, everything stops. 

Nobody seems to mind the tremendous inefficiency of talking with one's thumbs. Sending little text messages takes time, especially for older folks like myself who were taught to type using all of our fingers. 

Nobody seems bothered when people tune out mid-conversation to smile at their phone, happy as a fifth grader who just got a note that not-so-incidentally, the person next to them did not get. 

Nobody seems to mind that the problem of people tuning out to text is literally taking lives on our highways.

Text messaging triggers the production of a powerful drug by our glandular nodes that overrides all other concerns. 

It is the same drug that makes unopened Christmas gifts under the tree more thrilling than the disappointing box of junk you take home after the gifts are opened. 

It is a drug produced by hope that an oracular message from beyond will finally soothe the unbearable anxieties of existence.  

As with all drugs, we love to deny their pernicious effects. Texting is "more efficient," people say. 

Efficient? Try going through the same revolving door as somebody who is trying to finish up a text message. 

The reason people insist texting is more efficient is it doesn't require the hassle of clumsy social conventions like saying hello and goodbye. 

Texting doesn't require that you look a person in the eye.

 

No wonder twenty-something love birds now break up with each other by text message. 

Text messaging is one more way machines have drained the blood from human communication.

Yes, we can be in constant touch with everybody. Yes, we can get magical messages from beyond. Hundreds per day!

But to the extent we prefer oracular machine messages to face-to-face human communication, we set our physical, emotional and mental health aside in favor of a pernicious drug. 

 

Last month big machines rolled in to rip up the seven miles of the road that goes past the farm.  

After years of rumors, surveyor sticks, ribbons tied to doomed trees and unreadable symbols written in day-glow spray paint on the road, the big project finally got off the ground. 

It will be a two-year ordeal. In the end, the entire seven miles will be beautiful tar, free of frost boils, built to bear the weight of the truck traffic that tends to travel the route anyway.

The county engineer's office has foretold that on the two miles gravel road to the east, the hills will be flattened, the low sloughs raised, the crooked made straight and the rough places plain. 

The five miles to the west, meanwhile, were already tarred. Last week one of those big grinders came and pulverized the tarred surface to smithereens and we now have gravel all the way to the main highway for the first time since the mid-1960s. 

The road past the farm was first tarred in 1976. As a sixth grader, the road construction made for a festive summer. Most exciting was when it rained four inches while the road was clay and we had to slide around on the slime just to get to town for milk. 

One of the road crew camped in our yard with his wife and 15-year old son. Although the kid pretty much wrecked my Honda 50 before the summer was over, it was fun to have somebody around the place close to my age. 

As we rode our bikes one day, we stopped to rest under some trees out back by the corn crib. The kid got quiet. I asked what was wrong.

He had a secret. I had to promise not to tell. Anybody. If I told anybody, I would be dead. 

I promised. 

"They found a body."

I felt a chill. 

"Who found a body?"

"The road guys," he said. "They found a body in the ditch." 

My vivid imagination conjured up the horror of finding a decomposed murder victim. 

"Who killed the person?"

"They don't know."

 

About then, Dad drove up in the pickup and told me to jump in. He was all excited. The road crew had found some bones and we were going to go down to see them. 

No way! I said. I don't want to see a dead body. 

Dad laughed. He said it was just bones. As we drove the half-mile to the site, I concealed my dread. 

The driver of the scraper who uncovered the skull had jumped off his machine, run to his pickup and gone home for the day, so I wasn’t the only one scared.

But jelly-legged fear turned to curiosity as Dad and I scraped away the dirt from the bones. Here was a button. There was a boot heel. Here was some wood from a coffin. 

By now, I was in on the party. This was fun. We loaded up the bones and the buttons into the pickup, drove back to the farm and went to find Grandma, who had lived there all her life, to see if she knew who might be buried in the ditch across the road. 

She knew. It was Dr. Per, a quack doctor who committed suicide about eighty years before. Because the local church wouldn't bury a suicide in their cemetery, neighbors dug a grave right under the tree from which the quack doctor hung and interred him there.

He rested there in peace until Dad and I dug him up.  

The path of the road was only later moved closer to where Dr. Per was buried. Grandma always wondered if they would find the grave. When she walked home from Luther League late at night as a girl, she ran scared past that spot as she knew somebody was out there. 

After telling us the story, Grandma scolded us for being so light-hearted about human remains and said we'd better call the sheriff so poor Dr. Per could get a proper burial. 

The sheriff came and took the bones away. There was no investigation. The newspapers didn't pick it up. It was pretty much a big joke. 

