First, we need to recognize that the problem is political, social and economic, but not really technical. This is important, because we keep on trying to apply the technical solutions and they never work. We use oil because it is cheap. We use foreign oil because it is even cheaper. We want to continue to use oil because it supports the lifestyles we enjoy at a price we accept. Unless we change part of that equation, we will always come up with the same answer - more oil.

Before going on, let me break the problem down into two parts. The one part is oil as an environmental problem. The second part is FOREIGN oil as an economic and geopolitical problem. They are separable. You could solve one and not the other. For example, foreign oil can be replaced by American oil from ANWAR, oil shale from Utah, Colorado & Wyoming or from oil sand from Alberta (yes a foreign country but nearby and generally stable). This oil will cost a little more in terms of dollars and a lot more in terms of environment, but we can achieve reasonable energy independence in this way. This is not the way to go, IMO.

Oil use as an environmental threat is the bigger challenge. Remember why we use oil, but then figure in the external costs. This makes oil less of a good deal.

Rand Corporation has recently released a study indicating that falling costs of ethanol, wind power and other forms of renewable energy could allow them to supply 25% of U.S. energy by 2025 at little or no additional expense. (Renewables currently account for only 6% of our energy, and about half of that comes from hydroelectric dams.) This assumes that the price of oil does not decline by very much. Low cost oil (reaching its lowest point in 1998) has destroyed hopes for alternatives before. So let's make sure the prices do not drop very much.

Once they get started, renewables have a big constituency, especially in farm states. The most promising, IMO, is ethanol from wood chips. I admit a personal interest in that. Also interesting are various ways to make methane from manure and other wastes. Read more about these things here.

Promising as all this is, read the number very carefully - 25%. That is the optimistic scenario. That still means 75% has to come from someplace else. We will still be using oil, coal and gas for a long time. The most promising large scale clean alternative is nuclear (the French get 78% of the electric power from nukes; we get about 20%). We might be able to squeeze a little more out of energy conservation. If we just build smarter we can save money, be comfortable and help the environment at the same time. A sustainable resource house, BTW, need not be built out of straw or sticks and it can be very attractive and comfortable.

So let's address the energy problem, but let's address the right one in the right way. Recognize that we have the energy mix we have today because it is what we chose and what we continue to choose. We need not blame others or talk about the stupidity of past generations. We chose what we have and that means we have the choice to choose alternatives too.

A very interesting are the accents. It is not quite the usual southern accent, more like a mixture of tidewater and upland.

Here are some pictures.

Tobacco was a big part of Indian culture and the first crop English colonists really could make money selling. It built the colony of Virginia. These are some picture of Indian tobacco. Recently when I was down at the farm the hunters told me about tobacco. Southern Virginia used to be a big tobacco growing area, now less so. The tobacco lands have often been turned over to loblolly. When the tobacco grows, the bottom leaves turn yellow. These are the first harvests. Later the whole plant is dried.

If you look closely at the first picture, you notice the no smoking sign. I dislike smoking with a passion, but it is funny that we forget the importance of this particular crop.

I am hoping to build a pond on my land, so I took lots of pictures of the pond they have at the museum. I like the mix of cattails, lilies and the bald cypress. You would not guess this was right in the middle of urban Washington.

This is me with the trees of heaven, an invasive species native to China. It has become a problem in the U.S. The trees dominate native species and give off a toxin that hinders competition. There are about ten acres of them around the farm. I have to kill them all or they will spread. We chop the truck with a machete and then apply the herbicide “Arsenal”. You can just spray it all over the leaves, but that overuses the chemical, bad for the environment and not cheap. Chop and apply is much more labor intensive, but better. Besides, I can get the boys to help, so labor costs are minimal.

Above shows the scale. That is our car parked on our dirt road. The big trees are boundary trees. The ones in the back are on the far side of State Road 623. These trees get pretty big. We own about 10 acres on the far side.

