Walking through history

Walking through history

“A lady asked Dr. [Benjamin] Franklin, ‘Well Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?’ ‘A republic,’ replied the Doctor, ‘if you can keep it.’” — 1787 journal entry by James McHenry (1753-1816), a Maryland delegate to the Constitutional Convention

History and I have always gotten along reasonably well.

But geography?

Geography has been the better teacher.

Somewhere along the way, I discovered something about myself. I can read a history book, watch a documentary, admire artifacts in a museum and still keep history at a comfortable distance.

Then I stand where it happened.

That changes everything.

This seems worth mentioning as America celebrates its 250th birthday with fireworks, speeches, concerts, parades and enough red, white and blue bunting to decorate a continent from sea to shining sea.

I enjoy every bit of it.

But the older I get, the more convinced I become that America reveals itself best not through textbooks, but through places.

Not flying over them.

Not reading about them.

Walking them.

I first realized that at Gettysburg back in 1995.

Like most Americans, I already knew the broad outlines of the battle. Three days in July 1863. Cemetery Ridge. Little Round Top. Pickett’s Charge. Then, on November 19th, Lincoln’s 271-word Gettysburg Address, feted as one of the most famous and significant speeches in American history.

Then I stood there.

Standing on Cemetery Ridge, I looked across those open Pennsylvania fields and suddenly understood the impossible distance of Pickett’s Charge.

Maps tell you distance.

They cannot tell you scale.

Only then did I appreciate the courage, the terror and the heartbreak of what happened there. Gettysburg stopped being an illustration in a history book and became a place where thousands of young Americans, wearing different uniforms but sharing the same fears, forever changed the nation.

Valley Forge did something similar.

Until I visited, the Revolutionary War encampment had been little more than a name in social studies class.

Then I walked Washington’s 1777-1778 stone headquarters house along the Schuylkill River and among the reconstructed log barracks, imagining soldiers enduring a Pennsylvania winter with little food, threadbare clothing and no certainty that the cause would survive.

There are no grand triumphs at Valley Forge.

Only perseverance.

Sometimes that’s the greater victory.

Philadelphia changed my perspective in another way.

Independence Hall isn’t especially large.

In fact, it’s surprisingly modest.

Standing inside that room, I realized the American experiment wasn’t born in some towering palace.

It began in an ordinary meeting room filled with extraordinary ideas.

The Founding Fathers suddenly weren’t cold marble statues.

They became flesh-and-blood men arguing, compromising, second-guessing themselves and hoping they were creating something that might actually last.

A short distance away, Federal Hall in New York City tells another chapter many Americans forget.

Before there was Washington, D.C., there was New York.

George Washington took the first presidential oath there under the Constitution, and for a brief moment, Lower Manhattan became the capital of a nation still figuring itself out.

Nearby, a ferry carried me from Battery Park to two places that made history deeply personal.

The Statue of Liberty.

Ellis Island.

My ancestors came through those doors.

Suddenly, immigration wasn’t numbers or political debate.

It became great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents with last names like Samp, Aschauer, Langbecker, Johnson, Wittnebel, McPherson and Rumbeli — my people — carrying suitcases and steamer trunks from Germany, Sweden, France, Switzerland, Scotland and Italy, speaking unfamiliar languages and stepping into an uncertain future an ocean away.

I’d say they made the right gamble.

Otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this column.

Mount Vernon surprised me, too.

George Washington is so familiar that we almost stop seeing him.

Visit his home, however, and he becomes wonderfully human again.

A farmer.

A surveyor.

A husband.

A businessman.

A reluctant president who would have preferred tending his fields had history not called.

Virginia itself tells America’s opening chapters in remarkable succession.

Jamestown reminds you how fragile the first English settlement really was.

Williamsburg lets you wander streets where merchants, craftsmen, politicians and ordinary citizens argued about the future.

Yorktown reminds you that independence was anything but inevitable.

Standing there, victory feels improbable.

Which makes it all the more remarkable.

Washington, D.C., of course, was built to make history visible.

Lincoln quietly watches over the Reflecting Pool.

Jefferson gazes across the Tidal Basin.

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial allows names — not speeches — to tell the story.

The World War II and Korean War memorials remind us that freedom has always demanded a price.

But no place in Washington affected me more profoundly than Arlington National Cemetery.

You can prepare yourself for Arlington.

You cannot prepare yourself for its silence.

The white headstones disappear over the hills until you can no longer tell where the cemetery ends and the horizon begins.

Every marker represents a family.

