The country is spattered with memorials just as the roads are spotted with the torn carcasses of road kill.
In a shady park in St. Augustine, Florida, a half dozen memorials huddle together between King and Cordova and Cathedral Place and A1A. I can’t number the times I passed the William Wing Loring Memorial as I walked to college classes or ambled down the street to a nearby pub. The memorial, a skinny obelisk, stretches prominently above an intersection where cars and horse-drawn carriages idle. Piercing through the trees and skirted in a sidewalk of coquina shells and concrete, its somber reverence drowns in the loudspeakers of St. Augustine’s trolley train tours.
Just across King Street, the Cordova Café’s spiraled column imitates the memorial’s upward thrust. It jabs at the wrought iron scrolls lacing the building’s “Free Wi-Fi” signs. Tourists and locals hum at the café’s outdoor tables with cavernous umbrellas kept close by order of the handwritten signs tacked to each umbrella’s stem.
On the other side of Cordova Street, Flagler College crumbles elegantly under terra cotta tiles.
“And this,” intones a trolley guide, his voice piped through rattling speakers to half the city and five tourists captive on his tram’s benches, “is Flagler College, formerly the Ponce de Leon Hotel. A hundred years ago, rich northerners would winter at the hotel, built by Henry Flagler in. . . .”
Caddy-corner across the intersection, the Lightner Museum rests on its haunches, assured of its daily stream of visitors, the families and the elderly and the young couples strolling over from the Riply’s Believe It Or Not Museum down by Castillo de San Marcos, the Spanish fort hovering over the Intracoastal Waterway since the 1600s.
Of course the fort, the museums, the gift shops are more interesting to the groups of school children who pile out of their buses in school-issued matching shirts. In this town, visitors pay to chase ghosts from one Indian graveyard to the next. Memorials only pay homage to the real dead.
Maybe the tourists are just scared out of the park by the scraggly bearded men sleeping on the benches, bundled into thick layers of jackets against the balmy Florida spring.
So as I sit looking at tourists, only two stop to look at the memorial honoring a man from St. Augustine who served three armies – U.S., Confederate, and Egyptian. They are a couple, he in his sixties, she in her fifties, dressed crisply in polo shirts, their hands cramped around thick stacks of brochures and maps.
Behind them, school children stomp down the sidewalk.
“Oh, look,” the man says. He pauses, gazing at the unfamiliar Egyptian flag etched into the pale stone.
“Yes,” she agrees, her sunglasses skimming the memorial’s note of thanks to the Daughters of the Confederacy.
She digs into her oversized purse as she steps out from a magnolia tree’s shade. He glances at the U.S. flag, shakes his head at the Confederate flag. Within ninety seconds, they have crossed the street, their feet aimed purposefully for the Lightner Museum’s gardens.
A local couple rushes past the ugly brown water meter angled behind the monument, their steps as hurried as a mockingbird’s garbled song overhead. The overweight woman pants to keep up with her fit companion. A baggy-clothed teenager with an angry glare sulks past. A butterfly wobbles around the orange flowers clustered limply at the monument’s base.
This memorial is unremarkable, just another piece of carved stone in a city of carved stone. Like the field surrounded by fields I drove through at Christmas, when I visited my boyfriend’s family in Virginia. Except for the weighty history cut into the William Wing Loring Memorial, it is only another column, no different from the column supporting the weight of the Café Cordova. Except for the metal plaque near the roadside, the field was simply another field edged in a zig-zagging split rail fence, five minutes from our destination.
But I lurched when I read the name of a man who left one country’s army to fight against it with another. And I felt my stomach clench like a gear locking into place when I saw the sign just outside little Haymarket, Virginia, that gave a name to the field: Manassas – and the little creek trickling through its darkness: Bull Run.
“This is Manassas?” I half-wailed, gripping my door handle to support the news that we drove over the bones and blood of such history.
“Yup,” my boyfriend said, and flicked on the car’s high beams.
And the tourists of St. Augustine stop beside the William Wing Loring Memorial to check their maps, carefully step around history like a car avoiding roadkill.