These are little plantation pines on an old landing area. They are not as big as some of the others that are growing on better (and less compact) soils. In the long run, however, the will grow well up here. The stumps in this area are pretty big.

A little description. Most of our land is in loblolly pine plantation, planted in 2004. The previous owner sprayed to kill off the nascent hardwoods. Two streams run across the place. Near them, the timber was left standing to protect the watershed. The trees there are big. We have beech, oak, maples and walnut. These are the climax species, so this part has been left for a long time. We also have a wetland that has cattails, willows and some sycamores. It is hard to get near the wetland because of the multiflora rose. This is an invasive species sometimes called the living fence because it forms a thick and thorny living wall. It gets nice looking flowers, but generally is a negative. Eventually I will have to hack through some of them, but for now I am going to go after the trees of heaven. They are the bigger menace. The multiflora rose forms an understory and will not interfere with my trees very much. It is just literally a pain to walk through.

A couple weeks ago, the boys and I shifted 20 tons of A1 rip-rap to stabilize our road by one of the streams. It took us five hours to get it done. The dump truck could not get all the way down, so we have to do a lot of moving. The rocks cost $490.00 delivered. These are our rocks.

Alex graduated today. That night, he went on a road trip with his friends to a Slayer concert in East Rutherford, NJ. I am glad he went, but they planned not at all. I had to give them this map. I think their plan until that time was to just go north.

Here the graduates come into the hall. Girls in blue; boys in red. It was a beautiful day, warm but not too hot. We walked around DC near the Whitehouse after the ceremony.

Alex is happier now with the HS pressure gone. He is working at the local mulitplex and learning about the world of work. I think that going back to school will soon begin to look better.

The pines on our land are genetically superior super trees and will grow fast. I took the pictures below in June. When I went back in August, some had literally doubled their size and some were taller than I was.

We also have a lot of hardwood on the place and three creeks. The hardwoods are about as old as I am. I have a wonderful little grove of beech trees near one of the creeks and some very big white oak, tulip tree and sweet gum. The under story bushes are American holly. It grows wild down here. The land will just get nicer each year. I am looking forward to growing my trees and taking care of things like the wetlands.

There is a group of hunters who lease hunting rights. They are local guys who take care of the land for me. They claim to have hunted this land for more than 100 years (their families at least). They tell me they will run off anyone who tries to cause trouble and I believe they will.

I also joined the Virginia Forestry Association. Next year I will be the communications director for the Virginia Tree Farm. It doesn’t pay anything, but I think it will be fun. I hope also to meet people who can help me figure out how to best care for my land.

You can tell how excited the kids were to be there.

I went to Brussels and the Hague to consult with the people at the posts there. I have been to Brussels many times. It is a pleasant city in many ways, but not really beautiful. It does have its beautiful parts, however. There are different layers. The center is a late Middle Ages guild city. Up the hill a little is the late 19th early 20th century art deco city. Nice neighborhoods from about 100 years ago (above).The art deco part of the city starts with this arch (below). I think it was once in a better location. Actually same location, but the rest of the city changed around it. The city has grown a lot when it became EU capital. Most of the growth was not good.

Some of the monumental park architecture. They liked such things in the 19th Century.

Polish-EU Consulate

Check out the little statues.

I liked the vines on the pavilions.

More parks.

Streets were lined with sycamore trees. They made the whole place much more pleasant.

The thing I liked about Barcelona and the thing I like re Europe in general is that the streets are alive with people walking and living. Chrissy and I had a really good time in Barcelona. It was not what I expected. The medieval part was like France and the people looked as I would expect Germans or French, not Spanish. I guess Spain is a big and diverse country.

CJ posing in Barcelona

Bird sellers (fresh meat?)

Boys left in Warsaw looking at the mean dog.

It all starts with the chickens. Jerry seasons them from the inside out and then puts them on long pipes. They kind of get their heads stuck up their asses, a kind of Abu Ghraib for chickens. You can see from the picture. The machine is a local design. Jerry got some old man friend of his to make it. It is literally made of junk – pieces of metal that the old guy scavenged up. But it works well. The chickens cook slowly and the meat remains juicy. The result is chicken as good as I have had anywhere and better than most.

