Walking through history – 10 years later

My faithful readers might remember this: About 10 years ago, I did a walking tour of the Lexington City Cemetery and then wrote a six– (or seven–) part series about what I thought were some of the more prominent or interesting people buried there.

One of those people was Albert M. Hunter, a Civil War veteran who fought for the Union (see here). I could tell because his grave, an obelisk about as tall as me, was marked with a bronze five-point star Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) marker.

Curiously enough, his was the second GAR marker I found in the cemetery. Earlier, I had discovered the grave site of Charles E. Burgess. Wow, I thought. Two Union soldiers buried in a small-town Southern cemetery. What are the odds?

Could there be others?

Guess what? Yes.

About a week or so ago, my good friend and fellow Civil War enthusiast Jay Egelnick texted me that while searching for the burial site of a distant family relative, he came across the humble headstone of Samuel S. Hunter, complete with GAR marker.

Samuel Hunter and his GAR marker.

 Double wow! Now we had three Yankee soldiers buried in the cemetery, and two of them were named Hunter. What are the odds?

I sent Jay my original blog about Albert for his perusal, and he promptly dove into the research, utilizing Google, Ancestry.com and whatever other tools he had available.

And this is what he found:

 Samuel Shields Hunter was born on July 3, 1842, in Liberty township, Adams County, PA. Just to refresh your memory, the county seat for Adams County is a small, unassuming farm town named Gettysburg.

He enlisted in Company K of the 209th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry on Sept. 9, 1864 at the age of 22.

The fact that the regiment number is in the 200s is an indication that it was a late-war outfit. The Union never replaced its existing regiments with individual soldiers. Instead, it simply created new regiments. I'm not quite sure why. Maybe since it's because Union soldiers were generally recruited regionally, even locally, it could have been done for unit cohesion: if you grew up and knew the guy you were fighting with, perhaps you might fight a little harder.

Anyway, the 209th was a part of John G. Parke's 9th Corps. The provisional regiment was first detailed to Bermuda Hundred outside of Richmond, VA, in November 1864, and then became part of the 1st Brigade, 3rd Division of the 9th Corps a little bit later. It participated in the Petersburg Campaign, serving when Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox on April 9, 1865. 

The 209th saw limited action at Petersburg, losing 39 men. Hunter was mustered out on May 31, 1865, and went back home to war-ravaged Gettysburg and Adams County.

In 1871, Samuel fell in love and married Maria Elvira Catherine Musselman (a good Adams County apple butter surname). Somewhere along the way, they moved to North Carolina. I have no idea why. Barbecue, maybe. Or maybe the textile industry, which brought many Yankees south during Reconstruction.

Samuel died on Sept. 21, 1928 in Guilford County at the venerable age of 86, and was buried in Lexington City Cemetery on Sept. 23, 1928. I have no idea what happened there. Did he live in Lexington and die in Guilford County of a heart attack? Old age? An accident? Barbecue? Perhaps.

At any rate, Samuel ended up buried in Lexington in the same cemetery as his older brother ... wait for it ... Albert M. Hunter.

The brothers are not buried together. Their resting places are about 200 yards apart from each other, with Albert close to the State Street fencing while Samuel is buried more toward the center of the old section, under an old Blue Atlas Cedar tree, along with his wife Elvira (the name she preferred and who has a bigger headstone than Samuel's. The family plot also includes a Lula and a Rife, who could be their children).

Imagine, two brothers, both Yankees and both veterans of the Civil War, buried in a Southern cemetery. It can't get any stranger than that, right?

Well, not unless you walk a few yards away from Samuel's grave and come across the Confederate marker of Pvt. Andrew Hunter of Co. H, 35th North Carolina. Andrew, like Albert, died in 1911, so the timeline prevents them from being immediately related, if they are related at all. Unless they're twins. But, geez, this is really getting weird.

Many thanks to Jay Egelnick for his steadfast research for this blog and for making my head explode.

Space flights of fancy

 I am a space baby.

I grew up watching the federally subsided glory days of NASA, rooting for the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo space programs to develop and then, ultimately, culminate with the moon landings in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

It was exciting stuff until both the funding and the national will dried up. There never was any colonization of the lunar surface, which I always thought was the ultimate goal of NASA. Instead, we got a space shuttle program that seemed like an unsatisfying substitute for space exploration. Shuttles were never going to go to the moon, much less into deep space.

And then the shuttle program, stunned by the Challenger (1986) and Columbia (2003) disasters, dried up.

All that's left is the International Space Station and robots on Mars. I know important research is being done on the ISS, but it seems like the $100 billion spent so far mostly gives us images of astronauts turning weightless somersaults in their cramped cylinder. Okay. Ho hum. Go back to your research.

Until this month when the billionaires arrived.

