From: msmorris@watsci.uwaterloo.ca (Mike Morris)
Subject: How I Spent My Summer Vacation
Organization: University of Waterloo
Date: Tue, 15 Sep 1992 20:07:49 GMT


                               Tuesday, the 15th of September, 1992

Hi y'all!

I managed to spend a couple of weeks away from here,
serendipitously missing a system upgrade while I was gone. I
had a small scare when I got back and `rn' elicited only an
`unknown command' response, but it turned out I had only to
re-customize my path and all is now well. Anyway, I thought
I'd tell you what (book-buying) I did on my summer vacation.

The itinerary was fairly unfocussed---plans to do a little of this
and a little of that---but we began by spending a few days with Martha's
sister in Churubusco, Indiana, on to a couple of days visiting
my family and attending a company board meeting in Indianapolis, then to
Lebanon Junction, Kentucky (south of L'uhvull) to attend a reunion of
Martha's vet-school clique.

I was going to give the Borders in Indy a miss this time through, but I
got to counting days that _A Forest of Kings_ was going to last
me, and I realized that I'd run out of reading on that thread
before I'd get back to Canada, so (I reasoned that) I needed to
acquire at least one last book on Columbus. At Borders I bought
  _The Conquest of Paradise_, Kirkpatrick Sale
as well as a few more volumes,
  _Whose Body?_, Dorothy L. Sayers
  _A Shropshire Lad_, A.E. Housman
  _The Kantletar_, compiled by Elias Lonnrot
  _Song of Solomon_, Toni Morrison
  _Beloved_, Toni Morrison
  _Mules and Men_, Zora Neale Hurston
  _Dust Tracks on a Road_, Zora Neale Hurston
  _Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and The Weir of Hermiston_, R.L. Stevenson
  _The Master of Ballantrae_, R.L. Stevenson
  _Kidnapped and Catriona_, R.L. Stevenson
  _Treasure Island_, R.L. Stevenson
  _Longshot_, Dick Francis
  _Thomas Gets Tricked and Other Stories_, based on ``The Railway Series''
                         by the Rev. W. Audry
  _The Adventures of Eros and Psyche_, I.M. Richardson, illustrated
                         by R. Baxter
  _Pegasus the Winged Horse_, C.J. Nader, illustrated by R. Baxter.
The last three are children's books, the Stevenson fills a gaping ecological
niche in our library, the Housman includes two poems which were left
out of the edition I had read earlier this year, and the Sayers is meant
to replace an earlier copy that Martha has been through (too) many times.
I promised her (and myself) I'd read some Sayers if I could only do it
with a book that wasn't going to fall apart on contact.

Our last day at Lebanon Junction we decided to drive on down to
Mammoth Cave. As has been the case every time I've stopped there,
all the really neat tours were sold out, so we settled on the 1/4-mile,
self-guided ``discovery'' walk in and out the main entrance and then a boat
ride on the Green River. This was probably just as well, because Xan
(our 2-year-old) thought the cave was neat, but he probably wouldn't
have been up to a longer hike. Anyway, Martha managed to buy
  _The Kids' Nature Book: 365 Indoor/Outdoor Activities and Experiences_,
                        by Susan Milord
at the park concession stand.

That left us with all of our visiting done and a hitherto un-planned-up
week in which to get home. We thought of trying to get to Okefenokee Swamp
or even Boston, but we finally decided any distance driving at all with
the kids (Helen is 7 months) wouldn't be much fun, so we took our time through
the Cumberland Gap over towards Charlottesville, Virginia. (We observed
a short silence in honour of Jeff Davis driving around Lexington.)

