Visitor's Views Archive

The Alamo, San Antonio, Texas

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Legacy
Published: April 27, 2009Posted in: Visitor's ViewsTags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

by Russell Dickerson

alamoIt seems like each culture has a story of a battle where “few fought against many.” From my perspective, living here in the western U.S., perhaps the most famous battle took place at the Alamo in 1836.

On a recent trip to San Antonio, Texas, I had the chance to visit the Alamo. Having seen various films and television shows about the battle, and reading books like The Breach by Brian Kaufman that recreate in vivid detail the huge numbers of men involved in the battle, I had a sense of wonder about visiting the site.

I had so many grandiose visions of what I’d see once I arrived—huge fields with wave after wave of attackers, the defenders fighting from all sides down to the last man. So, walking up from San Antonio’s beautiful River Walk, I reached the top of the stairs to behold the great Alamo.

I saw a hall of mirrors, several tourist attractions (Haunted Attraction! World Records!), hotels, and tourist shops. To say that took the wind out of the sails would be an understatement.

Now, granted, the bar was pretty high in my imagination, so there’s a certain sense of setting myself up for failure. But this was just so…underwhelming.

Shaking off the feeling of being at a theme park, I walked across to the Alamo itself. I stopped in front of the main doors and, after snapping the typical tourist shots with my camera, went inside the great doors.

As I entered the building and was greeted by a smiling interpreter just inside, my feelings about the Alamo (across the street it was still flashing “Come see the Hall of Mirrors!”) began to soften a bit. I didn’t get the sense of moving back in time, but I did get a sense of the quiet in the building. Especially compared to the hustle and bustle of downtown San Antonio, the interior of the main building was very subdued.

After walking through the various rooms, listening as I walked to what the interpreters were saying to others, I realized that the quiet atmosphere reflected a sort of reverence to what had happened there. Despite often seeing tourists that are loud or rude at other sites, inside the building, everyone was quiet, reserved, and respectful. That was due largely to the staff on site, who spoke in quiet tones to the people inside, setting a reserved example for those around them.

Leaving the main building, I walked around the courtyard. There were more people out in the courtyard, but somehow inside the courtyard was quieter than in front of the building. The immaculately kept grounds give a sense of peace to a place that has seen the horrors of war. In the middle of a city as large as San Antonio, to have a place of quiet peace is a feat in itself. Outside the walls flowed the typical tourists, but inside they were a much calmer, more respectful group.

The Alamo is a dichotomy of a historical site in modern times. It has the advantages and disadvantages of being in the center of a major metropolitan area. It is an icon to America, and must somehow serve both the millions of tourists that visit each year and also pay reverence to the men who gave their lives for freedom. I don’t imagine that’s an easy balance to maintain.

What I took away from the Alamo is a sense that the site fights its own battle of the few against the many. The Alamo is completely surrounded by modern life and yet, within the walls, has managed to survive with its own freedom and peace intact.

Russell Dickerson is the creative technologies director for the National Association for Interpretation.

A Moment Frozen in Time: DeSoto National Wildlife Refuge, Missouri Valley, Iowa

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Legacy
Published: February 21, 2009Posted in: Visitor's ViewsTags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

by Betty Mulcahy

Photo by Randy Mays

Photo by Randy Mays

The chugging of a steam engine and the whistle of a steamboat lure visitors to a glance at the past, when river travel helped settle the West while also impacting the environment and wildlife habitats. Many national wildlife refuges protect wildlife and habitat along rivers, but one harbors cargo retrieved from the Bertrand, a riverboat that didn’t survive the treacherous journey hauling supplies up the Missouri River in the mid-1800s.

After striking a submerged log 20 miles north of Omaha, Nebraska, on April 1, 1865, the steamboat Bertrand sank into the Missouri River and settled to the muddy bottom, taking with it a rumored fortune in whiskey, gold, and flasks of mercury. Like many other riverboats at that time, the Bertrand left St. Louis, Missouri, loaded with cargo to supply Montana goldfields. Other riverboats failed to complete their journeys as well, but the Bertrand was resurrected in 1968, when Sam Corbino and Jesse Pursell located and salvaged its remains on DeSoto National Wildlife Refuge.

