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The road wiggled its way past the Brooks farm, the Hartwell’s place, and the Nelsons. The quarter mile long parade of foreigners strode cautiously but proudly towards their goal, a distant 20 miles from their origination. Farmland boulders, set so randomly by ancient glaciers were now piled neatly on either side of the seven foot wide dusty trail. Beyond the continuous stack of stone lie the corn and the beans and all those other human nutrients. Peace and tranquility disrupted by the tromp, tromp, tromp of foot soldiers, were the first casualties of the day.
Row upon row , the muskets came. Eager to engage any local rabble encountered. Through patches of forests and fields of grain, without thought that these fortresses of nature might later hide their incensed enemy. The local homesteads were diminished of men who were now racing towards Concord to be with comrade kin. These staunch and stalwart brethren of local colonists, who had come across an ocean to enforce laws loathed were tiring now from their fifteen mile ordeal. Still they faced five more arduous miles of unfamiliar terrain. The smooth bore musket, its deadly cargo, and the trappings of a British regular began to weigh upon them, yet English training and strenuous demands had hardened them and so they continued.
They surged into Concord and dispersed themselves in search of local munitions. Upon a simple wooden bridge they arrived and there their conquest ended. Not from their own commanders but from previous friends turned resolved foe.
On April 19, 1775, the unknown soldier from an indiscernible army fired a shot that covered the planet. Now the red coat was bloodied and retreating. In tempered chaos, they reversed themselves and headed back towards the safety of their origination. However, the journey back would not be the peaceful one that they had enjoyed in the morning. Those little ridges, those never ending fieldstone walls, the darkening forests, and the waving gardens of corn would now be an enemies friend and an armies nightmare. The river of red jackets would eventually arrive back in Boston with the help of reinforcements, battered, bloodied, and the weariest of men. Many of their comrades would be left along the waysides and the world would be forever changed.
The little road of savagery would become peaceful again in time, as it is now. Tall oaks, maples and pine -generations old, never saw that holiest of time. They never witnessed the makings of a red, white, and blue country. Those events are an older history living today as I stroll under the canopy of green. Twisting gently the little road beckons the few riders with me. See my ancient neighbor's home she cries and opens herself to the stone rubble basement. Feel my fallow’d farms and taste the drained lowland turned swamp. Hear my songbirds and the thrrruuuuppp chirp of Red Winged Blackbirds. See my stony borders and most of all, remember what endured here. What was sacrificed here. What was won here.
Mel Casey - MGCCoyote@aol.com |
