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East Coast Death & Misery TourJuly 23rd to 27th, 1997. |
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I left Providence Wednesday night and drove to Cherry Hill, NJ, where I stayed the night with my Aunt & Uncle. On Thursday I went into Philly with my Aunt and my cousin, Erica. We first visited the Mutter Museum, attached to the Philadelphia College of Physicians. There we saw a special exhibit on Medicine & The Presidency where we found out about all the presidents' illnesses. We also saw a small permanent exhibit on the history of medicine in the U.S., including the evolution of the x-ray machine. Did you know that x-ray technicians used to use their own hands to test the strength of the x-rays? It's true. As you may imagine, repeated exposure led to some pretty nasty dermatological problems. Anyway, the most interesting part, and what we had really come to see, was the collection of medical curiosities -- titillating for laymen, educational for medical students. These included the skeletons of a baby born with one head and two bodies, a dwarf, a 7 foot, 7 inch giant, and people who had died with various ailments of the bones. The corpse of an overweight woman which had turned into soap after burial was pretty gruesome. We also saw the preserved, connected liver and a plaster cast of the upper, connected torsos of famous Siamese twins Chang & Eng. I spent some amount of time poring over a large, catalogued collection of "Objects Swallowed or Inhaled", finding that pins, buttons and desiccated bits of unidentifiable food predominated. One large glass case contained a collection of 139 skulls amassed by a 19th century researcher of Phrenology (the study of the link between skull structure and race, class and morality). There were also the obligatory deformed fetuses in jars, plus dozens of wax representations of diseases of the eye, a small exhibit on the different kinds of Siamese twins, and the stuffed large intestine of a man which had grown to the size of one of those giant teddy bears you can win at the carnival. Unfortunately, no photography was allowed in the museum, and the giftshop was almost nonexistent (damn, no postcards!). Disappointed as well that the famous Mutter calendar had been discontinued, I bought a plastic skeleton puzzle instead. We went from the Mutter straight to the Eastern State Penitentiary a few blocks north. Built in the early eighteen-hundreds, it represented a radical shift away from previous incarcerative practices and provided the model for the modern prison. It was designed like a monastery -- each one-man cell had a high, barrel-shaped ceiling, a single skylight and a private exercise yard. This prison had rudimentary flush toilets before even the White House. Another innovation was the spoke design, wherein all cell blocks were within line of sight of the guardroom at the central hub. Overcrowding eventually forced the abandonment of the one-prisoner/one-cell ideal, and the prison became more like the sort we know of today. Al Capone spend eight months there in the thirties -- you can bet he had his own room. Eastern State was in use until 1970, when it was closed. Now for $7 ($5 if you have AAA) you can tour the grounds, as long as you sign a waiver, releasing the city of Philadelphia from liability, and wear a hard hat. The day we were there one section of the prison was being used for an art exhibit examining the lives of women behind bars. The prison was cool, but I think I was most impressed by the portable toilets near the beginning of the tour. Across their doors was emblazoned the brand name "Potty Queen". Thursday night I went with Erica to her recently-purchased home in Spring City, PA. Friday, Erica and I went to nearby Valley Forge National Park. We didn't stay long because we had to meet her husband, but we checked out the visitor center, (which was overrun with Boy Scouts), where we watched a short film on the time that the Continental Army spent quartered at Valley Forge. More than three thousand men died during the winter of 1777-78 as a result of frostbite, starvation and disease. Oh yeah, and dysentery -- lots of dysentery. Leaving the visitor center, we took a quick drive around the grounds before going to meet Erica's husband for a hearty and nutritious lunch which was mostly free from harmful bacteria and parasites. Erica decided she wanted to come with me on the rest of my trip because, while prior to moving to PA she had lived for some time within shouting distance of DC, she had never visited the Holocaust Museum. So we drove to Frederick, MD, to stay with my friend Keith. Erica and Keith and I caught the Metro into DC the next day, Saturday. We got tickets for the Holocaust Museum and checked out the special exhibit, "The Nazi Olympics: Berlin 1936." Then, since our entry time to the actual museum was not until the afternoon, we popped over to the Museum of American History to kill time. We saw Fonzi's leather jacket and Edith & Archie Bunker's chairs. We also dawdled through an exhibit on The Information Age. I was tickled by the fact that out of the nine or ten personal computers they had on display at the end, I had owned three of them. I saw the first Apple computer -- it had a case made of wood with the word "Apple" cut out with a jigsaw. After a crappy lunch in the basement of the History Museum we returned to the Holocaust Museum at the time designated on our tickets. We went up the elevators and got off into the darkest, most crowded, and quietest museum I've ever been in. (Yes, I've actually been in quieter museums, but in those cases I was one of five people in the building at the time). We saw pictures, read words, watched footage, toted up numbers, walked through a freight car, touched barracks bunks, saw the shoes, saw the glasses, saw the hair, saw the operating table. When we came out into the light three hours later Keith and Erica seemed reluctant to talk about it. They were a bit stunned. Truth be told, I guess I wasn't prepared to talk about it right then either. We discussed it much later that evening, in the car on the way home. Keith had found it too claustrophobic. He finished a full hour before Erica and I -- I guess because he couldn't deal with the crush of humanity. I argued that that was an intrinsic part of the experience. At least Keith was able to leave of his own free will. Erica said that the constant breakdown of numbers that we saw brought the fact of the Holocaust into much clearer focus for her. Instead of the unfathomable six million figure we've heard all our lives, we read about 1,300 from this town, 852 from that town, 67,000 confined to this ghetto, etc. The numbers were smaller, yet seemed unending. It takes only a second to say, "six million," but you could spend all days reading the numbers off the plaques in the Holocaust Museum. In any case, I'd recommend it highly. It was extremely well done. So anyway, we left the Museum and walked around the Tidal Pool to the new FDR Memorial. I hadn't realized it was so big. It actually covers several acres, with many quotes, and waterfalls and pools and big blocks of stone. FDR's dog's nose had already been rubbed shiny by the burnishing action of uncounted sweaty tourist hands. By the way, just in case you weren't aware of it, Washington, DC in the middle of July is a hot, muggy hellhole. The place was built on a swamp and it feels like it. By this time it was early evening. We were hot and sweaty and our feet hurt. I wanted to continue on to the Lincoln and Vietnam Memorials, but they were in the opposite direction from the Metro station, and I was willing to concede that I might drop dead at any moment from exhaustion. So we took the Metro into Georgetown, found a restaurant called Marshall's Bar & Grill, and had some yummy food. Sated, we left there, caught the Metro back to the car and returned to Frederick by 10:30. We got up early the next morning, Sunday, and followed Keith to Antietam Battlefield, where he volunteers a few days a month giving tours. Being the kind friend that he is, he gave us our own, personal tour. The day on which the Battle of Antietam took place, September 17, 1862, is said to be the single bloodiest day in U.S. history. 23,000 casualties were sustained between sunrise and sunset. To put that into some sort of perspective, approximately 56,000 American troops died during the entire 8-year U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. Most of the casualties at Antietam happened because mistakes, both small and huge, were made by the leadership of both sides. Six generals lost their lives that day, three Union and three Confederate. Keith was a History major in college, and for some reason he never went farther than a Bachelor's degree, but his grasp of military strategy, his memory of detail, and his enthusiasm for his subject make me wonder why he doesn't do this for a living. We finished up there around one, said good-bye to Keith, and drove back to Spring City, where I jumped into Erica's new pool. It felt damn good. I said good-bye to Erica and her husband, drove back to RI and arrived home by 11 PM. I immediately fell into bed and slept peacefully, with no bad dreams.
original 19970728 revised 19990422 |