Scott D. McLean, MD

Week 19 of 52. One third of the way through a year of transition, from my days in clinic and on the ward enjoying clinical genetics, to a fully committed immersion in letters, poems, novels, essays, prescriptive nonfiction, chapbooks, cookbooks, and laundry lists. “Lists” should be a genre! During this interlude, we play and dream. And worry.

There is so much to worry about. What day in the existence of the planet has not featured some unfolding catastrophe? We must love this stuff, since we always seem immersed in a sea of Gordian knots, decisions between bad and worse, and the inevitably lost grocery list. We push a sad cart among the bok choy and asparagus. Will there be a fight? Will I need to take a side? Then what? We know about that discomfort beneath the sternum when you reach toward the panic button but hesitate, unsure of your ability and your courage.

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Recently Paula and I visited with an old friend, Dr. Rogers Fred, a retired veterinary oncologist who happens to be an Antietam Guide. We spent a warm Sunday walking the fields just west of the Antietam Creek where, in September 1862, there also was much to worry about. On one of those days, during the 12 hours of daylight, more Americans died than in any other battle at any time in the history of the nation.

We stood on that ground. The grass this spring is green and thick. The world turns.

There will be a time when the soldiers will be forgotten, just a footnote dissolved in the cauldron of data that eons and events will churn and dilute, when our soil and planets, our hearts and light will return to stardust.

In the meantime, we can remember, if we so choose. Then the question is “Why?”

Dr. Fred talked about the Confederate and Union soldiers, officers and enlisted, as we surveyed the Cornfield, the East and West Woods, the Sunken Road, Pry House, and, on the rise near Sharpsburg, the National Cemetery. There, Robert E. Lee and his staff found a useful panorama, a sweep of insight into the regiments, skirmishers, pickets, artillery, cavalry, and blood. We talked about smooth-bore and rifled muskets. We talked about Lee’s broken wrists, suffered at Second Manassas/Bull Run when Traveller, his cherished horse – gray, 16 hands, American Saddlebred – was uncharacteristically startled and pulled the general onto a stump. Lee maneuvered through western Maryland in an ambulance. We wondered if his pain – and his judgment – was relieved by laudanum.

Antietam is one of the pivotal settings for a novel I hope to write, fiction infused with the worries and the courage of the people who were there then. This will require a commitment to both the reality of what happened and a simultaneous telling of a tall tale that dares to approach the truth about what they did, how they changed, why they changed, and what difference that made then and makes now –  ripples of the surface and subsurface of the waters in our small pond on this small planet.

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Lesson in humility: Some years ago, when I was a Major in the Army and attending the AMEDD Officers’ Advanced Course, we were required to research and write a “battle analysis,” a formal account of strategy, tactics, action on the field, operational significance. We could choose any battle between any combatants at any time in history. I chose the American Civil War ‘Battle of South Mountain,’ which occurred on September 14, the day before Antietam. I had camped and hiked and looked eastward to the mountain on many days as a teen. I studied maps and read books and thought carefully, even reverently, about South Mountain.  Consequently, I thought I was rather an expert on this historical event. My paper was brilliant.

The day after we walked Antietam, Paula and I drove up Maryland Route 40 and parked where the Appalachian Trail bisects the ridge and hiked for half an hour to the south. I thought we were on the South Mountain battlefield – Turner’s Gap and Fox’s Gap, key points of the conflict. But it was just forest. No stone walls, monuments, or historical markers. Still, it seemed like the right place, especially since in 1862 it would have been plowed and grazed fields.

A week later I properly checked out the historical maps and discovered, blushing, that we had been a mile away. The real battle occurred significantly to the south where the National Road, as it was known in 1862, aka today’s Alternate Route 40, crosses over the mountain near Zittlestown. Even more appalling: I had been there before, years ago. Yep, forgot that, neurons missing in action (potentially) – missing it, in fact, by a mile. Some expert.

Note to self: be humble.

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Walt Whitman, whose poem “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” I quoted last week, cared for the Union wounded in various Civil War battles from 1862 until the end of the Civil War in 1865. He was a “wound dresser” and comforter. From his collection Drum-Taps, a selection, free verse:

Bivouac on a Mountain Side

I see before me now a traveling army halting,

Below a fertile valley spread, with barns and the orchards of summer,

Behind, the terraced sides of a mountain, abrupt, in places rising high,

Broken, with rocks, with clinging cedars, with tall shapes dingily seen,

The numerous camp-fires scatter’d near and far, some away up on the mountain,

The shadowy forms of men and horses, looming, large-sized, flickering,

And over all the sky – the sky! far, far out of reach, studded, breaking out, the eternal stars.