Now, thirty-some years later, they are out digging with the scrapers again, pushing back layers of land with the dozers, digging where digging hasn't been done for decades. 

It will be interesting to see what turns up. 

 

Midwesterners who assume that the East Coast is nothing but urban sprawl are often surprised by the endless dense forests which cover the most of the eastern seaboard from Maine to Georgia. 

It wasn't always so. 

During the two-hundred year colonial period, the coastal lands were stripped of their original forests. 

First, the British took the timber to build their immense naval and merchant fleet. The tall, straight trees in the New World were particularly valued for ship masts. 

Trees were needed for fuel. Every home burned wood. Eventually, iron furnaces consumed entire forests in Appalachia. 

Farther south, when tobacco became a lucrative crop, planters cleared forests make farmland. The rise of cotton and rice hastened the deforestation. 

When one visits battlefields on the East Coast, from Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts to Gettysburg, PA, the problem for historians who want the battlefields to remain as they were is that there are more and deeper forests now than there were when the actual battles were fought. 

The lush forests along the road the Redcoats used to retreat back to Boston after the first shots of the Revolutionary war simply weren't there in the 1770s. There was nowhere to hide.

In Gettysburg, removing trees to preserve the sight lines which existed during the battle in 1863 is a major budget item for the Gettysburg Foundation. 

What happened to make the coastal states more forested today than they have been at most times in the past 300 years? 

First, the British shipbuilders were denied the use of the forests once they lost the Revolutionary War. Eventually, the British and everybody else stopped making their ships out of wood. 

As for the land cleared for farming, the soil in the coastal lands is very weak. Fertilization was not yet common in the 1700s. Clearing the land of trees sometimes yielded only a few years of good crops before the soil wore out and the forest was left to grow back. 

Finally, with the discovery of coal and eventually oil, the need to use wood for fuel decreased. 

As a result, the forests have grown up again and are probably more extensive than they have been in a couple hundred years. 

And the woods are dense. As you drive from Washington, DC through Virginia, most of the freeways are virtual tunnels. Driving east down the peninsula towards colonial Williamsburg, so thick were the woods in the median that we went a good seventy miles without once seeing the oncoming traffic in the westbound lanes. 

It is enough to disorient a prairie person. Eventually you get claustrophobic and just want to see some open land. 

But there is no open land. Ever. The only comfort is when you get to the ocean. However, when you realize you can't drive across the ocean, the comfort evaporates. To get anywhere, you have to burrow back into the forest tunnels. Scary. 

The coastal forests of Virginia, even those which have regenerated in recent years, feature impressive trees which form a canopy two to three times as tall as the oak forests of northern Minnesota. 

In Virginia, live oak (a type of oak which keeps its leaves most of the year) mix with pine. In Georgia, pine predominate. Sycamore, gum trees, hickory, ash, walnut, cherry and dozens of varieties of oak also are native.

In more domestic settings you find the legendary magnolia. In older neighborhoods, some are massive and historic.

Enormous trees on battlefields are honored as "witness trees" if pictures can prove that they were there during the Civil War. 

In Savannah, GA twenty one city squares feature massive oak planted in rows hundreds of years ago, each draped with strands of pewter-green Spanish moss. 

The most handsome southern tree of all, in my opinion, is the pecan. It isn’t the largest, but it is utterly dignified with a straight trunk and a dense crown of dark, glossy green leaves. 

The main enemy of forests in the south is kudzu, a vigorous and invasive vine imported from Japan in the 1870s to feed cattle. 

What a disaster. Easily controlled in the Orient, kudzu took off in the heat of the South and consumes about 150,000 additional acres of land per year. 

Kudzu drapes itself over entire groves, killing the trees and all of their undergrowth. 

But despite the kudzu, one is encouraged to find that in the South, at least, there are more forests now than at any time since the early days of settlement. 

We northerners can be a bit smug about our record on racial equality. After all, we fought to free the slaves, did we not? 

The historic record is more murky, as became obvious when our tour of 40 history teachers from Northwest Minnesota moved to Atlanta. 

When the Civil War began, President Lincoln framed the struggle as a fight to preserve the Union. He knew if the purpose of the war became to free the four million enslaved African-Americans, support for the effort would evaporate. 

In 1863, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. It was a war measure designed to destabilize the Confederacy and win support for the Union overseas. It worked. 

But the Proclamation was worded so that it liberated slaves only in areas controlled by the Confederacy. It freed nobody. It was a propaganda device and a good one, for it created a sensation amongst the enslaved and won the support of Europe's masses for the northern cause. 

