What with The True Story of John Yates Beall culminating a year plus of research and preoccupation with the Civil War, I could not resist the Boscobel reenactment this past weekend.
Expected demonstrations of horseshoeing, tent & candle-making, spinning, etc. None. However, nosing about the encampment of white canvas tents, (historically correct for 1860's and quite handsome) I came upon a woman named Caroline who had been doing reenactments for 37 years. Everybody else was off at the battle, the weekend's central event, tho' that struck me as mundanely barbaric as picnickers at Manassas coming to the 1st battle of the Civil War.
I mean, would you be really able to eat potato salad and picnic chicken after seeing men shot dead and wounded in an open field?
Regarding my expectations, Caroline replied, "That's why I always do something they would have been doing." She held up a small harp-shaped tool, looping a single thread over itself on the two tines of it.
"A lucet," she explained, "makes a very strong flat cord they used for corsets, to hang or tie anything."
"I suppose there were no women in Civil War encampments."
"Who do you suppose did the laundry and sewing and cooking?" They had sewing machines, but after the blockade couldn't get thread, and handmade was uneven and couldn't be used in them.
"Then there was always the world's oldest profession!" She chuckled, and encouraged me to go to the battle since I confessed to having never seen one.
The "play by play" was interesting and obviously well-researched; the cavalry Hollywood--dark roanish horses no paints, Palominos or sway backs. As I was leaving early, it galloped by.
And I got a whiff of critical insight--the sound of the commradery, the scent of the horses, the creak of their tack may be what modern life is missing. And perhaps barbarity is just a part of the total human mix.
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