For treasure hunters, cargo retrieved from this wreck proved disappointing. Divers in 1865 removed the great valuables folklore had described, leaving common goods of little interest to those seeking fortunes. Required to relinquish artifacts located on government property, the salvagers surrendered Bertrand’s cargo to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to be preserved in an exhibit at the refuge.

While treasure eluded its hunters, real treasure proved to be the necessities that reveal life in the gold camps. Tools, clothing, food, and other equipment provide researchers a glimpse into 19th-century life. But unexpected luxuries also recovered from the Bertrand hint at extravagance not usually associated with rigorous frontier living. Who could have guessed that prospectors and settlers would crave and demand olive oil, mustard, French champagne, bottles of cherries and peaches, or new-fangled cans of lemonade and instant coffee? And few would suspect that the variety of clothing in its cargo included business suits and fancy jackets, not merely work clothes.

At DeSoto National Wildlife Refuge, a short film recounts the excitement of the discovery and excavation that produced over 500,000 artifacts. Then, as if stepping across the deck of the boat, visitors walk over plank flooring toward the exhibit to enter the past. They pause to allow their eyes to adjust to dim lighting that not only protects the collection, but also reflects upon artifacts that survived entombed in mud for over 100 years.

A large model of the Bertrand introduces the display. Progressing through the exhibit, visitors experience a moment frozen in time as they view recovered objects through a protective glass wall. Of the many shovels, shoes, and other items that include even a child’s chalkboard, perhaps the glass bottles capture the most attention. Collectors gasp at the elaborate designs on these once commonplace containers. The variety of sizes and shapes awe many who long to possess such antiques.

But at what expense to wildlife did riverboats and expansion of the West contribute? Workmen felled trees to fuel steamboats, boat wrecks fouled the water, and sparks from smokestacks ignited fires, all of which altered the landscape. Little aware of consequences, farmers and miners plowed and polluted habitats, creating new environments unsuitable for native species. DeSoto National Wildlife Refuge not only presents the controversy of both sides in its Bertrand exhibit, but, like other national wildlife refuges, restores, improves, and maintains wildlife habitat throughout its 8,000 acres.

As expressed in the exhibit, “Steamboats were the first to deliver the ax, the pick, and the plow to this area—three tools that would forever alter the face of the West.”

Betty Mulcahy and her husband Chuck are full-time RVers who volunteer at national wildlife refuges as naturalists. She has been published in Escapees Magazine, InMotion Magazine, Refuge Update, Fish & Wildlife News, and other publications.

Hartley Nature Center, Duluth, Minnesota

By
Legacy
Published: December 20, 2008Posted in: Visitor's ViewsTags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

by Sonya Welter

Photo by Sonya Welter

Photo by Sonya Welter

Most recently, this spot was an overgrown field, slowly filling with invasive tansy and buckthorn. Before that, pastureland for the dairy herd at the old Allendale farm occupied this land during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And before that, it was just another chunk of the mixed hardwood and pine forest that covered most of northern Minnesota in the presettlement era. Now it houses Hartley Nature Center, a state-of-the-art building that is a model of sustainability, and the surrounding Hartley Park, a 660-acre oasis of wilderness smack dab in the middle of the city of Duluth.

Today, it is a glorious spring day, sunny for the first time in over a week, and my friend Chris and I have come to Hartley with a few hours to spend in the park before heading back to the nature center for an Audubon-sponsored program. Park volunteers have built some new boardwalks over the marshier bits of Tischer Creek, so we take a little walk to see what we can see. Insect life has started to buzz awake in the sudden warmth of this late May day, and the warblers are having a feast: yellow-rumps are flycatching in the air, and Cape Mays and black-and-whites nose around in the leaves and bark for tasty spiders and bugs. Red-winged blackbirds and swamp sparrows sing from the cattails, and young boys are fishing in the pond, their bicycles haphazardly piled next to the dock. Every green thing has exploded in fresh leaves, and marsh marigolds are just starting to bloom. The trails are still muddy and our pant cuffs are getting stained with red clay, but it’s the sort of day where you want to keep going, just to see what’s happening around the next bend in the trail, and then the next one, and the one after that.

