Hot on the Trail
By William Harwood
My name is William Harwood. Together with my wife Marcia and two little boys, I moved to Asheville about six weeks ago. The reason has to do with a global children's educational play network I'm building on the Internet. It's a bit of a long story, but I'm the creator of Kinetic City: Mission to Vearth , an award-winning, upper-elementary, after school science learning game funded by the NSF and produced by the AAAS. (See www.kineticcity.com and www.kcmtv.com .) This project currently boasts several hundred 'save Vearth' clubs around the world and is growing quickly. The goal, or at least one of them, was to use technology to connect kids around the world in a spirit of learning, cooperation, sharing and fun.
When my new job starts Sept. 1st at the YWCA in Asheville, I'll be doing the same thing. Only this time with the middle school kids. The Internet is a revolutionary medium and I believe it's high time we launched a revolution on it, one promoting peace and play. If you wish to know more about the project, just send me an e-mail and I'll gladly fill you in on the big plans. In the meantime, I've attached an essay that will soon appear in Blue Ridge Outdoors, a monthly published here in Asheville. The last two paragraphs address the project to organize a global children's educational play network.
Peace be with you,
William
Running Late for John Brown's Raid,
Hot On the Trail of Another Harpers Ferry Revolution
If you're like me, running and history are two of your passions. If you're even more like me, you like your running a little rocky and your history downright revolutionary. If such is the case, then get thee to Harpers Ferry, present day runner's paradise and former setting for some highly innovative scenes in our nation's story.
Situated at the confluence of the Shenandoah and Potomac rivers, Harpers Ferry occupies a narrow spit of land at the tip of West Virginia's eastern panhandle. There, the tiny town clings to the side of a hill like a glacier meeting the sea, all its former factories long since calved off and melted away into the past. What remains today is little more than a Civil War theme village, semi-frozen in time and largely owned by the National Park Service, an arrangement which ensures a nightlife as dead as the ghosts you might see should you stumble 'downtown' after dark looking for something to do. However, to its credit, the Park Service does maintain the trails and some serious tranquility is freely available on the triple crown of heights that surround this unique place.
Having lived here for a year until my wife, bored to tears, demanded we return to Washington, DC, it was my recent happiness to visit for a run on the trails I had once cut my teeth on. (Literally. A chunk of my top left canine now forms a permanent part of the Blue Ridge summit. Ouch.) The June afternoon I selected, an unusually warm one, was a bit cooler atop Bolivar Heights, the lowest of Harpers Ferry's three hills. (To get there, turn onto Washington St. off of Highway 340 at the traffic light and look for the grassy slope that rises behind the West Virginia visitors center. A paved road leads to the top with ample free parking.) In addition to its welcome shade trees and wide green lawn, Bolivar Heights provides an extraordinary view of the famous gap through the Blue Ridge two miles to the east. There, in an argument with the mountain that must have lasted for millions of years, the Potomac river -- strengthened at the last possible second by the Shenandoah -- finally ruptured through the rock, creating fourteen hundred Maryland Heights and twelve hundred foot Loudoun Heights like an enormous set of nearly matching bookends. No less a personage than Thomas Jefferson, arguably the most brilliant hypocrite this country has ever produced, once described this same scene as "worth the trip across the Atlantic." It sure was worth the road trip from DC; not that I had much time to enjoy it. This area is developing rapidly and unforeseen traffic jams had left me with less than three hours of daylight. So, strapping on my running belt like a gunslinger -- its twin, twenty-once caliber water bottles fully loaded -- I turned my back on the gap and headed west along the crest.
Commanding the northern entrance to the Shenandoah valley, Bolivar Heights was strategic ground during the Civil War and racked up the body count to prove it. The biggest battle was the Union disaster of September, 1862, when Stonewall Jackson neatly encircled then mercilessly shelled 12,500 incompetently led Federals. Hopelessly trapped, one Union lieutenant recalled the horrific cannon fire: "The infernal screech owls came hissing and singing, then bursting, plowing great holes in the earth, filling our eyes with dust, and tearing many giant trees to atoms." With its carnage and suffering, war has always sucked, but the Civil War took the loss of life to a new low. A major reason was the advent of modern weaponry made possible by the industrial revolution, a story in which Harpers Ferry played a leading role.
