The air quotes should have tipped me off.
“So you’re from California,” the guide said as she pulled her Hyundai SUV onto Seminary Ridge. “Remind me to show you where your ‘regiments’ fought.”
I hadn’t known that Californians fought at Gettysburg, but it made sense. California was as Union Blue as Abe Lincoln’s underwear. I refer doubters to a map of San Francisco: Union Square, Grant Avenue, Union City across the bay. And can you guess the name of the train depot in Los Angeles? Hint: It’s the same as the one in Washington, D.C. (Answer: Union Station.)
I was in Gettysburg, smack in the middle of memorial ceremonies – 146th anniversary of the two-minute Gettysburg Address and Lincoln’s 200th birthday – that were particularly pompish and circumstantial.
By the scheduled start of my Civil War battlefield tour, which included an authentic November rain, I was chilled to the bone. My wool overcoat – a remnant of the wardrobe from my East Coast college days – offered little comfort, and like an idiot, I had forgotten the holy trinity of scarf, hat and gloves.
“It’s a good thing, actually,” said Joanne, my tour guide. She was a native Pennsylvanian, a middle-age mom who had gone back to school in preparation for the notoriously difficult Gettysburg tour-guide exam. “You’ll get a better sense of how it felt that weekend.”
“That weekend” in Gettysburg means July 1-3, 1861. In a very real sense, there is no other weekend, no other time in the town. Though I lived for two years in Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia, I have never experienced a place more rooted in a particular moment.
“I would apologize for the mist,” Joanne said as her Hyundai crept along Reynolds Avenue, stone monuments dotting the landscape like scarecrows. “But this weather is actually more representative. After 2 hours of cannon fire, you wouldn’t have been able to see your hand in front of your face.”
And so we rolled over the rolling hills, stopping here and there to imagine the lines of infantry and artillery, the headquarters and field hospitals. The car tour touched on all the legendary landmarks: the Roundtops (Little and Big), the Peach Orchard, the Wheat Field. In the land of the Eternal Weekend, these are all proper nouns.
We saw the ridge where Gen. George Pickett’s men lined up for their ill-fated charge, now marked every hundred yards with a monument to one of the former Confederate States. Of the thousand-plus stone markers on the field, only a couple dozen are dedicated to the Southern dead – an eerie physical reminder that history is written by the victors, at least in the victors’ backyard, anyway.
Eventually I reminded Joanne that I had to be back at the hotel for dinner. We were idling at a spot called The Angle, where Pickett’s Charge was repelled.
“I almost forgot,” she said. Lowering the driver’s side window, she pointed through the mist to a squat stone obelisk. “That’s one of your regiments. There were four ‘California regiments,’ and that’s the first.”
With the Hyundai back in gear and the gray skies fading to black, I had to ask. “Listen, Joanne, I noticed that every time you say ‘California regiments’ you use air quotes.”
Without pause she said, “That’s because all the men were from Pennsylvania.”
“Excuse me?”
“You all sent a check.”
Nearly three hours I had listened to her stories – about the sacrifice, the bloodshed, the only truly consecrated cornfields in North America and so on – and I had nodded and agreed, confident that my sacrifice was just as good as hers. Now I realized that this Pennsylvanian had all along seen me (and my state) for what we were: absentees.
That weekend, 331 men lined up as the 1st “California regiment,” virtually all of them from the City of Brotherly Love – 21 died, 58 were wounded, 19 more went missing. These were not Californians. They were “Californians.”
“I feel like a jerk,” I said as we pulled up in front of my hotel. “I had no idea. I know it’s a hundred years too late, but thank you.”
“Nah,” she said. “You all would have done the same.”
Back in 1861, California had plenty of gold but few men. Today it’s just the opposite. God forbid we should ever be in that situation again, but just supposing, we might have a chance to repay the favor.
Until then we’ll just keep sending players to the Phillies.
Nick Taylor is a writing professor at San Jose State who last wrote for Travel on Mallorca. E-mail comments to travel@sfchronicle.com.
This article appeared on page M – 5 of the San Francisco Chronicle
Nick Taylor
Friday, January 29, 2010
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