Standing at the foot of history

Sometimes you discover history after it is past.

I have visited a lot of cemeteries and memorials, but probably the most moving is the Vietnam Memorial in Washington D.C.

I’ve been there twice, the second time after I had learned that a cousin had been killed in the war and that his name was etched on the marble wall.

I had a natural interest in the wall because I had made three trips to Vietnam while the war was still going on.

Visiting the wall is a moving experience. It is one of the most popular memorials in D.C.

On my visits it was crowded. People would stick flowers, notes and a variety of things in the cracks around the names.

I had no idea where to look for my cousin’s name. They did have a place where you could go to find locations, but I wanted to look for it. It took about a half hour to locate the name.

Walking along the wall is a history lesson in itself.

Another moving object of history is the President Kennedy eternal flame at his resting site in Arlington Cemetery.

I had been there once earlier, but this time I was more alert to my surroundings and the people who were there.

My only regret was that I didn’t have the time to wander among the grave sites and read the names of those buried there.

Arlington is a powerful history lesson.

The Lincoln Memorial is one that grabs you, and if it doesn’t then that is probably because you are beyond feeling.

While in Atlanta on a newspaper conference, I went to the Martin Luther King, Jr. memorial. It is now a national park and includes the baptist church that King attended, and other things of interest.

On a trip to Baltimore to visit our daughter Kathy, Dorothy and I walked to the cemetery so we could visit the burial site of Edgar Allen Poe, a walk of a mile or two.

For a person who likes dark literature, it was another historic site.

Another author that made history is Ernest Hemingway. A memorial in his honor is hidden away in Sun Valley, Idaho.  I had been sent there for a week each summer that I was with The Idaho Statesman in Boise. They held a national coaches clinic there, and I met and wrote about a number of national coaches. That’s when I first discovered the Hemingway memorial. It is hidden away near a small stream about 1,000 yards from the lodge. It is not a large site and the message is short. But I visit the memorial every time I pass through Sun Valley. If anyone was history or tried to grasp it, it was Hemingway.

While on one Far Eastern trip, I ventured to the Kanchanaburi Memorial cemetery in Thailand. I had decided that I wanted to visit the site where the Bridge over the River Kwai was located. It was certainly not the scenic site shown in the famous film by the same name.

I found the cemetery to be much larger than I expected.  The service men and women interred there were by and large from British Commonwealth countries.

It was and is a place where history was written.

Since my visit, the place has turned into a tourist trap, in my mind desecrating a very important and solemn place.

I have always had a fascination with cemeteries.

We ventured back to Kentucky many years later to meet many of my wife’s relatives. Her father was born at Golden Pond.

The area is near the “Land Between the Lakes” and is dotted with many cemeteries, with scores of Compton gravesites (my wife was a Compton) and a number of her relatives showed us around. We hiked, on one occasion, through the brush and came to a clearing where we could see some tombstones off to our right. We returned home with lots of pictures and notes of her family, past and present.

It helped fill in family history.

On my own side, my similar history is much closer, at Palouse in Whitman County.

That’s one of the first things I do when I go to Palouse, is to visit the cemetery.

I have dozens of family members buried there.

I had been seeking the burial site of my Norwegian grandmother for years to no avail. Then a couple of years ago I found the local mortician, a willing researcher, who traced her burial place so my daughter Kathy and I could see that a stone was placed at her gravesite. She died in 1937, during the “Great Depression,” and I figure that my parents couldn’t afford a stone at the time, and then time rolled by. It had been on my mind for years.

History is all around us, that of people made more famous and history that strikes us personally.