I personally still feel the pain from last year’s Chickenfest revelation when I learned that my grandfather was NOT a brew master, as I had always believed. He was, in fact, a candy maker. Beer . . . candy? Candy is not as cool. It wasn’t even famous candy like M&M, Three Musketeers or Milky Way. He made caramels and hard candies of dubious trademark. I really believed he was a brew master. Why? I thought he was a brew master because when he took the glory road he left a bottle of “Meisterbrau” (or brau meister – don’t recall exactly) beer in our fridge. My mother never threw it out and it dwelled permanently in the space between the catsup and mustard for at least twenty years. When we replaced our gas fridge with a new and improved electric one, the beer moved too. It was a fixture of the fridge. For as long as I could remember I saw that bottle every time I needed some cheese or coke and I ate a lot of cheese and drank a lot of coke. Meisterbrau was grandpa’s beer. I started associating Meisterbrau – brew master with my grandfather. We lived in Milwaukee, the most famous beer city of North America. The leap of imagination was a short one. Grandpa was a brew master. Meisterbrau, as I learned later, was not a good beer and not even made in Milwaukee. Its little known claim to distinction is that it was the precursor of all light beer. Meisterbrau tried unsuccessfully to make a light beer in the early 1970s. Miller bought Meisterbrau, tweaked the formula a little and created Miller Light. Anyway, I blame Meisterbrau as the source of my confusion. A lot of family histories are like that, I suspect. I am thinking of going with the original legend, maybe even embellish it with scandal to explain how we lost whatever great fortune we once enjoyed. Why tarnish the beauty of the thing with unnecessary accuracy.
Whether the old guy was a brew master or not, Beer was and is still a big part of family gatherings, but beer drinking is a declining art among us. The older generation failed to pass the torch. In days of yore, the men (they were real men in those days) would sit around a keg of beer and drink prodigious amounts of the liquid bread. Past, present and future blurred into a soft amber glow. In the parlance of the time, they would all get a snoot full. Now the our gatherings are relatively sober affairs. We still have our share of characters, as you can see from the pictures. Everyone is healthier, however, and that is a good thing. The beer now comes in bottles and cans and there is greater variety. You count cans and bottles individually. Bottles slow the drinking. The keg tended to facilitate sluckin it down, as cups held more than a standard can and you tended to fill it up again before it was empty. In other words, you never really knew how much you were drinking because you had a bottomless cup.

Milwaukee was especially pleasant during my visit, with highs in the seventies with low humidity and a breeze off the lake. I drove around a little and ended up near Whitnall Park. I used to ride my bike to Whitnall Park along Grange Avenue. I don’t recognize most of the way any more. What used to be a country road is now a suburban street, but some is preserved as park. Just past 76th Street stands Jeremiah Curtin’s house and an old lime factory. Jeremiah Curtin was a moderately famous linguist, who wrote a history of the Mongols and translated Szienkeiwicz (for those less up on Polish culture, he wrote “Quo Vadis” and won a Nobel prize in literature about 100 years ago.) Above are pictures of the old lime farm. It is that quintessential Wisconsin style. The house is made out of crème city brick, the kind you can find only around Milwaukee. The other building is stone. It would be nice to make a community in a place like that.

I went down to my old running trail in Grant/Warnemont Park. It is a really nice running trail with a little roll but nothing a reasonable person could call a hill. I ran the distance in 24:21, which is 25% slower than I used to run it when I wore a younger man’s shoes, but it was still fun. That trail was a solace through the worst of my unsuccessful job searching back in the early 1980s. I think I applied at every major firm in North America. They were amused, but not interested. The more rejection letters I got, the farther I ran. I was probably in the best aerobic condition of my life. Sometimes I ran all the way through Grant Park to the Root River Parkway, about 12 miles. I am fatter now and I can't run that far. I blame the economy. The economy has not been that bad since then, so I have no compulsion to run very far. The trail has changed a lot since I started there. A very big oak tree that used to guard one of the kinks in the trail died some time back. Most of the birch trees have died and even the stumps have rotted into compost. A birch forest is ephemeral everywhere, but especially around here. Individual trees don’t live long and won't reproduce naturally in southeastern Wisconsin.

