The year in review Part 2

Once I got back from Europe in April, I had my fourth and last eye surgery, putting my eye woes behind me at least for now.  In May I picked up running after a two-year layoff, once my eye healed.  I had electricity woes inside my house where half my electrical outlets would suddenly click off inexplicably, including my TV, refrigerator and bedroom lights and then suddenly come back on minutes or hours later, for seemingly no reason.  It cost me three weeks and a couple of thousand dollars to fix (I needed a new outside box) and involved permits from the city, visits from Public Service and many headaches.  If that fix hadn't worked, the next step (inside re-wiring) would have started at $15,000.  I maintained ties with a few former colleagues by having lunch about once a month with somebody or other.  The spring flowers about the neighborhood and in the District were a pleasing splash of color as usual.  I attended a graduation party put on at a local hotel by my neighbors for two of their daughters who had graduated from college, one with an advanced degree.  It represented a timeless American immigration tale, the parents came to America from Bolivia not knowing English and both were schoolteachers by trade.  They took menial jobs, worked hard and long, bought the house next door, sent their children to the excellent public schools in the area, and became citizens.  Now their children are college graduates who speak English but very little Spanish and have good jobs in the cybersecurity area.  The latest in the ever present wave of migrations washing over our shores, making America great.

I continued my return to running slowly and painfully in June by running three times a week, although only a mile and a half or two at a time, running a few times in the District, such as running through the Mary Livingston Ripley Park on the Mall as pictured below.  As the month wore on I decided to skip out of town over the July 4th holiday because I didn't want to be in town while our president commandeered the celebration of our country on that day and made it all about himself.  The Revolutionary War soldiers capturing airports indeed!  I planned a car trip through the south.

In July I drove through North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Tennessee to see some sites and attend a baseball game at the new Atlanta Braves park, where I hadn't seen a game yet.  The Braves won that baseball game but Bryce Harper hit a home run for the Phillies, the new park underwhelmed me, the Atlanta Stadium Motel 6 I stayed at ripped me off by double billing me then claiming I had reserved two rooms (yeah, right) and refused to reverse one of the charges.  Effin Southerners with their phony, slow and cloying sweetness.  Places I visited were Corolla on the Outer Banks where I swam in the ocean, the Currituck Lighthouse, a couple of coastal towns in North Carolina, Charleston, Andersonville, Chickamauga Civil War Battlefield, Lookout Mountain, Chattanooga, The D-Day Memorial in Bedford, and Appomattox Court House.  It beat listening to someone bloviate on the National Mall.  Persons I visited were my sister and her family, my college roommate, and my best friend in ninth grade.

In August I took another car trip, this time to the midwest.  I went to Maryland, West Virginia. Pennsylvania and Ohio.  I visited the Flight 93 9-11 Memorial near Shanksville, Morgantown, and spent some time enjoying Columbus at the house of my sister, where I enjoyed hanging out in a college setting with two of her her three sons, like her middle child, below.

Chattanooga

On the penultimate day of my 2500 mile car trip through five states, I toured the Civil War battlefield of Chickamauga in Georgia, where in September 1863, Union General George Thomas, a Virginian, earned the permanent sobriquet of The Rock Of Chickamauga when he saved the Union army from destruction with a heroic stand upon Snodgrass Hill a few miles outside of Chattanooga after the army was sent reeling in disarray during the battle when a gap inadvertently, due to a confusing set of order, opened in its battle line.  Thomas organized a defensive line among disorganized fleeing troops upon the high ground in the background of the picture below and held the position until nightfall, when the army retired to Chattanooga where it was besieged by the Rebel army.

The dominant position in the siege of Chattanooga was on lookout Mountain in Georgia, just south of the city, where Rebel artillery made the Yankee position below practically untenable.  However, U.S. Grant was appointed commander of the Union army in Chattanooga, and with forces he brought with him from his own army which had just captured Vicksburg, he drove the Rebels away in the Battle Above The Clouds on Missionary Ridge and Lookout Mountain in November 1863, thus opening up the Deep South to the Union invasion which occurred the next spring with General William Sherman's army's march through Georgia to Atlanta.

The picture below taken from downtown Chattanooga shows how Lookout Mountain dominates the landscape.  In the city I also visited the National Cemetery and stopped at a few jazz sites before I headed northwest through central Tennessee to return to Virginia.

Along the way I saw a nice rainbow, although it signified encountering rain on the drive.  The next day I wished to see a couple of landmark sites in Virginia before I returned home.

Dalton

Leaving Andersonville National Historical Park in central Georgia mid-afternoon on the Fourth, I drove west across Georgia on Highway 26 before turning north on Interstate 85/75 to drive to the Tennessee border so I could tour the Chickamauga and Chattanooga Civil War battle sites the next day.  At Ellaville on the highway to the west I came across a Rebel sentry guarding a raft of Amrrican flags planted in the city square for the Fourth.

