Wynn Worlds

Vagabond Photographer, full-timer in a tiny trailer, exploring beauty in all its forms

Pennsylvania

Flight 93 National Memorial

Flight 93 National Memorial

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On a clear September day in 2001, Flight 93 took off from Newark, New Jersey at 8:42 AM ET, en route to San Francisco. It would never arrive there, instead crashing into a field in southern Pennsylvania at 10:03 AM. 

The flight path of Flight 93

Forty people onboard that plane fought terrorist for control, preventing it from crashing into the US Capitol in Washington DC. Seven crew members, 33 passengers, each of them a hero for choosing to fight back and ultimately die rather than see their flight become the fourth that horrible day to crash into an American landmark. 

The Flight 93 Memorial is stark in its simplicity and contrasts. For those who want a quick visit, a walk along a concrete path provides a visual timeline of the three ill-fated flights that hit the World Trade Center buildings and the Pentagon. The path ends overlooking the memorial wall and the field where Flight 93 crashed, with a large boulder marking the exact point of impact. 

Directly in the middle of the field is the boulder.

I drove down to the memorial area, where your path parallels the long crater made by Flight 93. After 18 years, the field has closed up around the crash site. Green trees have grown tall again, and the grass grows wild and slightly yellowed by the heat of a July morning. I knew the boulder was there, but it was hard to find until it wasn’t. There, far from the path, framed by the line of trees, that’s where Flight 93 ended that day. 

At the memorial site, a series of tall marble slabs, each one engraved with a name, stands in a long line, symbolizing the unity of the crew and passengers that day as they made the decision to fight back. 

The line focuses attention on a wooden gate at one end. Stand at the gate and you can see a path cleanly mowed to the boulder in the field. I stood there, looking through the gate at the boulder and then back at the long line of names etched on marble, and I felt the courage of those people. 

I took Boeing 757 flights from Boston to California all the time back in the day, back in those days. I knew people like those on Flight 93: business travelers, someone going home, a family setting out on a trip. They were ordinary people on Flight 93 when it left Newark that morning, expecting to be in San Francisco before lunchtime, thoughts of to-do lists, friends, and meetings crowding their heads as the plane taxied down the runway. 81 minutes later, they were all dead.

Items left by visitors to the memorial.

I stood there a long time, thinking how lives can change in an instant. And how heroes are born by courage in action. 

Cards that visitors can leave expressing how they feel. Mine is in this photo.

In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.

Theodore Roosevelt

Southern Tour: Gettysburg Redux

Southern Tour: Gettysburg Redux

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My first time at Gettysburg was a quick day trip in 90 degrees of heat and humidity, left hand in a cast, on my way to somewhere else. I hadn’t really known what to expect of the place. I was pretty thin on the history of the Civil War and of this battle in particular. One of my nephews had been big on Civil War dioramas in his youth, and, honestly, that was my only reason for stopping by. I figured I’d snap a few pics to text to him, get a postcard or two.

After two hours that day, I realized I needed to give this place way more time and respect in order to understand the magnitude of the battle fought here, the thousands of soldiers who died here, and the lasting impact it had on the Civil War.

Union Army: 3,155 dead. Confederate Army: 3,903 dead.

Last summer, it was time to go back to Gettysburg. Over the winter, I had read Killer Angels, a novel based on the real generals, soldiers, and events of Gettysburg. By the end of the book, the horror of cannonballs flying into formations of foot soldiers and the reality of hand-to-hand combat when bullets ran out had made the battles at Gettysburg real to me in a way my US history classes never had.

I arrived early this time, trying to beat the summer heat, which also meant I beat most of the crowds. Not many people actually walk the battlefield line, as it turns out, and with good reason: I was a sweaty mess after 90 minutes, but I also had a vivid sense of exactly how long the Union line was, from The Angle on the north end down to Round Top at the south end.

The two monuments on far right and far left show the Union line just below The Angle. That white dot in the distance, about 1/4 of the way from the right edge, is the Virginia monument, and it marks the center of the Confederate line. Now imagine all the space between that white dot and the two Union monuments filled with foot soldiers, officers on horseback, cannonballs flying from both sides, and the noise and smoke of battle. More than 160,000 soldiers fought at Gettysburg, the large majority of them right here.

From the flat open plain of the main battlefield, I headed south to Round Top. The image below is looking across the battle plain towards Round on the left.

The drive goes through forested land filled with monuments to fallen soldiers, Union and Confederate. Slowly following the winding road gave me plenty of time to think how hellish the fighting must have been: thickly forested hills and valleys, rocky ground and huge boulders, and an ever-changing, ever-charging line of battle.

From Round Top, the southern end of the fighting, I looped around to the Confederate line, looking across that same battlefield from the other side. It looks like a beautiful summer’s day in this image, but the monuments that line the sides of the road never let me forget for a moment what happened here across three days in July, 1863.

I went back again late in the day, when most of the tourists had long since headed back to RVs or hotel rooms and silence had descended on the fields. I could almost feel ghosts on the wind. I stood there for a long time, feeling the soft breeze and watching the clouds as twilight slid slowly across the sky.

