Disorderly Content
The Best Kind Of War
Last weekend I drove out to Clements, a flyspeck of a town near
Stockton in the Central Valley. My reason for visiting: a Civil War
reenactment I'd found out about after one of the reenactors read
an earlier post and
recognized a smoke ring as being produced by his very own replica 1841
cannon. He pointed me to his group's site, which got me to a calendar
of upcoming events. So when the day arrived, I headed east in search
of some interesting photo ops.
Which I got; you can see some of the result
on my Flickr
page and others
in
my stock photo portfolio. But that's not what I wanted to write
about.
What I found interesting is how real it started to feel, with the
cannons blazing and the rifles firing and the few mounted combatants
racing at each other. And the fallen, doing a pretty good job of
looking injured, or dead. That's when it stopped being fun, at least
for a moment. I thought about the real battles, a long way from here
and a long time past, when it wasn't about entertainment, and when the
discomfort of living rough lasted for months and years instead of a
long weekend. It was a relief to see the battlefield dead rise up,
shake hands and relax before their next encounter.
One other thing: in rating one of my pictures for a different stock photo site, a reviewer emailed me about how strange he found it that people in California stage Civil War reenactments, since California didn't even exist at the time. Turns out he was wrong. As any West Coast football fan knows, California took on a certain prominence with the 1849 Gold Rush; it became a state a year later. And even though there wasn't any Civil War action out here, there were battles as close as Arizona and New Mexico, to say nothing of tens of thousands of volunteers who saw action elsewhere. Not that any of that matters to the reenactors. I bet they'd be at it no matter where they lived.
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