Charleston's Green Flash

There is no more beautiful a battlefield on American soil than the gun emplacements at White Point Gardens. It is a holy place, an oak grove memorial, where acorns and obelisks are spread in scattered profusion, while old guns, long silent, remain registered on once adversarial Fort Sumter. The setting was consecrated as tribute to a time and a culture that drowned in the blood of seven hundred thousand countrymen. The war was born on this very spot. Headlines throughout the nation reported South Carolina’s secession from the Union. Two armies mobilized. On April 12th, 1861 the first shots of the war between the states echoed off the same homes that stand today. City dwellers watched in awe as a war unfolded while cheering their confederate comrades. So much hardship was to follow. The oldest of the oaks had watched far more than this first volley, signaling the final siege, the death of an agrarian society. They had lent a limb for the hanging of pirates Bonny Teach and Black Beard; smelt the acrid, burning gunpowder as ships of a young nation and the great British Empire engaged in the first sea duel of the Revolution. The trees had witnessed the boys leaving for Havana, and watched again as they left for “over there.” They saw those same boys’ children, grown to brave young soldiers sail toward Hitler’s Europe, and again to Korea. And they wept as yet another generation headed for Southeast Asia. If oaks could speak, they would surely remind the visitor of Plato’s macabre vision that "only the dead have seen the end of war." *** Dann loved the richness of the park’s history. Of the park benches between the Fort Sumter House and the first of the thirteen-inch mortars, he chose the one in front of a memorial to submariners “still on patrol,” men who gave their lives in the fifty-two lost submarines during World War II. He shrugged. No memorials for my generation. Our war was the conflict that should not have been. His mood was bitter, his thinking jumbled and confused. Like the sailor he wanted to navigate his thoughts toward a constructive reach. I’ll sit here. I'll meditate. Maybe get a grip on my thinking, come up with a plan, a direction. It would be so easy to get sick drunk, or get a solid case of the “poor-me’s” spreading it like a plague everywhere I go! No! No! No! No pity Party, here! No one will ever know I'm sick; no one; that’s my pledge. No one will ever know! Without realizing it Dann had tacked. He had come about. He was finding fair wind, turning his bow toward a positive direction. He looked out across the Ashley River. His mind flooded with a sea of images; his childhood, loves, wives, his children, his ventures, businesses, and his war. In the ebb and flood of thought the flotsam and jetsam of his years drifted by. Within these tides his day passed. Suddenly he became aware. The color of light had changed from bright and glaring to soft and mellow, the color of a Carolina peach picked ripe; deep yellows and reds painted the skin of the evening sky. The colors of the park were tinted in the soft tones that beckon photographers to rise early or work late. The sun was just above the oaks across the tidal avenue. The golden hue of marsh with its first signs of spring greening glistened against the deep pastels of a setting sun. The air was beginning to cool. Dann felt the chill. Shocked out of his dream world he wondered where five hours had gone. That's when he heard the clicking of heels on the pavement. “Excuse me, sir, could I get a light?”