Where were you when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in December of 1941? I wasn’t born until eight days after Pearl Harbor, but my life was framed by those events of World War II and the long Cold War.

My father was a bombardier on a B-24 bomber that went down over New Guinea in 1944. His remains and those of the other crew members were recently discovered and removed to this country. Their burial at the National Cemetery in Arlington was scheduled to take place this fall. Those plans have now, of course, been set aside.

He was named George Robert Ellison Sr. and was called “G.R.” by his family and friends and my mother, who never remarried. I never knew him. I am George Robert Ellison Jr. My son, Bert, currently living in Colorado, is George Robert Ellison III. He was stationed on the U.S.S. Missouri in the Persian Gulf during the Gulf War. Bert’s son, George Robert Ellison IV, is scheduled to be born in a week or so. He will be called “G.R.” His life in the coming century will no doubt be as filled with as much joy and as much sorrow as yours and mine have been.

Where were you when President Kennedy was assassinated in November of 1963?

I was an undergraduate at the University of North Carolina, where I was majoring in English with an emphasis on 19th century American literature. A woman in the department next door stuck her head out of a window and said, “The president’s been shot.” I skipped classes for days and watched on TV all that ensued.

In my mind, the incredible events that ensued during the assassinations that occurred during the 1960s (JFK, Martin Luther King and RFK), the divisive maelstrom that was the Civil Rights era, and The Vietnam War are jumbled together. World War II and the Cold War had closure, but the issues of the 1960s remain largely unresolved.

Now comes what is — in some ways — the most astonishing and disheartening event of all. Crazed men infiltrate this country, train at our airports, and then hijack four American passenger airplanes in an attempt to turn them into firebombs. In three instances they are horribly successful. As I write this, we are looking at 5,000 or so innocent dead.

Where were you on Sept. 11, 2001? I was conducting a natural history Elderhostel workshop at The Mountain, a conference center and retreat near Highlands. Televisions are, thankfully, few and far between at The Mountain. I learned that the first of the Twin Towers had been struck that Tuesday morning via a brief message posted on an Internet message board that I frequent from time to time.
Returning quickly to my cabin, I listened as the second tower and then the Pentagon were struck one after another. [Since that time, I’ve seen all of the images on TV of the strikes and of the bloody horrors and of the eye-watering heroism on the streets of New York.]

The Mountain’s staff, faculty and Elderhostel participants determined that the week would proceed as scheduled. Teaching — interrelating with people — when you’re dazed by events of this sort isn’t pleasant.

I’m fortunate, I think, that I happen to be a naturalist. My classrooms are outside. I take people into the natural world and help them learn to identify wildflowers and birds. I take them to high vistas and to waterfalls and into the deep woods. This is in and of itself healing. The natural world is a cathedral of sorts.

After the workshops, and supper, I had to return to my cabin. My choices were listening to the radio — which I did a lot — or reading. On the road, I sometimes read sports magazines or literary reviews or whatever. At this time, however, I needed something else to read.

It seems somewhat curious to me, in retrospect, that before leaving for Highlands on the morning of Sept. 10, the last item that I packed was Walt Whitman’s Specimen Days in America. This volume of autobiographical remembrance was published after the Civil War, during which Whitman had served as a volunteer nurse and confidant to Union soldiers as well as to the stray Southerners who came his way in the Army hospitals and upon battlefields.

I say that packing this volume seems somewhat curious because Specimen Days, for whatever reasons, is the volume that I often turned to during the 1960s and 1970s whenever I was depressed by events in Vietnam or by the rigors of the Civil Rights movement. Why, I now wonder, did I choose to take that particular book along during this particular week?