Back at the nature center, the solar panels are sucking up the sunshine power and the geothermal coils underground are busy absorbing the heat of the day to help keep the building warm after the sun goes down. Nearly every part of the building contains some recycled content, from the paint to the carpet to the roof shingles, and new materials were produced or harvested sustainably. We record our warblers in the communal “Recent Sightings” notebook and walk through the nature center, still warm and sunny even as dusk is approaching. Photos and artifacts of the park’s history line the walls; there are pictures of cows grazing perhaps exactly where we’re standing right now, and vegetables growing in what has since become a cattail marsh after beavers dammed the creek and flooded the fields. We also say hello to the rescued, rehabbed, but unrereleasable painted turtle and snapping turtle basking in their separate tanks.

It’s hard to decide what to do tonight. At the nature center, author and field biologist Kurt Mead is giving a presentation on local dragonflies and damselflies, but there is also a guided hike through the park looking for ephemeral spring wildflowers. Kurt is a charming and charismatic speaker, so we head into the classroom—there will be another wildflower walk next month.

Sonya Welter is a freelance writer living in Duluth, Minnesota. She blogs at http://plainlivingandhighthinking .blogspot.com. For more information on the Hartley Nature Center, please visit www.hartleynature.org.

Captain John Smith Chesapeake National Historic Trail

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Legacy
Published: October 23, 2008Posted in: Visitor's ViewsTags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

by Andy Bystrom

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Courtesy Sultana Projects

For 120 days last summer, 11 crewmembers and I experienced the Chesapeake Bay and its major tributaries in a way that hasn’t been attempted in 400 years. By rowing and sailing 1,500 miles in a slow, silent, 17th-century-style, 28-foot open boat, or shallop, we had the fortune of seeing the bay in a very intimate way. We explored roughly half of the trail’s 3,000 miles while inaugurating the Captain John Smith Chesapeake National Historic Trail, the nation’s first all-water national trail.

In the summer of 1608, Captain John Smith and his crew of 14 stepped off the edge of their maps, becoming the first Europeans to explore this estuary. They searched for gold, silver, and the elusive North-West Passage to China, and sought to better understand the complex Native American civilization, a culture that had been in place for thousands of years prior to the Europeans’ arrival.  And while they found no trace of precious metals or the apocryphal waterway to China, Smith’s writings give us an unprecedented insight into the bay’s unspoiled natural and cultural environment.

The water trail marks a bold new path for conservation, and it rekindles excitement for the history of the Chesapeake. It’s a tool that encourages people to take pride in their environment and to get out and explore and protect the water and shorelines that ultimately improve the quality of life in this region.

While it’s unlikely the watershed will ever regain the unspoiled equilibrium that Smith experienced, we found that opportunities abound to lose oneself in the history of this body of water.

Though modern development has claimed much of the watershed, we were amazed by the beautiful, underdeveloped places that the water trail passes through. Along the Potomac River, a setting I assumed would be choked from its mouth to the fall line by Washington D.C.’s sprawling suburbs, we experienced portions of unspoiled shorelines. Birds hunted and fed their young with fish caught from the surrounding waters. Deer wandered out of the forested shorelines for a cool drink along the river’s edge. At the Potomac’s mouth, cow nose rays glided beside us in small schools, their fin tips cutting the water’s surface. Further south at the mouth of the Rappahannock River in Virginia, schools of curious dolphins swam beside our small wooden boat.  Their intelligence was palpable.

Along these same tributaries we drifted by sewage treatment plants and sailed under highway bridges.  The contrast between rolling, green shorelines and exploding development was a constant reminder to us of how the watershed is changing.

Our 120-day exploration of the Chesapeake Bay along the trail took us from Jamestown, the first permanent settlement in this country, through patches of pristine underwater grass beds and fish habitat, into Baltimore’s bustling Inner Harbor, to out-of-the-way fishing villages, through schools of marine life, into Native American villages, and back to the slippery banks where we began. The trail is poised to create recreational opportunities and encourage bay stewardship and education. It’s waiting to be explored in whatever way one chooses—by kayak, by car, in an air-conditioned yacht, or whatever rhythm fits the modern day explorer in you. There is something for everyone along this trail, a trail that marks the true beginnings of our culture in this New World.

