Every spring, before Winter has altogether loosened its grip on the Alleghenies, and before its premises are officially opened to the public, Pricketts Fort plays host to hardcore re-enactors from across the country and even from north of the border. Mostly gentlemen of a certain age, decidedly seasoned & weather-beaten, and ranging from curmudgeonly to mellow, these are the tried & true, the bruised & battered, the authentic old veterans of the re-enactor world. Hopeless cases one & all.
It’s become a tradition here at Pricketts Fort, to open its gates at the end of winter and the start of a new season, to invite all the old bears of the woods, still groggy & grouchy from their long winter’s hibernation in the workaday world, crawling from their caves, doubtless with bad heads and feeling more than a little mean & misanthropic. Ordinarily loners for the most part, and still surly-tempered from a long winter of bucking modernity, they now find themselves unexpectedly united in common cause: to find a pleasant clearing at the edge of the forest and a few rays of sun to ease the ache of old joints.
I was under a rather misanthropic cloud myself, if truth be told, after a particularly unremunerative winter and a deepening of hard times for everyone I knew, and I was not at all certain how sociable I was prepared to be. But as it happened, wandering about this eighteenth-century encampment, with the contemporary world and all its ills at several removes, was just what the doctor ordered. And if the majority of latter-day longhunters were as old and crotchety and solitary as myself, there were a handful of younger men as well, and even a few staunch-hearted women and some youngin’s to boot.
Outsiders to this world must be under the impression that we are all basically just a bunch of nutters who enjoy playing dress-up. But it really isn’t anything like that. Being in the midst of long-term re-enactors is nothing like being in the midst of actors who have just emerged from a dressing room and are headed for the stage; nor is it like being in the midst of overgrown children who are carrying the game of pretend way too far…. Rather the feeling is like being among a group of refugees who have been scattered for a long dismal season and have finally, by myriad separate paths, found their way back home to where, at the deepest level, they most truly belong.
The modern world has long since lost its way and gone to the dogs, and we are all out there ourselves, barking with the rest of them, but by stepping back, taking a breath & taking stock, and measuring ourselves against the values of our forebears, we can see ourselves and our world with a longer perspective, and with a steadier bearing.
Re-enactors have a peculiar relationship to the past. Americans, on the whole, and especially when compared with other nations, have almost no memory. For most Americans, the past hardly exists at all, or if it does exist, it has no connection to the present. We are baffled by nations whose people retain a long memory, who keep stories and events and individuals alive generation after generation. Americans have little realization of, or appreciatiion for the fact that such long memories are the norm in many parts of the globe. A short memory, such as Americans have, is actually the exception.
What distinguishes the American re-enactor from ordinary Americans is a sense of the past as something still present, still surrounding us. It is a sense that is almost mystical, and probably no two individuals would describe it in quite the same way, but I am convinced that most of us in the living history world have experienced it in one way or another.
With many of us, it is a sense of the past which extends back into our earliest childhood — something we have always possessed and which has never left us — a sense that the present is nothing more than a thin film on an immense bottomless pool of the past.
We feel ourselves as creatures in two worlds simultaneously, each interfusing the other. At encampments such as this, we travel across the country by auto or by truck, and depart the same way. Yet in some cases — I am more than half-convinced — a few among us emerge ghost-like from out of a shadowy forest: a forest that extends without limit — not over distance — but back into time.
These are just a few preliminary thoughts about this year’s School of the Longhunter. More will follow. There were a number of exceptional speakers, and attendance was at full capacity. Pricketts Fort opens officially tomorrow, and I will be covering daily activities as they occur, but I plan to continue my saunter through the School of the Longhunter encampment in future posts to relate a number of conversations I had with other re-enactors, to stop by the tents and blankets of various frontier sutlers, to catch a glimpse or two of those elusive Shawnee, and to attend the lectures of certain notable authorities on frontier life. I hope you will join me.
Being a descendant of the Skaggs line of Longhunters, I find this facinating. I wish I could have been there!