But racial equality? Lincoln would have none of it. To the day Lincoln died, he believed the best solution to the race issue was to ship America's blacks to Liberia. Or Nicaragua. Or South America. Anywhere, just not here. 

When the war ended, black people briefly exercised their freedoms as equal citizens. They voted. The held office. Some were elected to Congress. They assumed that not only were they free, they were now equal. 

How wrong they were. As the South's economy slowly recovered from the war, Southern whites found ways to put blacks back in their place. 

The gradual creation of two separate and decidedly unequal societies of black and white in the South went forward with the full assent of the North. 

In fact, the North joined the South in forgetting slavery as the underlying cause of the war.

In 1913, 54,000 veterans, both Union and Confederate, arrived at Gettysburg for a reunion on the 50th anniversary of the battle. It was a sensational national event. 

Not a single black soldier was invited. 

The only black people present when President Woodrow Wilson gave his address were those who set up the chairs. 

The theme of the reunion? Reconciliation. The War had been a big misunderstanding, little more than a chance for brave soldiers to show their manly valor by slaughtering each other for no apparent reason. 

A Richmond, VA paper crowed, "No attention was paid to the causes of the war."Veterans from both sides shed tears and exchanged hugs.

By now, whites of both North and South were on the same side: With the embarrassment of slavery ended, it was time to make sure black people stayed in their place. 

Wilson's refusal to mention the end of slavery was appropriate: As President, he worked tirelessly to segregate the Federal Civil Service, which had, after the Civil War been more-or-less color-blind. 

Wilson built separate offices for black and white civil service workers and forced out black workers where he could. 

A revived Ku Klux Klan arose in 1915 to terrorize blacks, Jews, Catholics, immigrants and whom ever else they didn't like. The organization, which enrolled approximately 15% of eligible males in the nation, wanted to "take America back" from minorities who threatened their jobs.

Several southern black soldiers who had the gall to return home from World War I in their uniforms were lynched upon arrival in their home towns. 

The Klan moved as far north as Grand Forks. Three black circus workers were lynched in Duluth in 1920. 

A system of laws solidified in the South which, by the 1950s, prevented blacks from voting, holding office or attending the far superior white public schools. 

Segregation was legally enforced in every area of public life while the North looked the other way. 

The "new birth of freedom" of which Lincoln spoke in his Gettysburg address failed to outlive the man himself. 

Only after World War II did the wheels of change began to turn. 

In 1947, Jackie Robinson became the first black major league baseball player since baseball was segregated in 1889.

In 1954, Earl Warren's Supreme Court ruled that separate schools were not equal. President Eisenhower eventually enforced the decision. 

From there, the Civil Rights movement arose to slowly tear down the humiliating system of segregation which had built up since the Civil War. 

We are more familiar with those recent struggles. 

What we prefer to forget are the ninety shameful years during which our nation methodically reduced the rights of its formerly enslaved black population. 

 

 

Stone Mountain just east of Atlanta, Georgia is an enormous granite dome, five miles around at the base, circled by sheer gray cliffs which rise out of the Georgia forest. 

 

The mountain looms as large in history as it does in the Georgia landscape. 

 

Carved on the side of the mountain is an enormous bas-relief sculpture of three heroes of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee and Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson, along with their horses. 

 

At the base of the mountain is a man-made lake surrounded by an amusement park with children's rides, gift shops, cafes, hotels and museums. 

 

Facing up to the sculpture is a long fairway of lawn surrounded on either side by trees which shade thirteen terraces, one honoring each state of the Confederacy.

 

Our group of teachers was to eat on the Kentucky terrace and then watch the laser show from the same perch once the sun went down. 

 

One problem, noticed by several teachers: Kentucky wasn't part of the Confederacy. It never seceded. 

 

In fact, the history books record eleven Confederate States, not thirteen. Missouri, too, was counted as a Confederate state by the amusement park people, even though only a tiny, disputed portion of that state left the Union. 

 

Welcome to the twisted historical world of those who advocate of the Lost Cause view of the Civil War.

 

Lost Cause proponents don't even consider the Civil War a civil war. They call it "War Between The States," or "The War of Northern Aggression." It was a war between two nations, not a war which tore apart one. 

 

The Confederacy, according to these revisionists, was the more honorable, Christian, American and refined society. It was defeated, not out of any great matter of principle, but simply because the North had greater resources in men and material. 

 

Earlier on our trip at Ft. Sumter, the island fortress which witnessed the first shots of the Civil War, several in our group heard Abraham Lincoln referred to contemptuously by visitors as "Dinkum," or "Pinkum," or other such epithets. 

