Dying well (and comfortably)

My apologies to all of you intrigued by the title because you are old enough to know that phrase, meaning you have not only lost someone close to you, but you've thought about the whole living dying thing in a more existential way.  As a hospice volunteer I have spent hours wondering about those words.

But this column has nothing to do with that; it has to do with Civil War Reenacting.  Whoa! You say, what tangent has Lauren gone off on now, and what a cheap shot at luring us in.... you're right on both counts, entirely a mainstream media thing to get you to read a column - you know the whole "World to come to a horrible end. News at 11:00" thing.  But in my defense, would you have read a column on me and my son dressing up like Union Soldiers and spending the weekend shooting black powder muskets, if I had titled the column "Civil War Reenacting"? - even if it turned out to be mildly amusing?

Okay so you've read this far, you might as well go the rest of the way.

My son got me into reenacting when he was 11.  I made the mistake of taking him to Duncan's Mills, here in California, to a reenactment.  Picture this.  About 800 reenactors all dressed up in their Union and Confederate gear running around on a huge field shooting at each other in a battle fierce enough to looking authentic enough to an eleven year old that he held my hand.

Horse drawn canons being hauled into position and firing.  The percussion from the explosions so strong that you can feel it in your chest, and loud enough to set off car alarms in parking lots hundreds of yards away.  The scene is hectic and full of smoke- lines of men advancing, orders being yelled, grizzly looking men and boys loading and firing in unison, and men seeming to drop dead on the spot from enemy fire.  Generals riding around on horses and ordering cavalry here and there.  Drummer boys sounding off orders to advance or retreat at the behest of their commanders, and field medics tending to the wounded who are groaning and writhing on the field quite realistically.  All quite gruesome and fascinating to a young mind.  And, much to my initial distress, interesting enough to him to the point that he insisted we join up on the spot.  This is now my fifth year as a Union reenactor, proud member of the New York 69th Irish Brigade.

So, six times a year, we pack up early and drive for three or four hours to a field somewhere, put on our wool uniforms, and spend the weekend pretending to be Union soldiers.  We wear what they wore, sleep on the ground as they did, take orders as they did, and fight like they did, using equipment that is exact replicas.  We wear ill fitting wool uniforms that are unforgivably hot in Fresno's 100 degree heat, and wool blankets that offer little comfort from rocky hard ground at night, to the point where, if you aren't a teenager, it takes a good half an hour to get all your bones moving again at 6:30, on a damp fog filled morning when the bugles go off calling you to breakfast.

To my son this is heaven.  No showers to take, stay up as late as you want, run around with friends shooting muskets, and only taking orders from people that you've agreed to let order you around, unlike your parents whose orders you never agreed to.

My wife thoroughly approves of this.  Not the gun shooting part.  The part that has us going off for a weekend and leaving her in a quiet house for a whole weekend part. We've been married for 20 years, and there's a point in there somewhere where you both decide you can be apart and miss the other but appreciate peace and quiet.

Two battles a day for two days.  Each done with great precision and planning and played out in front of crowds of spectators who have paid to come see the spectacle.   The visitors are mostly families - kids of all ages, parents pointing out things on the field, and rattling off amazing facts (at any one time half of the soldiers were suffering from dysentery) smaller kids with their hands over their ears, a bit afraid of the whole thing, and older folks who have actually lived through or participated in a real war.  They all come to be connected to a part of history that we now look back on with a weird sadness and pride that is hard to explain.

Okay the dying part.  If you are one of the soldiers your task is to stand in a line, load and fire your replica 69 caliber (large) musket.  You use the same black powder that the original fellows used, you just don't put in the lead ball.  You load and fire a couple times a minute if you're any good, and with any luck you don't go deaf from the new teenage recruit who stands behind you and who holds his rifle too close to your ear as he fires over your shoulder.  The things are loud and, if you're not careful, strong enough to land you on your behind if your musket misfires and you accidentally keep loading it up with more powder (spoken from first hand experience).  

And you have to do all this then die.  You die because that's the way it was.  Lines of men stood opposite each other, 50 yards apart, and shot until one side or the other gave up.  In real battles this lasted only minutes.  In the reenactments it's stretched out to forty-five minutes or so because it wouldn't be any fun for anyone if the whole thing was over in minutes.

But you didn't come to this thing to die.  You didn't drive four hours, put up with the heat, and bad food to die right away.  You came to shoot.  You die only because you're told to by your commander, or, and this is the part you learn about, because you're a bit older and you're tired and hot.

But when you do die, you try to make it look real, so you suddenly just fall to the ground convincingly and stay put, not moving until the battle is over, which can be another half an hour.   

During the first couple of years I fell on rocks, on the bodies of other men, in soggy puddles left over from a days rain, in one occasion on a pile of fresh horse manure, and on another - in a fit of wanting to look dramatic - on a wooden picket fence.  This last one was particularly uncomfortable.  
So you learn.  You learn to look around ahead of time.   You look in front of you, find a shady place, somewhere flat, no rocks, preferably grass covered, no puddles, just wonderful shade.  You fire your musket one last time, yelling something pithy at the enemy and then fall forward - carefully going to your knees first to break the fall, and then dropping your musket (it's worth $500) carefully to the side.  You lurch forward, and roll slowly to lie flat on your back.  You can now enjoy the rest of the battle in comfort, listening to the battle rage around you and work its way to the distance.  

I've been known to take a short nap during this time, being woken somewhat abruptly by what they call 'recall' which is when a bugle sounds and all the dead come back to life to the loud applause of the crowd.

Over the years these weekends have become one of the favorite times for my son and me.  No rules, just a kind of time-out from life, and school, and chores, and having to be grown up.  In short wonderful.