The trail used to run through a mixed meadow and forest that looked like the ecosystem you would expect 100 miles farther north. Whether through indolence or design, the park system has let some places return to nature. I used to think that letting things return to nature was an unmitigated blessing, but on reflection I recall a beautiful view of the lake around the second trail bend, kind of a v shaped field with wild flowers framed by tamarack trees. It looked natural, but was not. It takes a lot of planning to be spontaneous and somebody planned it well.

Tamaracks are not native to this part of Wisconsin, so they must have been planted about forty years ago. They backed up against the native basswoods and maples and looked really good especially in the fall, when their gold needles burned against the crimson of the maples. The park system also planted some Austrian pines “randomly” in the fields about the same time. They stayed dark green through the year. It was a work of art. The tamaracks and pines are still there, but you can't see them unless you look closely in the bushes. The exquisite interaction of tamarack, maple and pine is now replaced by the pea green banality of the box elder. Some of the box elders and ash reach about 20 or 30 feet. Box elders are nice in their place (generally next to rusty railroad tracks and pushing up through the ruins of abandoned warehouses next to rusty railroad tracks) but I never did like their unique fragrance and they block the view. That’s not good. I loved to watch the lake and the joys and sorrows of its changing face. Natural succession won't stop, of course. The box elders are transition species. Some of the ash trees will remain but in about fifty years maples, basswoods and maybe a couple of beeches, will cover the whole place. I won't see that and nobody will see the lake through them.

Chrissy and I drove to Keene, NH today. Keene reminded Chrissy and me of Bedford Falls, the place where the old Jimmy Stewart movie “It’s a Wonderful Life” was set. Like so many places around here, it is really cute. The area around is features ski trails and white water rafting. It seems like a fun place to live, although probably not exciting for those uninterested in either outdoor activities or looking at historical buildings or antiques.

The yellow building in the picture is a museum for furniture and antiques from the houses of the local elite from the nineteenth century. Keene was a mill town. Factories were set up to make textiles. They took advantage of the waterpower of the Connecticut River. Chrissy was looking forward to going to the museum, but it was closed for some kind of meeting. It shows the mindset of these little towns. They close things when they feel like it. This is like another movie, “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town.” He comes from a little town called Mandrake Falls, NH and brings these small town values to New York. This was a good movie with Gary Cooper as Mr. Deeds. Recently the movie was remade with Adam Sandler playing Mr. Deeds. Naturally, Sandler brought all his nasty, dumb humor to the role and ruined all the subtlety and charm. I hate Adam Sandler movies.

The drive is beautiful. New Hampshire is generally very beautiful. We are becoming accustomed to pretty scenes and don’t notice them too often. This part of New Hampshire is called Currier and Ives Country after the scenes that appeared on the 19th Century prints.