 

Apparently, the war isn't over. 

 

The amusement park at Stone Mountain becomes an even more interesting holiday pilgrimage for southern families when one learns that the second Ku Klux Klan was formed on top of the mountain in 1915. 

 

The re-founding of the Klan presaged thousands of lynchings in the south. Hundreds of postcards survive of smiling whites showing off burnt body parts of dead black people. 

 

But that dark and evil history is swept under the rug at the Stone Mountain amusement park where attendees are treated to a laser show which glorifies the Confederacy as a bastion of freedom.

 

After dark, the laser light show continued the rewriting of history. In a bizarre twist, Davis, Lee and Jackson gallop off on their horses to the tune of "Battle Hymn of the Republic," written by Julia Ward Howe as an abolitionist pro-Union anthem. 

 

To claim the Battle Hymn for the Confederacy takes a lot of gall. 

 

Later, as Elvis croons a sad song containing the phrase "your Daddy’s gonna die," soldiers are shown on the side of the mountain going off to battle, apparently never to return.

 

The message of the show is unmistakable: The South is superior in matters of honor and military glory. Those who died attempting to create a Confederate nation did so honorably. 

 

Moreover, it is the South’s noble tradition that is carried on today by the brave soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

 

In all this, not a word is mentioned of the real reason for the Confederacy: To defend the "freedom" of southern plantation owners to keep humans in bondage based upon the color of their skin and to defend the freedom of all southern whites, plantation owners or not, to subjugate, abuse and humiliate an entire race. 

 

Never once will you hear these Lost Cause advocates say in public what is implied by their nostalgia and their choice of shrines: Slavery was a benign institution, the foundation of a superior society. It should never have ended. 

 

The revision of Civil War history to minimize the importance of slavery is no small matter. When the Texas textbook committee votes to include Jefferson Davis' inaugural address as required reading, they do so to honor a traitor and an enemy of human freedom. 

 

They, along with those who display Confederate flags on their pickup trucks or dormitory walls, should be recognized as the retrograde bigots they are. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As our tour group of forty history teachers marched deep into Dixie, the temperature rose above 105 degrees. It was a relief to spend time in the air conditioned bus between stops at historic sites. 

After visiting colonial Jamestown, VA in the withering heat, we settled in for a six-hour bus ride to Charleston, SC where we would see Ft. Sumter, site of the first shots of the Civil War. 

But just a few miles down the road, the bus ground to a halt on a narrow but busy highway. Because I was in the front seat, I could hear our driver mumble.

A hose had come off the transmission. Behind the bus was a shiny liquid trail as far as we could see. The last of the fluid dribbled across the highway into the oncoming traffic. 

Thank goodness the engine still functioned. We had air. But we had to find a replacement bus during a very busy time of the year for tours.

Several cheerful sheriff's deputies showed up to direct traffic around the wounded bus. We gave them water from our cooler and told them of our mission to study the Civil War.

"I am not much of a Civil War buff, given how it turned out," drawled one cop. 

Even so, he pointed out that the ravine across the highway was not a ravine but was in fact a trench dug by General McClellan's Union Army as they prepared to invade Richmond. 

As I monitored the bus driver's phone conversations, it became apparent that a replacement bus was nowhere near. I decided to wander down the side of the road. 

Within a couple hundred yards, I came across a little sign that said, "Plantation House Tours." I walked up the drive, which in the south amounts to a forested tunnel, and came to a clearing which contained a huge antebellum mansion. 

A knock on the front door brought no response, so I walked around the side and ran into the lady of the house in the garden. 

No, she said, she was too busy getting ready for a wedding to be held on the grounds to give a tour to our teachers. But she would show me around so I could tell them about it in case they wanted to have a wedding there themselves. 

I don't think she was aware how far Minnesota is from coastal Virginia. But I took her up on the offer of the tour. 

The mansion, built in the 1820s, survived the Civil War in great shape. The dimly-lit interior was thick with period furnishings. In the middle of the house was a spectacular four-story unsupported cantilever spiral staircase. 

And, added the woman, the house was haunted. The ghost of a girl who died of a broken heart waiting for her soldier lover to return from the war still comes out at night. 

Forget the ghost, the woman herself was creepy enough. Layers of makeup melted down her face in the 100 degree heat. Something in her smile made me wonder if I would get out alive. 

She apologized for her appearance and said, "When I have visitors, I look fabulous." I said I was sure she did. 

She took me through the kitchen and told about the parties held in the 1840s where guests from the North and the South mingled "before there were any hard feelins'." 

