Shade

A Letter From Gettysburg

I tell myself that in times like these there has to be something for which one is willing to get shot and for which, in all probability, one is actually going to get shot.

— Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander

“So I will disappear,” said Thomas Merton, concluding his address to the International Monastic Conference in Bangkok on December 10, 1968. Merton, a Trappist monk and writer, planned to take an afternoon nap before a panel discussion that evening. He walked back to his guest cottage in the sweltering midday heat, took a shower, and, while standing in his bare feet on a tile floor, reached to turn on an improperly wired electric fan. The end came for him with asustained jolt of direct current, at about 2 P.M. local time. He was fifty-three years old.

I thought of Merton the day before my sixty-fifth birthday, in 2005, while standing barefoot on a wobbly chair to change a light bulb over the kitchen sink in my rented house in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. A rusted, poorly installed socket was making the task difficult. As I coaxed the old bulb loose, my mind drifted from Merton’s tragic fate to a discussion I’d had during a family get-together sixteen years earlier.

That winter of 1989, Bill McKibben’s book The End of Nature had been making waves by predicting the depletion of the ozone layer, the warming of the planet, and widespread species extinctions — shocking revelations at the time. My seventy eight-year-old mother, after hearing my agitated reiteration of McKibben’s statistics, shoved aside the vegetables she was preparing and tearfully asked, “Why is it that, of all the billions of people who’ve lived on the earth, we are the ones who must witness the time of the end?” I put my arm around her and made light of the subject, joking that we had at least six months before the end. But my eighty-year-old father, who had also read McKibben’s book, did not conspire with me to be lighthearted for my mother’s sake. “What makes me sad,” he said, “is that we can’t take with us into old age and death the assumption that nature, as we’ve always known it, will survive. That, it seems to me, is a first.”

I changed the kitchen light bulb without incident and turned sixty-five the next day. Life goes on, both within me and around me, but I am left holding this intuition of The End.

I didn’t learn about the tree-cutting program at Gettysburg National Military Park until I saw early evidence of its implementation. Just north of the hill known as Little Round Top, more than a hundred large trees — maples, oaks, tulip trees, mulberries, magnolias, cedars, hickories, and ash— were felled and hauled away in a matter of weeks. The sudden and seemingly pointless cutting was deeply disturbing to me. When I walked the former wood lot just after the logging machinery had left, I had to choke back rage at the sight of the low-cut stumps, many of them two and three feet in diameter, and some as much as five feet across. Left standing for the pleasure of visitors to the national park were exactly fourteen eight-inch-diameter ash trees, their leaves shot through with disease, their bark scraped by logging machinery — scrawny, wobbly-looking, giraffe-like stalks that seemed puzzled by their own survival.

Tourists can now rest assured that no trees will stop them from envisioning what the soldiers of Battery C, First New York Light Artillery, Fifth Corps, saw on July 2, 1863. Which is precisely what the park service intended: “to rehabilitate the Gettysburg battlefield so that the features that were significant to the outcome of the battle . . . more nearly reflect their historic conditions.”

When this logging project is complete, a forested area equivalent to 526 football fields will have been “restored” to match photographs taken in July 1863. At the time of this writing, 147 acres of woods have been cleared, and the remaining 429 acres are legally doomed. Any trees that have grown on the battlefield in the years since the Civil War will be removed; trees that were present in those days but have been cut or have died in the interim will be “replaced.” The work has been swift, efficient, and neat. In a year no one will be able to tell those woods existed.

The lovely hilltop road leading to the Eternal Light Peace Memorial, dedicated by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on the seventy-fifth anniversary of the battle, has been stripped bare of the dozens of old oaks that once lined it. Restored to its original state, the once-wooded hilltop itself now resembles not an arboreal amphitheater positioned for a spectacular view to the west and south, but a badly scalped bump of land hosting a stark granite platform. As a bonus, visitors can enjoy an unobstructed view, to the east and southeast, of the Giant supermarket, the Days Inn, the Hilton Garden Inn, the U-Haul franchise, the North Gettysburg Shopping Center, and the Gettysburg College sports facilities. The now-unfiltered din of traffic from surrounding highways makes it nearly impossible to conjure up the nineteenth century.

After five years of planning and protest, the forces in favor of historical restoration have prevailed over those who regard the stately woods as reassuring evidence that America has healed from its contentious history — not to mention those who simply cannot fathom the wholesale slaughter of hundred-year-old trees for any reason. The argument is over, and what I write here is not an attempt to persuade but an elegy for the kind of healing spirit that gave rise to this place.

Everyone understands that in the larger scheme of devastation caused by development and suburban sprawl, this particular alteration of the environment is relatively benign. The woods are not being replaced by shopping malls, after all. And at least the battlefield cannot be sold to developers. Opposing camps in this conflict have withdrawn and retrenched for now, but the deep and irreconcilable divisions between them remain.

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