Journey to Wilson's Creek

A Private Adventure

I did this as a test. I'd experienced strange things already and I was fairly sure I could do at least some of it
on my own. What I needed was a place where strange things happened, someplace that I hadn't been
before and didn't know much about. That turned out to be Wilson's Creek, the site of one of the first major
battles of the American Civil War and now a park and national monument near Springfield, Missouri. I
picked it because it was handy.

I picked Wilson's Creek without knowing much beyond the fact that it was there. I'd never been there and
I didn't know the history of the place. Old battlefields are often the sites of strange events, and Wilson's
Creek is no different. People who happen to be in the place at night have seen strange things, like a
phantom battalion of soldiers marching through a strange fog. Not phantoms in the sense that they are
ghostly--they seem real enough, dressed in uniform and carrying weapons, but they come out of nowhere
and disappear into the mist. It seemed like a good place to practice.

I'm not fond of war. I've seen enough of that to know it's a bad idea and not glorious. The last thing I
wanted was to wind up on the battlefield in the glory days. When things happen to me, they tend to affect
me in real ways, and I didn't want to get caught in a hail of musket balls. I wanted instead to poke around
the edges of the place, observe and learn, and get out again. If I did it right then I'd be able to verify what I
saw later on. If it didn't work, I'd come up with inaccurate information.

I could say that I built an extraordinary machine, based upon information given to me by extraterrestrial
beings, and made my journey into the past upon it. That would be true enough, the machine was built of
an extraordinary metal that was once one of the rarest alloys on Earth, reserved for the armour of kings
and more expensive than gold. And, some of the information about how to use it came from ET sources. It
just isn't a very fancy machine, and the techniques are simple mental procedures. The rare metal of the
framework for it is aluminum, one of today's most common and cheapest elements, and it was actually a
lawn recliner I bought at Walmart. I'd been reading that part of an old shamanic practice involved lying
down at a particular angle and going into a conscious trance, and the adjustable recliner seemed like a
good way to do that.

I don't feel good about what happened. A lot of what I've seen has been like that. It seems private,
something that shouldn't be regarded as entertainment. This isn't like watching the news on television, or
like seeing a movie about the Civil War. This was about real people, and maybe I shouldn't have gone
there. It's hard to explain why I feel that way. I guess I wouldn't want somebody coming into my life as a
sightseer.

I had a few preconceptions about the place. I knew the battle had been raging back and forth over a
cornfield, so I tried to go there. Right here, I can't explain how all that is done. It's a piece by piece process,
something that happens a little at a time. Information comes in through dreams, visions, and events that
don't fit either definition. The more you do the practice and work with the target you've chosen, the more
in tune with it you become, and if you keep trying then eventually you become more there than here, and
just have to hope you can find your way back again.

I had dreams that I couldn't shake or quite understand. I was walking down a dirt road towards a creek.
There were ruts in the road that reminded me of the old wagon tracks on what remained of the Trail of
Tears across the highway from where I grew up, back when I was just a kid. Not tire tracks, but ruts cut
deep in the muddy ground by narrow wheels. There was a spot up ahead where the road crossed the
stream and I could see a cabin of rough planks across the water at the edge of a field. The creek seemed like
it was full of debris, logs and branches maybe, I couldn't really tell what. It was solid enough I could walk
on them if I was careful, jumping from one rolling slick spot to another. Everything was eerie quiet and the
things I was walking on were gray and slimy. The cabin was empty, boarded up solid. When I tried to go
farther than that I couldn't. It was always time to go home.

That was the dream I had before I went to Wilson's Creek in my time machine. I didn't connect it with the
place at all, just filed it as one of those odd things that happens. The afternoon the real journey took place I
was doing my practice in the woodshop where I worked in those days, and suddenly there was a bright
yellow glow around me that I could see through my closed eyelids. It engulfed everything around me and I
lost all sense of place and self for a few moments. Then the glow went away and I sat up and opened my
eyes. I wasn't where I had been when I sat down in the machine.

I was sitting on top of a white laid stone archway at the bottom of a hollow, a steep valley between two
hills. It was about thirty feet long and built into the hillside. I'm interested in stonework and I saw right
away that whoever put this thing together was a master craftsman. It takes a lot of skill to make an arched
structure out of laid stone, and create something that won't crumble under it's own weight. I thought I
must be dreaming this, because the building was so out of place, sitting in a creek bottom away from
anything. I got up out of the lawn chair and looked around. There was a trail going up one hillside on the
other side of the creek from me. It wasn't a big creek, just a trickle. I jumped down and looked inside the
stone building and saw water several inches deep on the floor of it. That seemed to make no sense to me,
and I didn't go in.

