Stars and Bars

Harper's Ferry, WV
Mile 1008

Harper's Ferry is the most beautiful trail town I've seen yet, largely because it is an historic artifact preserved by the Park Service. Mighty rivers join right at the foot of a commanding church steeple, and cliffs loom like the ghost of history itself from three sides.

I ran into Cud at the Outfitter where we shared some good-natured Southern guffaws. "We're about to enter enemy territory," I said
"Hell yeah," Cud replied, "Comin up out of Virginia they got this big flag, Lincoln all over it, all kinds of stuff like that. Shee-it." Even in his wicking fabrics and lightweight backpack, he looks like he is wearing a gray wool uniform. Cud's southern Georgia accent and overall courtliness overrides the Johnny Reb in him, but it's always there for a true son of the confederacy. Which Cud really is not, thankfully (he's a Good Guy through and through), but it did get me thinking.

On the surface it is peculiar that folks emblazon their homes and vehicles with the flag of America's most dire enemy, the Confederate States of America. It's not so peculiar when you reflect on the fact that the Confederacy, in the minds of many, never really lost. The state song of Maryland ("Maryland, my Maryland") quotes Maryland son John Wilkes Booth- specifically, the words he cried out on shooting Lincoln. Sic semper tyrannis. Virginia should not call in vain.

Then you have a particular Missouri senator who remarked, in an interview with the laid-back white supremecists of Southern Partisan magazine, that we need to fight the idea that "Southern patriots" were "defending a perverted lifestyle". Slavery seems pretty perverted to me, but apparently former Senator and Attorney General John Ashcroft disagrees. If only he could keep his kinky slave fetish in the closet, because it's sort of disturbing reading about public officials being into this kind of thing. It's like finding a vibrator on your grandparents' bedstand. School voucher programs, preposterous drug sentencing (compared with sentencing rules for violent offenders), and pants-height laws all efficiently spell out what John Ashcroft, Trent Lott, and countless others so very much want to say: we don't like the Negroes very much.

So, as Osama bin Laden once observed in a 1998 interview, America is still a nation very much divided. Heaven help us if the Bad Guys get their ministry into the hideous US prison system. Actually, heaven won't help us, but maybe the Aryan Brotherhood will. When I left for the trail, an investigation into AB "stacking" of Florida state prison guards was underway. A federal attorney apparently began wondering why all the guards at Sanford had shamrock tattoos and carried nooses on their keychains. Hey Mr. Fancy Pants Federal Attorney, you ever consider that the AB may be our front line against terrorism?

This divided state . . we haven't even gotten into the sex thing yet, largely because feminists don't know how to point a gun or mix up plastic explosives. Which is a shame, because they're about to repeal the Enlightenment. So long marriage for love. Say hello to marriage for reproduction and, oh, needing a spouse's signed letter to buy condoms or birth control. Or going to jail for selling same. All of which will be revisited by newly sworn reactionaries, courts in power for the next few decades. It'll be a jolly old time when all those Lakewood Ranch soccer moms need a letter from hubby to go to the gynecologist.

But those fair ladies need not worry. They have enough money to hire their own doctors, doctors who won't give a damn about some cockamamie law saying what they can and can't treat. Seventy percent of the country consistently polls as against abortion, but eighty percent of the country wants the choice available to them when their teenage daughter gets knocked up. Instead of being anti-abortion, how about being "anti-letting-your-daughter-go-out-drunk-until-3AM"?

So Harper's Ferry sent my head spinning until I began unconsciously looking for the nearest liquor store. I came back to my senses and headed again into the woods, away from history and those accursed cliffs, at least for the time being. The town was a deathtrap for any force trying to hold it. It is a deathtrap for any hiker who gets too caught up in what it represents. I must focus. Defending the American Way is not what I am doing today. Today I walk.

Tomorrow I visit Monica in Washington, DC.