Outdoor Ghosts
by Charley Waterman
In persistent fishing and hunting you travel out of the mainstream much of the time.
I knew a man who crossed the country at least twice annually by car and who always drove out of his way to stand for a while at the OK Corral in Tombstone, Arizona, always spent a day at Gettysburg, and knew the locations of a dozen obscure Indian fights in the Northeast. He said he listened to the guns.
He was not a serious historian by common definition and his occupation was far removed from it but he could stand beside a modern highway and hear the crack of stagecoach whips or the rebel yell. The long ago, and even the not-so-long ago, had a hold on him. A former U.S. Marshall with the scars of more than 20 bullets, he really belonged to another time.
I am certainly no world traveler but I have driven a great deal in the United States and there are places I visit again and again, learning nothing new but drawn there by ghosts that refuse to leave.
The battleship, Alabama, impotent at final anchorage at Mobile, is a tourist attraction like some other ships. On dark and rainy nights her radar screen must swing and there must be the hiss of water past her hull, the big engines vibrating deep in the giant blacked-out ghost. It is the same with the Texas near Houston and the others. I must waste time staring at them, preferably at night.
The guns at Vicksburg, daytime decorations of a manicured battlefield, must be trained before dawn by long-gone urgent hands.
Custer and his men died on a grassy hill in eastern Montana, their fall now shown by white markers visible from a super highway. Deaths now recalled by a thousand jokes. That scene is best from a distance, framed by the wheeling wraiths of Indian cavalry.
Crumbling log cabins in big game country of the Rockies, the trails to them no longer plain. Eroded tracks left by jeeps and tanks on nearly abandoned military posts, the men who trained in them scattered over a shrunken world or long-dead on foreign battlefields. The rifle pits carefully dug atop a western butte, their time and purpose unknown.
Crumbling and overgrown stone fences and tiny forgotten cemeteries in New England. Indian shell mounds along Florida rivers, washed by the wakes of swift holiday boats. Buffalo jumps in the West where tourists have almost erased the traces of people who hunted for survival through the centuries.
And if you have moved about the country for a long time there are your own personal landmarks: the first sight of the Colorado Rockies, cloudlike as you go westward in blistering summer from the Kansas plains as I first did it as a child in a Model-T Ford; the first isolated knobs as you leave Texas for New Mexico by a more southern route; the Black Hills as you cross South Dakota from east to west.
But all the time you know these things are colored in your own head, which may or may not make life enjoyable. There was the old-timer I used to fish with who said:
"That old stuff gives me a pain. I rode a horse across the Indian Nations when I was a kid. An air-conditioned Lincoln is a hell of a lot better."
No, I'm no historian. I just think about some of those things.
