William Marvel: Gunplay in Goshen

As a child I entertained a vague notion of time as a dimension that could be modified or reversed by a change in physical location. I was not yet old enough for school when, on a road trip somewhere in the South, my mother pointed toward distant mountains and apprised me that there were people out there who were “still fighting the war.” In her parlance, “the war” was not the world war that had ended a few years earlier, but the one that had been fought nearly a century before, in which she knew that I already had an interest. Her comment made me want to turn toward those mountains, for I supposed that if we reached a certain elevation or crested a particular ridge we might stumble upon a camp of Confederate soldiers.

I found it difficult to grasp the idea that vast, tumultuous events could disappear entirely, and forever. By their sheer intensity such epochs seemed destined to persist in some form — preserved vestigially within one of the innumerable folds that I envisioned wrinkling the face of time as the Appalachians corrugate the surface of the earth. In the mists of some ethereal mountain moment, fifes had to be tooting “The British Grenadiers” for Redcoats on their way to chastise upstart rebels. The recesses of the cordillera must be hiding remnants of Geronimo’s Apache band, still resisting the conquest of their culture.