Blog 393 – 09.03.2016

Some time back I was in my home town, Chattanooga, Tennessee, with my family for a reunion with friends and former classmates. As was my custom at that time I had a twenty inch foldaway bike in the trunk of the car that I enjoyed riding wherever I could but I never at least before that trip thought of that bike as a time machine.

I have been fascinated with time travel since I first saw George Pal’s masterful film The Time Machine starring Rod Taylor in the early sixties. I have read many books and seen many movies with time travel as the theme. I even told my son when he was a boy that if he outlives me, and that is the hope of all loving parents, to come visit me in his past. I am always on the look out for an older version of my son and hey if it only serves to remind me to treat every man I meet as if he might be my beloved boy that is a good thing.

But back to my story about my own Time Machine.  We were staying at a motel near the foot of Lookout Mountain so I decided to get up early and ride my bike up the mountain to Point Park. It is a Civil War Memorial National Park. It is complete with canon and a small museum with a tremendous view of the Moccasin Bend of the Tennessee River. For a long time I thought of it as the most beautiful place on earth but I have seen many other beautiful places to rival it since I left my beloved Chattanooga to venture out into the wide world.

So up the mountain I rode before daybreak. In a couple of places the grade was so steep that I had to get off and push the bike. It took me about an hour and half to get to Point Park. It was closed, of course, at that hour but I stole past the gate and pushed my bike around the memorials at the summit. The ride down the mountain only took about twenty minutes. I was flying. Anything over twenty miles an hours on a bike seems much faster. At one point I even considered what to do if my brakes failed – drag my feet, slow the bike as much as possible and leap into the ditch away from the yawning valley below. Pretty exciting stuff. I was pumped after that long, fast coast down the mountain so I decided to ride over to Rossville Boulevard and if I still had it in me south to Chickamauga Battlefield, another famous Civil War National Park.

As I got close to the park the sky got lighter and there was a mist coming up from the ground and for a moment my mind wandered back to that fateful morning before the battle began. I thought it must have looked and felt just like that. Ahead of me on the side of the road which was hidden by the mist I saw two figures walking. One was a young boy maybe twelve or thirteen, the other an older man perhaps his father. They were wearing homespun and carrying muskets. For a moment I thought I had traveled back in time. As I got close to them I yelled, “Give ’em hell, boys.” They answered with a Rebel Yell right out of the pages of history. I rode on and about a half a mile further I saw a whole platoon of men dressed like the first two also armed with muskets and marching to the battle line. I greeted them too with, “Give ’em hell, boys!” And received back a much louder Rebel yell with cheers. These were, needless to say, re-enactors staging a mock battle. For a brief instant I was back there and wept for my brothers on both sides of the battle line.

Many people think time travel is impossible and that even if you could travel in time you could not change anything for fear of as Doc Brown says in Back To The Future, “Disrupting the time/space continuum.” But I disagree with Doc. Disrupting the time/space continuum is what life is all about. I think we are all adventurers in Space and Time. And every decision we make changes our future. We can even rewrite the past by remembering it and seeing it in a new light. Often people feel forever bound by some traumatic event in their past which is why for a long time physiatrists have believed taking people back to those past events and reinterpreting them releases people from the ghosts of the past. This is your story and you are the author, rewrite it. Today is all there is, rewrite the past if it bothers you and write a better future but by all means enjoy today, you time traveler you.

Your friend and fellow traveler,
David White