So, by chance, I suppose, I had some helpful reading with me last week. Let me share a few passages with you that caught my eye. Some of Whitman’s first-hand descriptions remind us that things have happened on American soil every bit as brutal and wrenching as what’s going on today. Other scenes that he recorded lifted his spirits as much as ours are lifted today by the ongoing heroics in New York and Washington, D.C., and elsewhere across the nation:

°°°

The war of attempted secession has, of course, been the distinguishing event of my time. I commenced at the close of 1862, and continued steadily through `63, `64, and `65, to visit the sick and wounded of the army, both on the field and in the hospitals in and around Washington city. From the first I kept little notebooks for impromptu jottings in pencil to refresh my memory of names and circumstances ... Most of the pages (in Specimen Days) are verbatim copies of those lurid and blood-smutch’d note-books.

°°°

Here is a case of a soldier I found among the crowded cots in the Patent-office. He likes to have someone to talk to, and we will listen. He got badly hit in his leg and side at Fredericksburgh that eventful Saturday, 13th of December. He lay the succeeding two days and nights helpless on the field, between the city and those grim terraces of batteries; his company and regiment had been compelled to leave him to his fate. To make matters worse, it happen’d he lay with his head slightly down hill, and could not help himself. At the end of some fifty hours he was brought off, with other wounded, under a flag of truce. I asked him how the rebels treated him as he lay during those two days and nights within reach of them — whether they came to him — whether they abused him? ... A couple of them, who were together, spoke roughly and sarcastically, but nothing worse. One middle-aged man, however, ... came to him in a way that he will never forget; treated our soldier kindly ... gave him a couple of biscuits and a drink of whiskey and water ... but did not change our soldier’s position, for it would have caused the blood to burst from the wounds, clotted and stagnated.

°°°

As I write this (May of 1963) the wounded have begun to arrive from Hooker’s command from bloody Chancellorsville. I was down among the first arrivals ... All around — on the wharf, on the ground, out on side places — the men are lying on blankets, old quilts, etc., with bloody rags bound round heads, arms, and legs ... The men generally make little or no ado, whatever their sufferings. A few groans that cannot be suppress’d, and occasionally a scream of pain as they lift a man into an ambulance. To-day, as I write, hundreds more are expected, and to-morrow and the next day more, and so on for many days. Quite often they arrive at the rate of 1000 a day.

°°°

The poor, wasted young man ask’d me to read the chapter about how Christ rose again. I read very slowly, for Oscar was feeble. It pleased him very much, yet the tears were in his eyes. The wound was very bad, it discharg’d much. Then the diarrhea had prostrated him, and I felt that he was even then the same as dying. He behaved very manly and affectionate. The kiss I gave him as I was leaving was return’d fourfold. He gave me his mother’s address, Mrs. Sally D. Wilber, Alleghany post-office, Cattaraugus County, N.Y.

°°°

Of scenes like these, I say, who writes — who ere can write the story? Of many a score — aye, thousands, north and south, of unwrit heroes, unknown heroisms, incredible, impromptu, first-class desperations — who tells? No history ever — no poem sings, no music sounds, those bravest men of all — those deeds ... unnamed, unknown, remain, and still remain, the bravest soldiers.

°°°

To-night, as I was trying to keep cool, sitting by a wounded soldier in Armory-square, I was attracted by some pleasant singing in the adjoining ward ... The principal singer was a young lady-nurse of one of the wards, accompanying on a melodeon, and join’d by lady-nurses of the other wards ...

They sang very well, mostly quaint old songs and declamatory hymns, to fitting tunes. Here, for instance:

“My days are swiftly gliding by,
And I a pilgrim stranger,
Would not detain them as they fly,
Those hours of toil and danger;
For O we stand on Jordan’s strand,
Our friends are passing over,
And just before, the shining shore
We may almost discover.

“We’ll gird our loins my brethern dear,
Our distant home discerning,
Our absent Lord has left us word,
Let every lamp be burning,
For O we stand on Jordan’s strand,
Our friends are passing over,
And just before, the shining shore
We may almost discover.”

(George Ellison is a writer who lives in Bryson City. He wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 287713, or at ellisongeorge@cs.com

 

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