Out the back we went to see the slave quarters. Then a massive garden. Then a stream. Then a flour mill, which still works using power from the stream. The place went on and on, deep into the depths of the forest. 

Eventually, the woman made it clear that I was free to leave. I thanked her. Overcome by sudden panic that the bus had left me, I sprinted down the drive and back up the highway. 

There had been no progress on the bus in my absence. It would be two more hours before the sheriff, tired of directing traffic, commandeered us a smelly bus with bad air conditioning. 

Given the snakes, ticks and chiggers in the ditch, the kindly cops stopped the rush hour traffic to allow us to drag our bags a couple hundred yards to the replacement bus using the whole two-lane highway.

After a sweltering six-hour drive, we pulled into Charleston at 2 a.m. having had our fill of southern comfort for the day. 

 

 

 

 

 

As I prepared last week for a tour of Civil War historic sites with forty history teachers from northwestern Minnesota, I looked at the itinerary and wondered if I would get anything out of touring battlefields. 

Although I enjoy history, history buffs who get their thrills out of battles at the expense of all else make me nervous. Don’t they realize that war isn’t football? Don’t they see the bigger picture, the lives ruined, the families destroyed? 

Our first stop at the Bull Run battlefield just west of Washington, D. C. confirmed my suspicions. Our guide was a wanna-be drill instructor who shouted at our tour group like we were fresh recruits. 

“So, my question to you is,” the little guy ballered, “what would you have done in this situation if you were General McDowell?”

I nearly shouted, “I would have punted!” but I didn’t want to do 100 pushups. 

Instead, nobody said a word. This was a bunch of rural Minnesotans. When threatened, we tend to stare blankly like Jersey cows, thus unnerving our foe.

After the clueless punk finished his blustering, our sullen brigade of Minnesotans trudged back to the bus without so much as a moo. 

The next stop was Antietam. Here, things went better. The guide was a serious young woman who knew her stuff. 

Yet, her obvious passion was not for the effect of the battle of Antietam on the Civil War but for the preservation of the battlefield in the present day. 

After her earnest explanations of who owned this and who bought that and how this house was restored and how this one was not, I was still not convinced that visiting a battlefield was vital to understanding the impact of a particular battle. 

Then we got lucky. For the tour of Gettysburg, our tour leader landed the ultimate guide: Professor James McPherson, author of Battle Cry of Freedom, the Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the Civil War. 

McPherson is a great historian. A professor at Princeton, he achieved the impossible.by writing a single-volume history of the war that is both respected by academics and read by the masses. 

I anticipated a suave and intimidating Ivy League professor who thought he knew everything and wanted everybody to know it. 

But when McPherson showed up, he was a no-nonsense home cookin’ sort who was born in Valley City, ND and raised near Albert Lea, MN.

I anticipated a man who knew the big picture of the Civil War but who might be impatient with details. 

But it soon became apparent that there wasn’t a rock on the 6,000 acre Gettysburg battlefield that the distinguished professor couldn’t explain. 

Under the tutelege of the great historian, the battlefield sprang to life. McPherson walked us through the three-day battle, dishing out frank assessments of each general’s strengths, quirks and weaknesses, justifying some of their decisions while criticizing others. 

You could see the wheels of the great mind that whittled down the Civil War into one volume spin hard to solve the same problem during our visit: How could he reduce the battle of Gettysburg to a seven-hour tour and do it justice? 

As the temperature rose to the upper 90s, McPherson grimly glanced at his watch and adjusted our route through the massive battlefield to respond to the interests of the teachers and our need for water. To keep us on track, he yelled “March!” 

We marched. 

The day climaxed when our group of teachers, lead by General McPherson, replicated Pickett’s Charge, the famous and futile attempt by General Lee to break the Union middle by sending a mile-wide swath of 13,000 men into the teeth of the Federal guns. 

As the doomed rebels marched forward, the Union troops let them approach to within a few hundred yards before ripping into the rebel line with cannon loaded with grape shot. Within minutes, thousands of Rebels were killed and wounded. 

The ill-advised assault was a disaster. The battle of Gettysburg was over. General Robert E. Lee’s winning streak was broken, his aura of invincibility shattered. 

Nearly 150 years later on the same march, our group suffered several wood ticks and a little sunburn. 

Not one person complained. 

After dazzling us with his knowledge for seven hours,  Professor McPherson unceremoniously stepped off our bus and disappeared into the crowd at the Gettysburg Museum. 

He left behind forty dumbfounded and grateful teachers who will never see Gettysburg the same way again.