By Richard Brady
Saturday, August 31, 2019
I remember my Dad pitching to us at Valley Forge Park. In
June, my parents would stuff picnic essentials and their six kids into the
station wagon and make the short drive out from our Philadelphia home. Today,
the meadows enfolding the encampments have been returned to milkweed,
goldenrod, and meadow rue. In our day, the grass on the wide, open plains was
just right for makeshift baseball: Three on a side, first baseman, shortstop,
one outfielder, car mats for bases. Dad was the steady pitcher, and, as in all
good things, Mom was the umpire. Bare bones, but pure sport and pure joy,
before the specter of time had come over the horizon. Love of baseball, and
other fidelities, began right there.
These sojourns did not include a full educational tour of
the site. We just wanted to get to that pleasant picnic area alongside a deep
stand of oaks and maples, in proximity to our baseball diamond. There was one
detour: Upon arrival, we began the afternoon with an inspection of the log
cabins fashioned by Washington’s men. We stared, in silence, for about ten
minutes, and moved on. A young boy thought these huts were pretty cool, much
better than the play forts we put together out of boxes and crates behind the
playground, even if the emptiness, the lack of anything fun in there, was a bit
disappointing.
My father seldom commented. We just walked up to an open
door and peered in. For my parents, love of America was never loud, but forever
constant. Mom was a brilliant woman whose serenity flowed from her quiet
communion with the saints. She was also a believer in miracles, a hard sell
then, a harder sell now. Dad was a carpenter and a fundamentally honest guy.
Years later he would take a week’s vacation to watch the Watergate hearings —
just because he wanted to find out what was going on in his government. He got
three weeks annually.
The games of youth faded. Hiking in the park followed,
into adulthood. Some teammates passed on. Much later, there were the long walks
toward the Memorial Arch at twilight. Yet while getting to the place was easy,
getting the place was not. There was no incantation to magically infuse the
historical text with a pulse. Was this a site of rare and special grace? As
with all portals and holy places, a traveling Jacob was challenged to wrestle
with the angels of imagination and empathy. What claim herein could the dead
lay at the feet of the living? What was really going on, in those darkened
huts, with their pinching, claustrophobic right angles? Where was the escape
from hunger and fever, frost and fear? How to resurrect the passion buried
under suburban haze?
The tales of a nation are encrypted, more often ignored,
and rarely reincarnated in the heart. They take on flesh and form only when the
living shed their own deceits and prejudices long enough to walk alongside
those beyond the veil. Then will the stick figure rise from the page, with
scent and sweat, glaring, cackling, and cussing, looking out his or her window
toward his or her world. Absent dialogue with those who formed it, the past is
actually always just the past, a bulb dormant beneath a blanket of icy
indifference.
At long last, that conversation began after years of
wrangling with Henry Brown’s words, carved high on a hilltop arch in the park:
“And here, in this place of sacrifice, in this vale of humiliation, in this
valley of the shadow of that death out of which the life of America rose,
regenerate and free . . .” Vale of humiliation? Three odd words to unlock their
humanity. Dedication, rage, fear, courage, and steadfastness are words
associated with a warrior in a noble cause, not humiliation. Not for the
American soldier. From portraits of fife and drum to cavalry charges to Marine
landings, the imagery of our fighting men does not conjure up “humiliation.”
Yet this was the shroud that hung over the valley.
The year 1776 was bravura inspiration for America. But
1777 was the depressive dawning of bleak and sapping doubt. Washington’s troops
(it would be inaccurate to call them an army) were routed by the British at
Brandywine and Germantown. The Founders fled Philadelphia as the British
marched in to seize the new capital. The Crown saw nothing noble in Adams or
Jefferson or Hancock. They were backwoods vermin in need of extermination, lest
their pestilence spread. The signers of the Declaration of Independence grasped
the daunting odds of this gamble, the peril for family and fortune, when they
vouched for independence, yet most rushed to the cause with the same alacrity
seen in their modern counterparts’ dash to Capitol Hill cameras. In 1777, the
hangman cometh.
The retreat of the Continental Congress took them deep
into central Pennsylvania, out beyond Lancaster. Washington’s sanctuary was
only 20 miles outside of Philadelphia. When driving from Center City to Valley
Forge today, it is baffling that the British never made that short trek to
crush the colonials for good. This besieged and discouraged crew of ordinary
men and women trudged into that valley at Christmastime, in 1777. When they
marched out the following summer, they would bend the arc of the modern world.
Contemporary culture has self-prescribed early-onset
dementia for our collective memories. We have forgotten our story, and
searching for the missing person out in the darkness, the person who created
the only home we’ve got, is something of a bother. Nations have traits,
mannerisms, accents, idiosyncrasies, predispositions, and beliefs. No nation is
more idiosyncratic than ours. The marvel of America springs from the absorption
of disparate bloodlines of every random family tree into the roots of the vast
and diverse national forest. Twelve thousand men suffered through Valley Forge.
They were cultural products of their unique colonies. They differed in race,
religion, and economic status. Doctors and lawyers, farmers and craftsmen,
Northerners and Southerners, endured the deprivation without turning upon one
another. Two thousand souls who marched in would never march out, but they
perished due to starvation and disease, and not fratricide. When other
revolutions turned to their reigns of terror, this nation found resistance to
the plague of class warfare. In the shared torment of that winter’s cold and
mud and dark, a new breed had been inoculated, to large extent, against an
ancient malady.
Vale of humiliation. Washington was asking men to die for
him, and he could not even put shoes on their feet. The troops knew, each
morning, that what they would eat each evening depended on the luck of foraging
parties sent out in search of game. They were tormented, viscerally, by the
accounts of captured comrades in the city, so close, being brutalized by the
Redcoats — about which they could do nothing. Unlike those who stormed Normandy
or recaptured the Korean peninsula, they had no assurance that their family
would be safe while they were absent, and cared for if they made the ultimate
sacrifice. Homefront and War Zone were one and the same.
Humiliation. To the Loyalists in the colonies, to the
English overlords, and to much of the world, they were not soldiers at all, but
merely a mob of buffoons. A band of shopkeepers and smiths had thrown down with
the Union Jack, a behemoth that, a few decades later, at Waterloo, would vanquish
the greatest fighting force since the Roman Legions. And those shopkeepers and
smiths had been defeated, dismissed, and sent scurrying to the valley of
misery. Winter raged on. The voices of wives and children and the familiar
comforts of distant homes plunged deeper and deeper beyond their grasp. The
cabins became tombs. Washington felt his army fading away, about to disappear
in the night like a dream, a dream of a country based on an idea, a dream that
does not survive dawn’s realities.
And, yet, these dreamers and buffoons stayed at their
post. Against convention, sorrow, anxiety, and loss, they dug in. Human souls,
a mystery then, a mystery now, planted a bloody foot in a field of snow and
cried out, “I will retreat no more.” After five thousand years, ordinary
fighters, made extraordinary by imagination, courage, and love, bound
themselves to this moment in Purgatory, and said to Ramses and Xerxes and King
George, and tyrants to come, “Not one more mile, not one more day”! It would
take another 80 years, down another Pennsylvania road, for that promise to be
fulfilled for all. Here, however, in the Valley of Death, the pact was signed.
A band of believers steeled their faith in the fire of starvation and disease
and humiliation, looked History in the eye, and cried out, to an awakening
planet, that the individual was the only true sovereign of the soul.
Miraculous, indeed.
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