On July 11, Sir Richard Branson took himself and several of his Virgin Galactic employees to the edge of space. They traveled in a vehicle (Unity 22) that looked something like a cross between an airplane and a gooney bird, and even though they didn't exceed the Kármán Line (that arbitrary threshold between atmosphere and true space 62 miles high that nobody ever heard of until this month), they got to float weightlessly for four minutes and saw the curvature of the Earth. That makes them astronauts in my view.

Then, today, Amazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos took three other passengers with him beyond the Kármán Line in a more traditional-looking rocket in a flight that lasted 11 minutes. It was reminiscent, to me, of Alan Shepherd's sub-orbital Project Mercury flight in 1961. You gotta start somewhere.

Bezos' mission looked pefect. The most amazing thing, I thought, was how the reusable booster rocket made a perfect upright landing on a pad not far from its desert launch site. The crew capsule, which included 82-year-old Wally Funk (an original Mercury 13 astronaut who trained with the guys but never flew because, well, she was a woman in a high-ceiling era), also made a perfect landing. Funk flew today and she could barely contain her excitement. Consequently, neither could I. She brought tears to my eyes. Good for her.

Originally, I wasn't too excited about billionaires trying to beat each other into space. Wouldn't humanity be better served if they put some of that incredible wealth into social projects to help the hungry and homeless? Or would it?

But I've revised my thinking. Maybe later, I'll revise it again.

We live on a fragile and finite plant. Eventually, some bazillion years from now, the Earth will be swallowed up by its dying giant red sun. Hopefully, by then, humanity will have found a way to Star Trek itself to other life-sustaining systems. Unless, of course, we continue to reject vaccines and mask mandates every time a pandemic comes along to try and wipe us out.

We can be, at the same time, both brilliant and extinction-insistent dinosaurs.

So, yeah, I salute private funding of space exploration. It's their money (if would help if Amazon would pay taxes, though. That's a good way to help the hungry and homeless. Actually, you might be helping to subsidize each space mission with your next Amazon order), they can do what they want with it.

In the end, this makes me feel like we're back in the game. This kind of space race might be just what we need.

Here we go again

 Why are you not vaccinated against the re-emerging Covid-19 virus?

What's your excuse?

Why are you endangering yourself? Why are you endangering me?

Because you are among the unvaccinated, the original virus has mutated to a more highly infectious Delta variant. That's science. That's what viruses do. They mutate. They evolve in an effort to survive. 

Everything evolves on a planet that revolves.

So is it because you don't believe the science? That's a ridiculous excuse. Your entire body is a walking science project, beginning with the very act of breathing and respiration, where oxygen makes that magical exchange with carbon dioxide in the thoracic cavity. 

(You learned this stuff in school. You know – the place where you had to be vaccinated for polio, smallpox, rubella and other viruses before you could attend. You've already been vaccinated for certain viruses and they have been shown to work. What's your issue with this one?)

The virus interferes with that exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide. It's why some people end up on ventilators when infected with Covid-19.

The vaccine interferes with that viral interference, thereby saving your life. Right now, 99.5 percent of Covid-19 deaths are among the unvaccinated. Let that sink in for a moment.

So it's simple logic, don't you think? Get vaccinated.

What, you don't believe the statistics? You think the 600,000 Covid-19 deaths are elevated numbers, fudged by medical officials for insurance paybacks? You think some of those deaths were heart attacks or cancer deaths, but listed as Covid? Death certificates are signed by medical examiners, coroners or licensed physicians. A false document can result in jail time and decertification, something those professionals probably don't want to risk. Trust the numbers.

The rise in hospitalizations is probably the most obvious indicator of the resurgence in Covid. A rise in deaths will likely follow. How many times must we learn this lesson?  Get vaccinated.

Is it political ideology? Why? A public health crisis should not be political. We should not be divided among the vaccinated and unvaccinated, and yet, here we are. Curiously, Republican-controlled states have the lowest vaccination rates and the greatest increase of Covid-19 hospitalization: Mississippi has a vaccination rate of only 33.8 percent. That's the state that currently has 10 elementary school-age children on ventilators. Louisiana is 36.1 percent. Georgia is 37.5 percent.

North Carolina is 42.9 percent.

The coastal states, where most of the Democratic electorate resides, has rates like Vermont, 66.8 percent; Massachusetts, 63 percent, and Connecticut, 62.2 percent. Or near herd immunity.

Former President Trump, a self-styled science denier and a self-styled Republican, once claimed that he took unproven and unapproved hydroxychloroquine as a preventative for Covid, but he got the virus anyway. He was hospitalized for several days and was nearly put on a ventilator twice. He was treated with eight different drugs, including Remdesivir, before showing improvement. The day he was released, he made it a point to arrogantly remove his mask in his best Mussolini impression to show his apparent victory over Covid. Yes. We all want close calls like his.

And here's the kicker: Trump and his family eventually got vaccinated anyway. So if your hero got the needle, why don't you? What's stopping you now?

