past, President, future

The State Park by my house is bustling today with a Civil War Re-enactment, so I took a step back in time. The army camp was all set up with its canvas tents... laundry tubs with washboards and red wool "union suit" underwear pegged to clotheslines... camp cook working over open flame with cast-iron cookware... cannoneers shooting "the poor man's cannonballs" (tennis balls filled with cement) into the lake... and a surprising cross-section of ages represented.

I thought this dress-up history-hobby would be the purview of older men, but there were just as many scrawny teenagers in uniform--awkwardly doffing their forage caps in deference to grey-moustached officers. Evidently our future-generation is just as interested in the past as their elders are.

And then we had the President in attendance--Lincoln, that is. Standing with a pair of Union soldiers with the sparsely-starred U.S. flag behind them, and cannon-smoke beginning to obscure them.

Things would only need to be dirtier, I think, to make this army-camp entirely authentic. Perhaps this one is a re-enactment of the beginning of the war, before everyone got raggedy...