I spent most of yesterday watching the Reagan funeral. What a big affair. He was my hero, a great man. Ronald Reagan’s clarion call to fight communism is one reason I went into the Foreign Service. We shall not soon see his like again. I think the outpouring of respect caught the establishment by surprise. Many of our intellectual elite liked to think of him as an amiable dunce. I always believed that history would be kinder to him than were contemporary pundits, but I am surprised how fast history is catching up with the old man. The thing I find surprising is how some memories are also changed. Dozens of pundits talked about the end of the Cold War. The ones on the right gave Reagan his proper share of credit for ending it on our terms. Those on the left said things like, “the Soviet Union was falling by itself, as we all knew.” I started the Foreign Service in 1984. I can't recall even one mainstream pundit who thought that the Soviet Empire would disappear anytime soon. On the contrary, many thought the democracies would have to make serious accommodations to communism. World communism seemed on the assent back then. Reagan was one of the only ones who saw the weakness in communism and for that he was derided as an “amiable dunce” or “reactionary fool” by the chattering classes, the same ones who now see the collapse of that benighted system as obviously known and forgone. I don’t really believe they have forgotten, since many have left written records, but they are covering, trusting in the notoriously short public memory to put them retroactively on the right side of history. I admit to some fault. I voted for Jimmy Carter in my first election (1976). It was a youthful indiscretion, but I am proud to say that I came to my senses and voted for Ronald Reagan in 1980. Mine was probably one of the few votes for him at the Webster Street polling place deep inside the “peoples republic” of Madison, Wisconsin. I am convinced if Jimmy Carter had been reelected in 1980, followed by Walter Mondale in 1984, we would still face the Soviet Union today, or worse it would have gone down in a bloody mess and taken us along. Defeatists and pessimists don’t make good leaders, no matter how intelligent, honest or admirable, and I do admire Jimmy Carter. He was much smarter in the academic sense. He had success at Camp David and started deregulation. It is just that overall he is a much better ex-president than he was a president. Maybe he should have just jumped to that step. Enough on politics.

I took some pictures of the area around our now former NH home. They are about a month old, so they are springtime pictures, but still applicable.

Our street

The lake and dam from down the hill from our house. The Army Corps of Engineers created the lake about 20 years ago by damming a couple of streams. They still maintain the small dam. The water is clean. On a calm day, it reflects the sky and the neighboring trees like a mirror. The lake view is one of the reasons we got a good price for our house.

Path to the lake. This looks like a postcard. It is surprisingly beautiful. I sometimes forget that.

Road on top of the hill from our house.

Big white pines near the house

We drove through mostly pine forest. I am continually surprised how much forest covers this state and most of New England. Portsmouth, NH was about a half hour drive down Hwy 101. It is a pleasant little city. The highlight is a place called Strawberry Banke. This is the original downtown. At one time an arm of the ocean reached up here and it was a seaport. Over the years it silted in until the city filled in what remained. It became a working class neighborhood and after that a non-working class neighborhood. I think the politically correct term for a neighborhood of welfare recipients in this case is leisure class neighborhood. In addition, in this land of forest and streams, I think we can call the homeless “outdoorsmen”.

No matter the terms, by the 1960s, the neighborhood was blighted and the Federal Government wanted to tear it down and build low-income housing. Local residents didn’t want this to happen, so they got together to buy and restore the buildings. They did a good job and now the area around looks solidly prosperous and well painted. We did talk to one outdoorsman. He told me that some sort of food stamp coupons were worth $100,000.00. He once offered to trade one of these coupons for a Canadian $2.00 bill, but the fool wouldn’t take the trade. He seemed more prosperous than outdoorsmen in Washington, since he had his possessions strapped to the back of a bike, instead of in an old shopping cart. Still, I don’t know whether to believe this guy. When we met him, he was fishing change out of a fountain. I figure he should get a job at Strawberry Banke playing a street person from the blighted neighborhood of the 1960s.

Strawberry Banke is not like Williamsburg, where all the history centers on one era. The buildings here are restored to various times in the life of the neighborhood. One house, for example, half is from the late 17th Century, while the other half is a working class house from the 1950s. They have a Jewish immigrant house from 1919, complete with a Jewish housewife (Mrs. Shapiro) who tells the story of her family and how they came to America from Ukraine. Living history also included the wife of a governor at the governor’s house and a woman at the grocery store. They all did a very good job of assuming the roles.

We visited the home turf of Thoreau and Emerson in Concord, MA. Actually, we spent a lot more time with Louisa May Alcott, who wrote “Little Women”. They all lived near each other and interacted on a regular basis.