A few miles further west I stopped at the town hall square in Buena Vista to read the myriad monuments on its grounds. One ballyhooed the "Poet and Confederate Hero, author of the Great Poem 'All Quiet on The Potomac Tonight'"Thaddeus Oliver, who died in 1864 during the war at age 38, and another was proudly dedicated by the Marion County High School class of 1971, the first "intergrated" class as mandated by federal legislation.

Far north in Dalton I encountered a statue of Confederate General Joseph Johnston downtown, who harassed Sherman's army on its drive from Chattanooga to Atlanta, and then again after Sherman's March to the Sea that made Georgia howl and, basically, made the morally bankrupt Confederacy lose the war as the Union eastern armies manned the trenches outside of Richmond and Petersburg.

On the top of a hill just west of downtown Dalton was a cemetery with a small, lonely part enclosed as the Confederate Cemetery, with a Rebel sentinel watching over 425 graves of Confederate soldiers and four unknown Union soldiers, victims of nearby battles.  Meanwhile at the Whitaker County Courthouse, acres of American flags were planted on its lawn and along the main avenue, with no tanks in evidence as the proud banners waved gently in the cooling breeze.

Andersonville

Rather than hang around the District on the Fourth to listen to an oversized kindergartener give his version of the Revolutionary War, with real tanks as props, I left Atlanta the morning after I saw a ballgame at the Braves' new ballpark the evening before and drove to Andersonville, Georgia, to pay my respects to the thousands of Union POWs buried at the National Cemetery there, on the grounds of the notorious Andersonville Prisoner of War camp during the Civil War.  33,000 POWS were kept there within the wooden stockade during the last year of the war, without shelter from the elements and with little food and foul water, and 13,000 died, and many of the rest including, I think, a relative of mine, suffered from ailments because of their captivity there for the remainder of their reduced lifespan.  (33,000 men occupied this field, within a wooden palisade, without shelter and scant food, drinking the polluted water trickling trough the ravine cutting across the field, downriver from the Rebel guards' camp, with only the clothes they arrived with.)

The open-air prison contained no officers, only non-coms, and military order quickly broke down and a hideous lawlessness reigned inside the camp, perpetrated by the Raiders, a gang essentially that preyed upon individual soldiers or prison newcomers who had not yet formed bonds with anyone, robbing, beating and killing them.  These predators were opposed by the formation of a reprisal gang called the Regulators who identified the lot and especially the ringleaders and reported on them to the camp commandant, Major Henry Wirz (who was the only Confederate tried and executed after the war as a war criminal).  (The six predatory gang leaders within the prison camp were hanged by their peers after a trial and buried apart from the thousands upon thousands of Union soldiers who perished from the inhumane conditions within the POW camp.)

Wirz arrested the identified Raiders, kept them apart from the main population while a military tribunal made up of inmates inside the prison put them on trial and delivered the six ringleaders back to the prisoners after a sentence of death by hanging was imposed upon them by their peers, who hanged them inside the prison on July 11, 1864.  A raider leader named Patrick Delaney uttered his last words, "I would rather be hanged than to live the way most prisoners have to live."  (The Raiders are hanged for their crimes.)

The six executed men were buried apart from the rest of the Union men in the burial grounds.  Today a Union sentry stands vigilant guard over the thousands of men within the cemetery who gave their last full measure of devotion to the freedom we enjoy, for now.  (Ever faithful to democracy, despite the individual cost.)

Georgia

On the fourth day of my car trip, I left behind the kind generosity of my two long-time friends who played host to me the three previous nights and headed out towards Atlanta so I could see a ball game at the Braves' new suburban baseball park they plunked down in the far northwestern suburbs of the Atlanta metro area, far, far from downtown with no public transportation there to get there except by car driving up the beltway so they could better serve who they perceive as their clients, white suburbanites.  Good luck going forward on tat one, it was a nightmare in honking, slow traffic on Atlanta's Interstate system to get there, trying to make split level decisions as to which fork in the multilane roadways to take as Siri gave out vague directions on these similar-to-wet-spaghetti-strewn-out-on-a-table exits that came up multiple times as I tried to work my way to this new stadium that couldn't be seen from any roadway.  (The Battery outside SunTrust Park.)

I made it, however, and then faced my next new-age challenge, gaining admittance using the phantom ticket I'd bought online without its physical presence like a ticket I could have picked up at the Will Call window.  Nope, that option was "unavailable" even while it cost $5 more (the stadium does have a Will Call window) and once I purchased the ticket I was directed to Ticketmaster so I could create an account and bring up the ticket's QR image, whatever that is, on  my "handheld device" to show the ticket taker. Well, that didn't work because I got locked out of Ticketmaster when I couldn't enter my Apple ID and password (?!) and I was just SOL.  Grr.  (A statue outside the Braves' new park of the legendary Warren Spahn, a figure whose pitching heyday was in Milwaukee, bespeaking of the Braves' longstanding ties till now to three cities, Boston, Milwaukee and Atlanta.)

