Cold Harbor

I turned the engine off and got out of the car, leaving the headlights on to read the marker I’d already memorized.  “Around this crossroads is bloody ground,” it said, and went on to number the casualties from the two battles of Cold Harbor:  14,800 men in the first and 17,000 in the second.  It was a little after three a.m. and the wind smelled like rain.  My car clicked, cooling down, and all around me slept the suburbs that were replacing the fields that had replaced the trenches. 

I live northeast of Richmond, Virginia, in a region both hilly and swampy that served as a natural barrier to invasion during the Civil War.  Union armies bounced off of, sunk into and cursed at this land the whole time they were trying to get to Richmond. There are battlefields all around me—and most of my life I couldn’t have cared less. Not anymore.  This fall I became passionate about The War.  Now I devour thick, dull books, memorize facts and visit battlefields—sometimes even in the middle of the night when I can’t sleep.

My mother died this past summer.  This fall I became fascinated with history.  The two facts are not unconnected.  I understand that—and it’s no reason to stop.  Recapturing a past—even if it's not that particular past that I’ve lost—is a natural defense, an easily fortified position, sort of like the land I live on here north of Richmond.  Besides there’s something immensely comforting in the fact that soybeans—or suburbs—can sprout in such bloody dirt.  It leads, perhaps falsely, to the conclusion that wounds eventually heal. 

I got back in my car and drove down the road a little ways, pausing by another marker that talks of 7,000 casualties in a half an hour.There’s a statistic that always puts my pain into perspective.The farmer grew sweet potatoes in that field last year—and now it waits peacefully for the spring plowing, soaking up moonlight under the watchful eye of his neighbor’s satellite dish.