“Little Women” was Chrissy’s favorite book when she was a girl. I suppose there are men who have read it voluntarily, but we were not the target audience. I did enjoy touring the house, however. Louisa’s father was named Bronson. He was an interesting guy who came from extreme poverty. His father was probably illiterate, but Bronson taught himself. I never knew anything about him, but evidently he influenced many people besides his famous daughter. Emerson’s essay on the American scholar is supposed to have been based on him. In his house was educated a local artist who went on to sculpt the statue of Lincoln in the Lincoln memorial. Thoreau was a frequent guest. All that said, the man was obviously weird and probably hard to live with. He didn’t support his family well, and they were always poor until Louisa May made big money from “Little Women” and her subsequent writings.

Louisa May never married. According to the guide, her mother and father had different personalities. I think that is docent code for family conflict. That, and her father’s remarkable inability to earn a decent living for his family, may have soured her on the opposite sex. If a movie were made about Louisa May Alcott as an adult, Glen Close would certainly play her. I am not fond of Glen Close, but you have to give Louisa May Alcott credit. She supported her whole family, on to the third generation, with the money she earned and never seems to have complained about anything. She traced and paid all her father’s debts, which were many, sent her high-strung little sister to art school in Europe and paid for the family house, which we visited.

The Alcott house was built first in the 1600s and later extended and improved. It is a pleasant place, but the ceilings are very low and the floors badly warped. In fact, the place is crumbling. Powder beetles, which have a diet a lot like termites, have eaten most of the supporting pillars. Besides that, Bronson put some of the house on the dirt – no foundation. Direct contact with wet earth is not good for wooden structures. I guess the house lasted long enough for his purposes. The place is being restored by some society created specifically to do that, probably consisting mostly of earnest old ladies with a lot of money. I have no doubt they will succeed.

I enjoy such houses because of the personal insight you get into the people’s lives. In the Alcott case, I was impressed on how contemporary the family seemed. Sure, they did a lot of things we no longer do, but they had similar problems, hopes and dreams. As I wrote, Bronson was weird. He imposed tasks on his family and made them all vegetarians. From all indications, however, they didn’t really listen to him. It sounds a lot like a modern sitcom, maybe Frazier with five kids. Bronson also dreamed big. He built “The Concord School of Philosophy” next to his house. It is sort of a fancy barn with a big lecture hall. It is unheated, so classes were held only in summer. His faculty consisted of himself, but he printed up programs and managed to get most of the famous people who passed through Boston to come out and give lectures. A freelance university - you just couldn’t do anything like that today, but it is easier to start a dot com.

The picture below is one of the fine New England stone walls behind the Alcott place.

Walden
After the Alcott place, we visited Walden Pond, where HD Thoreau wrote the famous journal about his life in the wilderness. It is not wilderness now, and it was even less wilderness then, when the area was heavily farmed. You can walk from Concord to Walden in about a half hour and there were always people around even in Thoreau’s time. Thoreau was kind of going out to live in the local park. I am sure he was a local curiosity – strange old Henry living next to the lake. It is as if I found a guy along one of my running trails who thought he was living in the wilderness because there were a few big trees and a couple of fierce chipmunks prowling nearby. If Thoreau was really looking for wilderness, he could have easily found it in 19th century America. The truth is that Thoreau didn’t like wilderness, at least how we would use the term today. The one recorded time he came in contact with the real thing was during a visit to the State of Maine, when he complained that it was too lonely up there. His quest for the simple life was obviously a hobby. But like Bronson Alcott, he dreamed big and left a lasting mark.

Walden pond is bigger than I thought it would be, even if not so big. I bet I could swim across it. Chrissy doubts my bold claim. In fact, some people were swimming, although they were wearing wet suits. Didn’t look that hard. Where we saw the lake, there was a beach with sand brought in from somewhere else. These little mud-bottomed lakes don’t naturally have sandy beaches. It reminded me a lot of Lake Harriet in Minneapolis. Bunches of teenagers were loitering around. I bet the place gets even more popular with them when the sun goes down.