I thought of how much things haven’t changed. Confederate flags still fly, statues of Lee and monuments to Confederate soldiers stand in places of honor at state capitols and small towns across the South. Divisions of race and class, immigrants and natives, obscenely rich and the desperately poor: we’re in the middle of a war, it seems, just not on a battlefield with cannonballs and muskets. How will it go? Where will it end? And what kind of country will America be then?

But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate—we cannot hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. 

Gettysburg Address
Abraham Lincoln

Lancaster

Lancaster

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If you’re looking for a place to hide out for a few weeks while seeing doctors and physical therapists, I have to admit you could do way worse than Lancaster, Pennsylvania. It’s a quiet place at first glance, and if you stick to the highways, you might not give it a second glance on your way to Philly or Pittsburgh or somewhere else. This post may convince you to stop over and stay a while.

The city itself is a mix of old and new, with architecture and eccentricity creating visual delights like this section of a downtown street.

There’s an old cemetery a few blocks away where patriots from the War of Independence are buried, graves carefully marked and maintained. Lancaster is a place that values its history.

When you venture out of the city a few miles, it’s all farmland, so lush and green that it’s like driving through a painting.

This is Amish country, so on any country road, you may meet a horse and buggy. You give them wide berth and pass when you can.

The horse-and-buggy traffic is so ubiquitous that Costco even has a covered shed where they can park while shopping! Even the Amish shop at Costco.

Speaking of covered things, there are a couple of covered bridges here, just to round out the whole experience. With a weight limit of 3 tons, I’d have to leave Breeze behind (my whole rig weighs in at 7,000 pounds). Lucky for me, my friend Larry was driving us around in his car. (The cover photo at the top of this post is actually the inside of the covered bridge.)

There are more tourist things to see in Intercourse. Yes, that is the name of the town. As a bonus, I caught a buggy in the shot of the town sign. There is a beautiful quilt store here, way out of my price range, but I loved looking. Across the street is one of the best quilting supply stores I’ve ever seen, and it made me want to get back to quilting (if only my left hand agreed with that crazy idea).

Farms, silos, corn, and tobacco: I’m surrounded by these things at my campground this week and I don’t mind it one bit.

I’ve spent a few weeks here, and it’s on my list for more in future. Consider putting it on your bucket list, too.

Be life long or short, its completeness depends on what it was lived for. 

Amish proverb

Longwood Gardens

Longwood Gardens

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There are few things I enjoy photographing than flowers these days, so a few hours at Longwood Gardens was a slice of pure heaven. It also marked the first time my left hand was strong enough to work with my favorite (and heaviest) camera, the Sony A7, since the accident on Memorial Day.

From the home of the Lenni Lenape tribe for generations to the farm of Quakers descended from William Penn that over two centuries became a tree-filled arboretum, this place has a long history. When logging interest threatened to level the trees in 1906, Pierre S. DuPont bought the land and began creating the gardens and fountains that a century later would captivate visitors throughout the seasons.

The conservatory features more than a dozen environments, from orchids to African Palms to southwestern US cacti. It’s an amazing place, a gardener’s idea of heaven.

I hope my images give you an idea of the breadth of the place, and also give you breathing room at the end of the workweek.

Flowers seem intended for the solace of ordinary humanity. 

John Ruskin

Gettysburg

Gettysburg

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I grew up in Southern California, thousands of miles and a century removed from the Civil War, so I wasn’t sure what to expect when I stopped at Gettysburg National Military Park last week. I knew I wanted to pay my respects at the National Cemetery there (my parents are buried in the National Cemetery in Riverside, CA) but other than that, I didn’t have an agenda. It turns out I didn’t have a clue what Gettysburg meant to my country, then or now.

I spent time today — Independence Day, and 154 years after the battle here ended — reading about the Civil War and the importance of Gettysburg.

The numbers involved in the three-day battle are horrific:

  • Union: 93,921 soldiers, with casualties of 23,055 soldiers (3,155 killed, 14,529 wounded, 5,365 captured or missing)
  • Confederacy: 71,699 soldiers, with casualties of 23,231 (4,708 killed, 12,693 wounded, 5,830 captured or missing).

Gettysburg became the most costly battle in US history. By the end of it, with both sides low on ammunition, they fought with rifles, bayonets, rocks and bare hands. As I stood in the hot July sun staring out at the fields where so many had fought and died, I was without words. I knew it was time for me to understand more about this place.

General Robert E. Lee’s Confederate Army was determined to break the Union by driving north through Pennsylvania. At Gettysburg, the Union army, under the command of Major General George G. Meade, held their position and after the bloody series of engagements here in July 1863, the Confederate forces retreated back to Virginia. They never got close to the Union states again. Lee’s invincibility in battle had been proven false, and while the war continued for two more years, Gettysburg was where the Union’s strategy and strength had re-energized their cause.

General Meade Memorial

Today, Gettysburg’s battlefields are peaceful open fields, where people walk to retrace the steps of Little Round Top, Cemetery Hill, Culp’s Hill, and Pickett’s Charge. In the cemetery, both named and unknowns are recognized, with some visitors searching for family, with rangers assisting and providing historical background.

I have only scratched the surface of Gettysburg’s importance, I know. For today, I will end with Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. Reading it at the place where he delivered it was overwhelming, both because of the past and where our country finds itself today, divided in different ways, facing an uncertain future.

Gettysburg Address Memorial

Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

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