Every marker represents a story interrupted.

Then comes the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

Like millions of Americans, I’d seen the changing of the guard countless times on television.

Seeing it in person is entirely different.

The measured 21 steps.

The flawless precision.

The absolute silence of everyone watching.

No movement is wasted.

No detail overlooked.

Standing there, I realized the tomb doesn’t simply honor three unknown American service members from World War I, World War II and the Korean War,

It honors every American who gave everything — including those whose names history itself could not preserve.

For a few quiet minutes, history wasn’t something I was learning.

It was something I was honoring.

The three Sept. 11 memorials affected me in much the same way.

Ground Zero in New York.

The Pentagon.

Shanksville, Pa.

Part of that is generational.

I remember exactly where I was that morning in 2001.

Part of it is personal.

For 16 years I served as a volunteer firefighter.

That changes how you stand at Ground Zero.

You don’t simply see reflecting pools.

You think about turnout gear.

Hoses and axes and pike poles.

SCBA air packs.

Radio traffic on the hand-held.

And I couldn’t help thinking about my adopted FDNY “brother,” Squad 18 firefighter Eric T. Allen, and 342 other FDNY firefighters just like him who climbed upward at the Twin Towers while everyone else desperately tried to come down. He was last seen entering the North Tower a quarter century ago now, moving upward through the stairwells with his team, helping evacuate World Trade Center office workers and giving comfort amidst the chaos. He never made it out.

At Shanksville, the quiet speaks louder than words for the “Let’s Roll” hero citizen patriots of United Flight 93.

At the Pentagon, the memorial reminds us that ordinary workplaces can become sacred ground in a single morning.

Those three places are painful.

They are also profoundly inspiring.

They remind us that courage isn’t an abstract virtue.

It’s something ordinary people choose when extraordinary moments arrive.

I found that same feeling, in a different form, at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis.

History books tell us where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. died.

Standing beneath that balcony tells us something else entirely.

It gives the Civil Rights Movement an address.

A railing.

A motel room.

A parking lot.

A wreath.

History becomes heartbreak measured in feet instead of decades.

New Orleans, meanwhile, teaches yet another lesson.

The French Quarter reminds us that America has never been just one culture or one story.

French.

Spanish.

Creole.

African.

Caribbean.

American.

All layered together within a few remarkable blocks.

History in New Orleans refuses to stay inside museums.

It spills onto wrought-iron balconies.

It echoes through hidden courtyards.

It drifts from street musicians playing beneath gas lamps.

It lives in centuries-old bricks worn smooth by generations of footsteps.

Then there is one of my favorite surprises.

Vandalia, Ill.

Few tourists put it on their bucket list.

They’re missing something.

Inside the fourth Illinois Statehouse along U.S. Highway 51, I walked the same creaking floorboards Abraham Lincoln walked between 1836 and 1839 as a young state legislator.

I climbed the same staircases.

Looked through the same windows.

Suddenly Lincoln wasn’t the 28-foot marble giant seated in Washington.

He was still becoming Abraham Lincoln.

A lanky lawyer.

A Whig legislator from Sangamon County.

A young man with no idea history was quietly watching.

Greatness hadn’t arrived yet.

It was simply getting started.

That’s what historic places do.

They shrink the distance between us and the people we admire.

They remind us that history wasn’t made by marble statues or textbook illustrations, however well crafted.

It was made by ordinary people who had no idea their decisions would still matter centuries later.

Just like us.

So yes, I watched Fourth of July fireworks.

I enjoyed an America 250 patriotic symphony and chorale concert.

I had a brat and, true to form, managed to spill mustard on my Hawaiian shirt at the ballpark.

Traditions matter.

But if you really want to appreciate America as it celebrates 250 years, don’t just read about it.

Go stand somewhere.

Walk the battlefield.

Ride the ferry.

Sit quietly in Independence Hall.

Climb the staircase to the House Chamber at Vandalia.

Visit the balcony in Memphis.

Read the names at Ground Zero.

Stand in respectful silence at Arlington.

Listen to the wind at Gettysburg.

Pause beneath the trees at Valley Forge.

Because America isn’t just 250 years old.

It’s 250 years of footsteps.

And every time I walk where those footsteps were first made, history stops feeling like someone else’s story.

It starts feeling like my own.

And maybe that’s what America’s 250th birthday is really about.

Not simply remembering history.

But remembering that we are part of it.

Vilas County News-Review columnist Eric A. Johnson can be reached at eric@fyinorthwoods.com.