Thoreau’s Wilderness
I listened to a lecture by a forester from the University of Massachusetts called “Thoreau’s Country”. He pointed out the Massachusetts looked much less like wilderness in Thoreau’s time than it does today. In those days, farming was inefficient (although organic) and a lot more acreage had to be under the plow or in pasture. It leads to an interesting dilemma for preservationists. What do we preserve? If we leave the land alone, it will quickly be covered with forest, but heavy forest is not the landscape that Thoreau, Emerson or Alcott would recognize. Of course, farming with the old methods is not economical and the upscale local communities would object to the pungent presence of pigs, horses and cows needed to keep the fields from becoming forests. (Maybe horses would be okay. Upscale people like horses. Grazing horses are picturesque; running horses are graceful, but cows are a stretch, especially on the graceful running, and pigs have none of these redeeming characteristics.) He guy also said that modern people don’t really understand where their resources come from. In Thoreau’s day, people knew some of the local trees were for fuel or furniture and today’s pig was tomorrow’s pork. When food and fuel comes from far away, people can delude themselves about nature being a big park full of benign creatures that are to be seen but not touched.

Thoreau’s Tool Shed
Back to our trip. We saw a reproduction of Thoreau’s cabin. The real thing has long since become compost. That is Chrissy with Thoreau’s ghost in the picture in front of his cabin. He really craved Coca-Cola, but water was all we had. Thoreau’s place was much like a shed for the lawnmower.

We finally got to the place where the American Revolution began. Lexington and Concord are now Boston suburbs (they were Boston suburbs back then too, but it took longer to get around) and some of the most pleasant towns I have seen and especially so on this pleasant day in May. There are many very big trees, flowering bushes and beautiful homes. Concord and Lexington are connected by bike and hiking trails, a nice place to live, although I am sure the local conservation committees are stricter than even the most confrontational condo boards.

Fairly busy streets now surround Lexington green. I am sure it was very different in April 1775 when British soldiers encountered Captain Jonas Parker and 75 armed Minutemen. The soldiers came to disarm the colonists. In sort of a proto NRA action, the colonists would give up their guns only when pried from their cold dead hands. The British obliged, killing 8 Minutemen and injuring 10 others. We think of it as a war between Americans and the British, but there were no Americans at that time. British colonist militia faced British troops. When Paul Revere rode out, he didn’t say, “the British are coming.” That would have made no sense to the colonists who still thought of themselves as British, albeit disgruntled progeny of Albion. He just told everyone that the regular troops were on the way. I am sure the colonists were surprised when some of them got shot by their own king’s men. The price of protest had risen sky high. (By the way, the best book to read about this is a novel by Howard Fast called “April Morning”.)

Chrissy and I followed the same route as the British troops from Lexington to Concord and stood on North Bridge, where the Concord battle took place. By the time the British regulars got to Concord, the colonists were ready. This time armed militia had gathered from the villages and farms and this time they inflicted casualties on the British regulars. The colonists might not have been soldiers, but life on a frontier had made them extremely warlike - and able marksmen. As the British regulars retreated toward Boston, everybody came out of his house to shoot at them. It was a hard road to travel. Now the area around it is tree covered. In those days it was mostly open fields and farms, which would have been almost bare in April. There was nothing to conceal marching troops in easy to see red uniforms. On the other hand, the roads and fields were lined with stone walls providing cover for the snipers, who would shoot and run off. They knew all the shortcuts. The fighting on that April day is shrouded in a historical mist. Nice old ladies at historical societies smile when they describe the British retreat with the colonists in hot pursuit. It seems like a game from our distance, at worst hard-hitting game between the Yankees and Red Sox, but it was deadly nasty business all around, a civil war beginning and a world turning upside down.

Nice houses in Lexington above

CJ in Lexington

By the rude bridge that arched the flood, Their flag to April's breeze unfurled, Here once the embattled farmers stood, And fired the shot heard round the world. – Concord Hymn by Ralph Waldo Emerson

JM at North Bridge in Concord and with Minute Man statue. Notice the new haircut. When you are going bald, embrace it.