I reach the cannons at the end of the crest then run downhill to Washington Street to head for town. Looking around, it's hard to imagine this sleepy place was once a major manufacturing center, a fact that leads straight back to George Washington. In the summer of 1785, the nation's first head-patrician-in-charge stayed here while reconnoitering the rivers for his 'Patowmack Company.' Though he wussed out shooting the Class III rapids in his canoe (friends talked him out of it), his experience with the local water power gave him a great idea for where to stick a national armory. Consequently, when he became President four years later, Harpers Ferry went into the weapons production business. By 1802, the bustling town was busy making muskets, rifles and pistols. This was perfect timing for Meriwether Lewis of Lewis and Clark fame. He stopped here to load up on arms and Indian presents before heading out west on his big mission to erase large chunks of terra incognita from the North American map. Crucial to his expedition's success -- it kept their guns firing to the Pacific and back -- was the new concept of interchangeable parts. When a musket's lock failed, it was quickly replaced with one of the many spares Lewis had wisely thought to bring along. Today, we take such machine-made precision for granted. At the dawn of the nineteenth century, however, exchangeable parts were revolutionary and Harpers Ferry led the way.
Running east on Washington Street, I soon find myself on High Street instead. Here, a steep drop into town provides an eyeful of antebellum architecture along with a few glimpses at another revolution Harpers Ferry witnessed, the one in transportation. In the 1830s, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, the Winchester & Potomac Railroad, and the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal all converged here at more or less the same time. Goods that had once taken days to reach market could now do so in a matter of hours and at a fraction of the cost. Harpers Ferry thrived, but not that the prosperous times were shared by all. Ferry operators, for example, lost their livelihood as the railroads built bridges over the rivers. Still, even these guys had it good compared to the other group that didn't benefit -- the people held as slaves. Denied the fruits of their own labor by law, they had to wait for Harpers Ferry's next revolution to come along, a socio-political-cultural one. It began with a bang on October 19,1859, embodied in the form of one man, John Brown.
I think about brother Brown every time I reach the end of High Street and hook a left for the bridge across the Potomac. It's tough not to; his 'fort'-- a brick building about the size of a two car garage -- stands right in the way. Surrounded by high ground on all sides and with the rivers blocking the escape routes to the mountains, it's a ridiculous place to make a stand against superior numbers, especially when those numbers included Robert E. Lee, Jeb Stuart and a whole bunch of heavily armed marines. Yet, of course, that's exactly what John Brown did. From his point of view, he had to; taking Harpers Ferry was essential to his plan's success. Without going into the details that never materialized anyway, his basic idea was this: first, get about twenty guys and take over the arsenal; second, announce to the local slaves that an army of abolition was forming and to come grab a weapon and join up; third -- and with winter soon approaching -- march the untrained volunteers up the Blue Ridge and head south (that's right, south) to fight a guerilla war in the Virginia mountains with no hope of resupply until the sin of slavery was no more. It was as noble as it was nuts. Even Frederick Douglass, a man who had escaped slavery himself to become a highly successful newspaper editor and orator, tried to talk him out of it. The two friends met in secret the previous August in a Pennsylvania rock quarry, John Brown outlining how he intended to raid only slaveholders to keep blood loss to a minimum, Frederick Douglass shaking his head and saying only that it was suicide.
I cross the Potomac and drop down to the canal to reach the path up Maryland Heights. Sweating on the same trail laboriously hacked out by Union soldiers during the war, I pass the point where Abraham Lincoln once turned back after declaring the mountain too damn steep. Whewf, tell me about it, Abe. I keep my legs pumping and try not to think about it, reflecting on John Brown instead. Conventional historiography claims the Civil War began in South Carolina in April, 1861; I don't buy it. Instead, I'm with Frederick Douglass who, in 1881, gave a speech at Harpers Ferry's Storer College, one of nation's first integrated institutions. "If John Brown did not end the war that ended slavery," he thundered, "he did at least begin the war that ended slavery. If we look over the dates, places and men for which this honor is claimed, we shall find that not Carolina, but Virginia, not Fort Sumter, but Harpers Ferry and the arsenal, not Col. Anderson, but John Brown, began the war that ended American slavery and made this a free Republic." I couldn't agree more. By becoming the architect of his own demise (and by not bleeding to death for it at his capture) John Brown was able to crow like a rooster to the nation at his trail. At his sentencing -- death by hanging -- he aimed his short speech straight at the souls of his fellow Americans, pointing out the glaring discrepancy they countenanced between their professed belief in the teachings of Jesus and the ugly facts of slavery they allowed on the ground. In the battlefield of human consciousness -- a war that continues to this day -- John Brown pulled off a classic martyr maneuver, transforming himself from a man into an idea, one whose time had come.