Behind the building, on the steep slope of the rounded hill that stretched up and up above me, I saw what
looked like rows of corn about a foot and a half high. That also looked strange because in my time people
didn't plant on hills that steep and it was a strange place for corn. I found a dirt path leading up the side of
the field and followed that. At the end of it was what looked like a bunker, a hole dug in the hillside with
ramparts thrown up around it. I jumped down into it and surprised a wild eyed fellow in rough clothes,
with a dark beard and what looked like a long single shot rifle clutched in his hands. I said hi to him, and
he backed up against the dirt like he thought I might be about to kill him. I went past him into a dugout
cave that was mostly empty and then got hit by a wave of emotions that about knocked me down, like
suddenly I was tuned in to what was happening around me.

War has a sick feeling to it, or at least it does to me, all sadness and sorrow leading up to what happens
and maybe a few ecstatic moments thrown in if things go well for a minute or two. The feeling you get is
strong enough to taste in the back of your throat, and it hit me so hard I fell against the back of the dirt
cave. For a moment I didn't think I'd have the courage to even come out. When I did, my knees were
shaking. The bearded crazy guy gave me a rifle and some gear and I took it. He was looking up over the
edge of the rise to our right, at a treeline. Nothing was moving there as yet, but it had that feeling to it. I
thought about staying with the fellow because he had a pretty safe spot built, but instead I wished him
good luck and went back toward the Spring House and took the other trail.

At the top of that other hill there was a nice house with a cabin out back behind it. I went in and followed
some voices until I found a cellar and went down in it. Several women were there, wearing long dresses
and with rifles at the ready, and I made it clear I wasn't a threat. They seemed very nervous about
something, but also very strong and capable, like they didn't really need any men to help them. They
wanted to know if I had anything I could spare, and I didn't really, but I told them I'd see if I could come up
with something useful and if I did I'd be back. They thanked me, but they seemed more relieved I was
leaving than for the offer of unlikely help.

There was a road leading past the cabin, and I struck out along it, bent over low with the rifle in my
hands. I felt like I knew where I was going. It felt right, and I was grinning.

I don't remember all that happened. It's usually like that. I went into it not wanting to know the horrible
parts. I thought the cornfield was flat, where the battle was fought, but actually it was fought on Bloody
Hill, and the corn wasn't corn, it was sorghum, and back in those days before chemical fertilizer crops
didn't grow nearly so tall as they do now. I was wrong about a lot of things I expected to see.

The Spring House is still there, testimony to the skill of the men who built it, and there's still several inches
of good clean water on the floor of it although these days it probably isn't safe to drink without boiling.
Today nothing is. It looks as out of place as it ever did.

Up the hill at the Wilson Place, the farmhouse is boarded up now, the whole area is a park and the
buildings aren't in use. The cabin is still out back where the woman who bore Mr. Wilson's black children
used to live. Slavery was a terrible thing but I can at least hope there was some love in what happened
between them. Sometimes the good in people wins out, even if they can't show it the way they would
want to do. The smell of the blood and the bandages is gone--that cellar was the aid station for the
duration of the battle, and the women did what they could. I never ran across any mention of the
Confederate scout I ran across, the wild eyed and nervous guy in farmer's clothing who was keeping an
eye on the Union lines. A lot of it, I don't remember well, there's an echoing quality to it as though I'm
saying things I don't want to keep.

The cabin down by the big creek is still there, too, all boarded up now so nobody will go in and mess with
it, just like in the older times when the owner was trying to keep people out of his house. You can still walk
that road, though the wagon tracks have filled in a long time ago. After the battle was over, the creek was
so full of dead horses and mules that you could walk across it without getting your feet wet. Bloody, but
not water wet. That's the last of it I remembered, and then it was time to come home.

I know a little of what happened in between, from having read my history now. It was an early battle, and
not very well fought, with inexperienced generals and inexperienced troops, and at the end of it I'm sure
both sides thought they had lost even though history says the Confederate side won. It would have taken
awhile for them to figure that part out, since at the end of it both sides were pulling back. I've walked the
trails there, looking for things I might remember, and the one thing that does seem familiar to me was a
battery position occupied by Arkansas cannoneers, some of the people who turned the tide that day when
the Union cavalry charged and thought they'd rout the bunch of us. It takes practice to load a musket, but I
can lift a cannon ball as many times as you want me to.

You see, that's the difficult part of time travel. It isn't just television, or sight seeing. At first you're there
just a little bit, and then you're there completely, as you make that shift you lose connection with what's
here. I can read histories of Gettysburg and understand the emotions of the time, with a glimmer of what
happened there, but I wasn't there. Wilson's Creek was a minor battle historically, considering the course
of the war, but it wasn't minor for the people involved, and it isn't minor for me. People tell me now and
then, as though they know what they are talking about, that you shouldn't go into the past to change
history, or that if you do you can't. I can't argue either way on that. The right and the wrong of it is
beyond me. Those aren't the kinds of decisions you make when suddenly you're just there. Suddenly
you're a part of history, however it works out.

For me, Gettysburg is an historical event. Wilson's Creek is something I did.