I got in after 30 minutes in the "Ticket Resolution" office while a 30-something bored park employee hardly listened to my I'm-an-old-guy-with-no-kids spiel while she poked my I-phone with her index finger and voila, suddenly brought up my ticket's bar code.  Inside SunTrust Park, the sight lines were good everywhere and passage around all aspects of the park was easily gained, but it's a stadium totally removed from anything Atlanta and it might as well be plunked down in Any Suburb, USA.  It's strictly a money-maker as the team obtained generous terms from Cobb County, brought their partners in to develop "The Battery" in the stadium's immediate environs with restaurants, hotels and business parks, and control the parking revenues at this drive-only park.  (My $11 dinner at the ballpark, it was quite good.)

The Braves beat the Phillies 9-2, Bryce Harper, recently of the Washington Nationals, hit a home run and after a night at a nearby Motel 6 ($66.13) and drove away the next morning to spend July 4th at the Andersonville Civil War POW camp to reflect upon true heroes of our country at the National Cemetery there rather than listen to some BS history lesson from a colossal and dangerous fool flanked by tanks on the National Mall.  I won't ever be back to see a game at the Atlanta' Braves SunTrust Park, it''s a nice park but so totally outside the fabric of venerable baseball that it's not appealing to me in the least.  (The view from SunTrust Park, of corporate America,)

In Atlanta

"Sir, that run is for the morning."

"What do you mean, the morning? I'm doing it now."

"But it's 8 p.m. You can't do that run now."

"Why not?"

"Sir, that's a morning run."

"I won't get lost in the dark. There's only one turn."

"Umm. . . . it's not safe."

"Oh."

"It's a morning run."

"Okay."

I had this conversation with the front desk clerk at the Ritz-Carleton Hotel in Atlanta early last week when I arrived on business at 8 p.m. Since I was leaving at 7 o'clock the next morning, I asked the clerk if she could suggest a 3-mile run I might do.

She showed me a route on a downtown map that took me from Peachtree Street, where the Ritz is, over to Centennial Park and back. Basically the directions were to run down the street, make a left, and then come back. Then this very nice clerk in effect forbade me to do it when I said I was going to do the run immediately.

I knew whereof she spoke. I have stayed on Peachtree Street in downtown Atlanta before, a few years ago. As in many American cities, the homeless are everywhere.

Homeless people don't bother me. But it is not safe to run in the dark in an unfamiliar area with no good alternative route in mind should problems develop.

So I went at 5:30 in the morning instead.

It was a memorable run. There is no better way to see a new city than to run in its downtown when there is no traffic on the streets to slow you down.

It was dark, and cool. Peachtree Street was well lit, and I ran from the Ritz past the Westin to International Boulevard, where I turned left and ran down a hill. Atlanta is hilly. (Right: Down a hill from Peachtree Street in Atlanta you come across Centennial Park in the bottom of a hollow.)

I passed well-lit hotels and empty parking lots. I ran by a tiny park where stood a bronze statue of a man extending his open arms in greeting, and stopped momentarily to shake his right hand.

Lights blazed all around me as I came into the square occupied by Centennial Olympic Park, commemorating Atlanta's hosting of the 1996 Olympics. It's an odd shaped park, sort of like a big checkmark plunked down upon the downtown streets that border on the Georgia Aquarium, the Coke Pavilion and Georgia State University.

I ran into the park and stood briefly in the middle of it, looking up all around me at the sea of lights I was at the bottom of. Tall buildings past the expanse of the park surrounded me, and on all sides of the park there were tall, lit columns on its borders.

Circling the outside of the park, I ran by a few homeless people on the move in the chill of the early morning air. The sky was starting to brighten with dawn as two runners went by me at a brisk clip. As sometimes happens when serious male runners pass by each other, neither runner acknowledged my presence as they ran right past me.

Having completed my trip around the circumference of the park, I eschewed running up International Boulevard again and struck off into the maze of tiny streets that slants off the park at a diagonal. I figured I'd hit Peachtree Street eventually.

I ran by a small theater on Luckie Street, then a 24-hour diner. Yes! I had brought some money.

Inside was the entire on-duty contingent of the Georgia State Campus Police apparently, taking advantage of the restaurant's warmth on a cold morning, and its ambiance. Dispensing coffee and easy banter was a stunning redhead, who poured me a cup to go.

Slowed by my sloshing, capped container, I loped easily to Woodruff Park on Peachtree Street, near where a Marta stop is. I slowed to a walk and perambulated around that park. Regaining Peachtree Street from Peachtree Center Avenue, which involved climbing another hill, I came back into the Ritz lobby feeling great after a 40-minute jog.

The rest of the day was anticlimactic after this delightful run. At 7 a.m. I drove up to Dawsonville (apparently the birthplace of NASCAR) for a deposition, and then returned to the Atlanta airport for a flight home. Dawsonville is in the mountains of northern Georgia so the car trip was pretty, but the running trip through Centennial Park in the early morning was magical.

I just wish my RBF friend Akshaye in Atlanta could have done the run with me. Next time when I have more time!