Upon reaching the top of Maryland Heights, I earth-surf my way back down and cut again through Harpers Ferry, this time along the Appalachian Trail. My destination is the bridge over the Shenandoah and the path up Loudoun Heights -- John Brown's 'escape route.' He lived nearby in the summer before the raid and no doubt huffed it up this same mountain more than once, timing how long it took him to reach the ridge and burning his neuroses for fuel. (What do you want to bet he was fast?) To avoid suspicion, he told the locals he was a miner prospecting for minerals. None would have batted an eye to see him charging up the rocky slope, shovels and picks in his hands in lieu of the rifles and pikes he soon planned to carry. No doubt the hard-sweating old man -- he was fifty-nine -- looked like just another ambitious individual out to get his American dream on. Which, if you really think about it, he was.
Burning some of my own neuroses for fuel, I make it to the top of the Blue Ridge then pause to polish off the last of my water; it's been a long hot run, full of twists and turns. To my right is a path leading to a bluff overlooking Harpers Ferry. To my left is the Appalachian Trail leading to my missing chip of tooth and, beyond that, Georgia. In front of me is the way I just came in, now, thankfully, all downhill. The sun is setting and the trails grow dark fast; it's time to bring this exercise full circle and get back to Bolivar Heights. I take off across the roots and rocks, trying not to trip and thinking about the pursuit of my own revolution. It's not something I like to admit in public -- I guess I'm doing it now -- but I'm afflicted with the same condition John Brown had, the one that makes you feel driven by God to take aim at the biggest wrong of your time and hit it as hard as you can. In John Brown's day, that wrong was chattel slavery. In ours? Good grief, where to begin? To save time, let's just call it a general global deficit of peace, love and understanding. Because of my condition, I moved to Harpers Ferry for inspiration while dreaming up Kinetic City: Mission to Vearth, a global game on the Internet designed to organize a worldwide children's educational play network. My employer at the time, a venerable non-profit science organization in DC, paid me to do it, but -- if truth be known -- it sure felt like a mission from God, especially while sweating bullets on the trails. Anyway, like the mustard seed in Matthew 13:31, the global game to save Vearth (a virtual Earth under attack by a computer virus called 'Deep Delete') is just a small thing now, a few hundred after-school clubs around the world at most. But the numbers are growing. Halleluiah, they're growing. And, as they do, so too do the chances of uniting young hearts and minds across cultures in common cause against a fictional foe. Worlds that play together stay together, and the Earth / Vearth challenge is a recipe for cooking up a grassroots children's movement predicated upon sharing, learning and fun.
Back once more on Bolivar Heights, the evening has come, but the glow in the sky isn't from the moon or stars, it's from the parking lot of the 'Super Wal-Mart' off in the distance and the Charles Town race track and casino just beyond. I glance at my foreign-made running shoes and fancy belt, evidence of my own culpability in a global system that generates comfort for most Americans while shifting the unsightly burden elsewhere. Even though I'm currently unemployed (and about to move to Asheville in search of meaningful work; I hope to start my own 'Save Vearth club) I'm still easily affluent by global standards. My wife and I own a nice house and a decent car and the only problem we have feeding our beloved toddlers is ensuring that they eat more fresh vegetables and fewer French fries. In short, I'm blessed -- up, down and all around. I'm also obsessed. Obsessed with the idea that this benighted planet of ours can still become a world of games and gardens and playgrounds. Call me a non-conformist, but it's my personal opinion that the military-industrial-entertainment vortex of doom currently running the world is running it off a cliff. We can do better, y'all; we can play a better planet into being. I hadn't originally planned on concluding this essay as a manifesto -- a largely nineteenth century genre the practice of which these days is a sure ticket to ridicule -- but since the deed is done allow me to close out in true 19th century manifesto style with a rousing call to arms: Babylon is vulnerable through its soft cultural underbelly and the time to strike is now. It's my American dream, one I believe John Brown and Frederick Douglass -- hell, maybe even Robert E. Lee -- would have liked.