>>>Challenge: Will
you find the link to a beloved icon of the 80s in this?<<<
Here’s
the somewhat late last account of my spring break experience. I’m deeply
ashamed of my negligent behaviour. And I’ll probably catch up with some more
posts.
 |
| Salem, MA |
Leaving Concord, NH, on March
7, Julia and I drove to Salem, MA, to check out some history and witches. You know—Nathaniel
Hawthorne, early colony, Salem Witch Trials of
1692—that stuff. We saw a pretty good documentary in the visitor center
which, I think, belongs to the Salem
Maritime National Historic Site. What I found pretty neat was to see the famous
custom
house that Nataniel
Hawthorne worked in, and in which The
Scarlet Letter’s frame narrative is set. (Didn’t see The
House of the Seven Gables, though). However, back to the witch trials! The
fact that people have been executed here in colonial times might today be the
most relevant factor of the town’s economy. We were told that certain witch
museums in Salem are more concerned with entertainment than history. So, a
serious and cruel historical event like the Salem Witch Trials is the reason
for which tourists (including the both of us) come to town and might then enjoy
getting their fortunes told by a psychic, or shopping in a witchcraft store, or
buying a small witch riding a broom to hang onto their cars’ rear view mirrors.
Julia and I didn’t do those things, but maybe you get my point…In telling our
histories, we often tend to heavily commercialize them. I became very aware of
that in Salem, but it’s true for countless other places. When these histories
are histories of suffering, intolerance, and persecution, I think it becomes
problematical. To make a living by turning the rope into a keychain…I’ll
keep thinking about that. If you are ever close by, visit Salem. It’s worth it,
and maybe you’ll feel different than I did.
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| New England Holocaust Memorial |
After Salem, we returned our
rental car and visited Boston. One afternoon is too little time to seriously
explore the city’s incredible amount of history, but we saw some interesting
sights, churches and monuments. They’re everywhere. Here, the balance between
telling actual history and marketing it seemed a bit more in favor of what
actually happened. Boston also is home to the very impressive New England
Holocaust Memorial. It’s basically a granite footpath with quotes and horrible
historical numbers carved along the sides. But you also have to walk through
six glass chambers (they are actually towers, felt kinda constrictive, though). And in writing 'glass chambers' I
first realize how horribly close the written word brings me to what these
things symbolize. You had to walk through a constantly emanating steam in these
chambers. A somehow brilliantly strange quality of this monument is that it can
shock you about your own behavior. Some people mistook the memorial for an art object
without any historical reference when they took photos of their friends
standing in front of it smiling, thumbs up, before they actually approached it
and realized what horrors it commemorates.
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| Boston at Night |
The next day, after saying
good bye to Julia and Nicole (who would spend the week around Boston and NYC with
Julia), I had to fly back to Columbus, OH. Getting there wasn’t too much of a hassle although my
flight from Philly to Columbus was delayed because the crew was late (probably
hangin’ out in a bar). But figuring out how to get from Columbus to Athens had
given me a good amount of stress earlier because the couple of options I had
had had not worked out (is that grammatically correct? I wanna risk it. Dear
prospective employers, please notice my courage!). Luckily, however, so many OU
students are wearing OU attire that I was able to identify two groups of people
at the Philly airport as Bobcats. And the second group did actually drive back
to Athens, and they still had a seat in their car. I was very very grateful for
that. They might have prevented me from a night at the airport. But after the 1,600
miles that Julia and I had driven that week, this one-hour drive felt like an
eternity. I needed a shower and my bed to get ready for the upcoming week.
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