Is it because you don't believe the news media? Of course. Any mainstream news that doesn't agree with your agenda has got to be corrupted, right? Not like that reliable social media. Disinformation is a huge problem in getting people vaccinated: some folks think there has not been enough testing of the vaccine, others believe injections make you sicker than the virus itself. Some think surveillance chips are being injected into your body, while others think you're being magnetized.

Clearly, the government is out to get you.

Holy crap.

All you have to do is look at the vaccinated world to see that the vaccine is indeed working. All you have to do is talk to somebody who's been vaccinated to find out how liberated they feel. We need to get this done before there's a Gamma deviant. Because, you know, mutating is what viruses do.

Human beings are an incredible dichotomy. We can be so phenomenal in our science, in our arts, in our architecture, in our religions.

And, at the same time, we can be dumber than a bag of bricks, skewed as we are by our ideologies and disinformation. The current Covid surge could get really bad by the time school restarts in a few weeks. It could mean the return of mask mandates and social distancing, and it makes me angry. It doesn't have to be that way.

Get vaccinated.

 

Now it's the songbirds

The other day I was flipping through my Facebook account when a story about songbirds appeared in my news feed.

It said any number of species – robins, grackles, wrens, sparrows, blue jays, and cardinals among them – were dying of a mysterious illness. Science, to this point, had no idea why, only speculation.

According to the US Geological Survey (see here), the illness is affecting birds across the mid-Atlantic region.

This was distressing news to  me. I have several bird feeders – one for hummingbirds, another for upside-down-feeding gold finches, and yet another for all those songbirds – and the thought of them going silent was a bit unnerving.

And, yet, as I thought about it, there seemed to be some truth to this latest pandemic. We've had noticeably less activity at the feeders. Kim and I thought perhaps there were some birds of prey nearby, like falcons, hawks or hoot owls.

A few years ago, we saw a cluster of feathers in our backyard and attributed the slaughter to some nearby redtail hawks, who are carnivorous cannibals, I guess.

Right now, though, it's all a mystery. There is some speculation that this year's cicada outbreak might be linked to the bird illness, but that remains to be seen. It's currently unproven theory.

Curiously, people investigating this mystery have suggested that a way to mitigate the spread of the illness is through social distancing. 

No, not us, silly. We've already done that for humans and it works. But what we can do to help the birds is to take down your bird feeders. Remove backyard bird baths. Take away anything where birds congregate in order to give scientists a chance to figure out what's going on.

It may sound a little ridiculous now, but bird-to-human infections are not all that uncommon. Remember the avian flu scare we get every so often? So far, a handful of A(H9N2) cases have already been reported in the Western Pacific Region. We need to keep an eye on this, I think, because if nothing else, the Covid-19 pandemic has shown that we are not much more than human Petri dishes. Keep your hand sanitizer handy. Get your flu shot.

All of this makes me wonder what's going on with the planet. Our bee population pollinators are on the decline, which has serious implications for the food chain. It's food for thought. Does climate change have a hand in this?

Aren't we Biblically challenged to be caring stewards of the planet? (Genesis 1:26-28 – And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

²⁷ So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

²⁸ And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.) 

Is it really up to us?

Save the birds. Save the bees. Save the whales. Save the elephants. And maybe save ourselves.

 

Neighborhood dresses up again

I had just completed watering the herb, vegetable and flower gardens in our backyard the other day and was making my way to the front when I noticed the red, white and blue wind spinners standing proudly in both of the rouge-red potted begonias that grace the entrance way to our house.

"Oh, that's nice," I said to myself. "I wonder who did that?"

I finished watering the plants and then stepped inside for a moment to get some relief from the steamy summer heat. When I came back outside, there were some Stars and Stripes bunting on my front porch railings. They hadn't been there 10 minutes earlier.

The Fun Fourth Faeries had targeted our domain.

Our house all dressed up for the Fourth.

And it wasn't just us. Bunting began appearing on the house across the street, next to the house that already had its colors on display days earlier.

By the end of the week, the houses of the Thornhills, Stricklands, Dillards, Cudes, Sanows, Colemans, Wests, Wehrles and Zannis (yes, actually I live in a neighborhood where some of the folks are perhaps a little bit squirrely whirly and maybe a touch zaney), were duly decorated.

The entire block. All of us. Red, white and blue.

This should come as no surprise, however. Back in December, ours was the neighborhood that was voted Best Decorated for the second straight year in the City of Lexington's Light up the Block contest.

If truth be told, I know these magical faeries. Kristi Thornhill, Stacy Sosebee-West and Pam Zanni were the irresistible forces ramrodding this project of patriotism. Perhaps not coincidentally, all three are educators who, no doubt, grew up surrounded in construction paper, crayons, glue pots and original ideas.

For this week, at least, they're real firecrackers.

And thank you.

(Here's a glimpse of the rest of the block. Click on each picture to enlarge):