***

Andy Bystrom works for Pretoma, a sustainable fishing nonprofit in Costa Rica, and is pursuing a master’s degree in natural resource management. Not a day goes by he doesn’t relive last summer’s expedition. For more information about the water trail visit www.nps.gov/cajo.

The Shipwreck Museum, Paradise, Michigan

By
Legacy
Published: August 23, 2008Posted in: Visitor's ViewsTags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

by Larry Tritten

vv-shipwreck_museumImageLake Superior is 350 miles long with a breadth of 160 miles. It is large enough in surface area and volume to contain all the other Great Lakes plus three more the size of Lake Erie. On Lake Superior’s coast, the Shipwreck Museum consists of eight historic structures at the site of the Whitefish Point Light Station, the oldest working light station on Lake Superior.

There are hundreds of lighthouses on the Great Lakes and 6,000 shipwrecks in the lakes, figures that give an idea of how dangerous navigation on the lakes is because of frequent nasty storms that make their waters almost as threatening as the open ocean.

The Shipwreck Museum addresses shipwrecks, the lighthouse service dedicated to trying to prevent them, and the lifesaving service offering assistance. The Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society has spent 20 years restoring the site to the way it looked in the early 20th century before it fell into disrepair and was abandoned by the U.S. Coast Guard in 1970. The original 1849 stone tower lighthouse could not endure the elements of Lake Superior’s coastline and was replaced in 1861. The society also restored the 1861 lightkeeper’s quarters, 1923 lookout tower, 1937 fog signal building, 1923 U.S. Coast Guard crews quarters building, and the 1923 surfboat house. The latter is the museum’s newest exhibit and features full-size functional replicas of a beach cart and 26-foot Beebe-McClellan surfboat used by the U.S. Lifesaving Service, the “storm warriors” whose brave motto was, “You have to go out, but you don’t have to come back.”

Once, artifacts found by scuba divers like Tom Farnquist, executive director of the Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society, ended up in private collections. But in 1978, a small group of teachers, divers, and historians organized to find a home for such artifacts and tell the stories of the 30,000 people who have died in Great Lakes shipwrecks.

The museum’s displays tell those stories in a chronological sequence, from Native Americans and early French trappers to the days of the first recorded shipwrecks. The first known shipwreck was the Griffon, built by the French explorer Rene-Robert Cavalier, Sieur de La Salle, and which disappeared in Lake Michigan in 1679. Displays include artifacts from the Niagara, the Comet, the John M. Osborn, the Vienna, the Samuel Mather, and other ships lost along Lake Superior’s “Shipwreck Coast.” Studying the exhibits, one listens to the sound of fog horns, the cries of sea gulls, and the melancholy lyrics of Gordon Lightfoot’s song, “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” which tells the story of the most famous Great Lakes shipwreck. The bell of the Edmund Fitzgerald, salvaged by divers at the request of the surviving families, stands at the entrance of the museum. The Fitzgerald was a 729-foot ore carrier that sank in a fierce winter storm in 1975 with the loss of its 29-man crew. A 20-minute video tells the dramatic story of the Fitzgerald and the raising of the bell.

In the center of the museum’s gallery stands a nine-foot-diameter, 3,500-pound Second Order Fresnel lens of the White Shoal Light in Lake Michigan, its 344 separate leaded crystal prisms giving testimony to the extreme radiance designed to beckon ships from a 16-mile distance.

The museum offers a unique experience for the visitor who wants to truly capture a sense of history: overnight accommodations. One can stay in restored 1923 Coast Guard lifeboat stations crews quarters, which also has a library stocked with books and videos on Great Lakes shipwrecks.

Nearby, glass-bottom boat tours are the perfect way to complement the museum experience. I got an unexpected dramatic bonus on the tour I took in the form of a spectacular storm that seemed to appear spontaneously and chased us back to shore with bolts of flashing lightning, a graphic example of why some ships are on the bottoms of the Great Lakes.

***

Larry Tritten is a freelance writer who ives in San Francisco. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, and Reader’s Digest, among other publications.