In Charlottesville on the night we arrived, we walked around ``The Lawn''
at the University of Virginia, admiring Thomas Jefferson's ``Academical
Village''. The next morning it was decided that I should go off on my
own in search of the American Express office to find traveller's checks,
since our U.S. cash was not going to hold out. Well, I'd already spotted
a bookstore near our hotel. The Book Gallery and Restaurant netted
  _The African Queen_, C.S. Forester
  _The Sign of the Seahorse_, Graeme Base
  _The Life Portraits of Thomas Jefferson_, Alfred L. Bush
  _The Academical Village: Thomas Jefferson's University_, Photography
             by Robert Llewellyn, essay by Douglas Day
  _Moll Flanders_, Daniel Defoe
  _Captain Singleton_, Daniel Defoe.
The Amex office turned out to be on a downtown street that has been
turned into a pedestrian mall. I think I passed maybe four bookstores
on the way to the office. But, I did not give in to temptation, did not turn
to the right or to the left---leastways until after I'd gotten the cash,
when I did allow myself this teensy excursion into The New Dominion
Book Shop (What could I do? It was just next door.) where I bought
  _Giles Goat-Boy_, John Barth
  _New Poems [1908]_, Rainer Maria Rilke
  _The Long Goodbye_, Raymond Chandler
  _The Georgics_, Claude Simon.
Well, I brought these (and a sheepish grin) back to the motel, whence we
departed for a visit to Monticello. Alexander behaved 
a perfect rat there, but we found
  _Jefferson's Monticello_, William Howard Adams
  _The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson_, Daniel J. Boorstin
  _Jefferson, Nationalism, and the Enlightenment_, Henry Steele Commager.
in the gift shop.

From there we drove up the Blue Ridge through Shenandoah National
Park, saw Skyline Caverns in Front Royal, and then curved back to the
west to come home via Pittsburgh. South of Pittsburgh, we spent a day
at Fort Necessity, seeing a reconstruction of George Washington's
makeshift French-and-Indian-War fort, visiting Braddock's Grave
and Jumonville Glen. 

This last is the site of a curious incident at the beginning of the
French and Indian War. France and England both had claimed the Ohio
valley. When Governor Dinwiddie of Virginia learned that the French
were building forts there, a young Washington was sent to bring a letter
to the French at Fort Le Boeuf ordering them out. The French quite politely
said ``No!'' and Dinwiddie sent men to the site of Pittsburgh to build
an English fort while Washington was to build a road through the wilderness. 
Well, the English got started but the French arrived in force and sent the
English off, burned down the English effort and built their own Fort
Duquesne. Washington's road got him to Great Meadows (site of Fort Necessity)
when he learned of a small French party nearby. Washington led a surprise
attack in which he killed or captured the twenty-odd French (one escaped)
and lost one man himself. It was his first bit of soldiering and he wrote
to his brother:
    I fortunately escaped without any wound, for the right wing,
    where I stood, was exposed to and received all the enemy's
    fire, and it was the part where the man was killed, and the
    rest wounded. I heard bullets whistle, and, believe me, there is
    something charming in the sound.
The skirmish was the first engagement of the world war that led not
only to Montcalm and Wolfe at the Plains of Abraham, but to
Frederick the Great at Rossbach. In the words of Horace Walpole,
``The volley fired by a young Virginian in the backwoods of America
set the world on fire.'' Unfortunately for Washington, though he won
this skirmish, he soon lost the battle, because the French came down quickly
in force from Fort Duquesne, Washington built Fort Necessity, just a
small circular stockade, and fought unreinforced and undersupplied
until his ammunition ran out, whereupon he surrendered and was allowed
to march his men back to Virginia with ``the honors of war''.

The curious thing is that the skirmish in which it all started gets
interpreted vastly differently depending on who you read. American
historians usually paint it as a rash but justifiable action on the
part of this proto-hero. French Canadian historians, however, consider
that the French commander, the Sieur de Jumonville, who was killed
in the engagement, was ``assassinated'' by Washington in a dastardly
sneak attack during a time of peace. And, within a few years of the event,
Jumonville and his demise became the subject of more than one epic poem
in French, Washington's deed a _cause celebre_ for the whole war.

Anyway, a French-Canadian friend first pointed out to me the controversy
surrounding the incident, and I had been curious to find out if there
were any books that the Park Service would be selling which might
bear on the story. I ended up buying
  _A Charming Field for an Encounter: The Story of George Washington's
               Fort Necessity_, Robert C. Alberts
  _The Jumonville Affair_, Marcel Trudel, translated and abridged
               by Donald H. Kent
  _Contrecoeur's Copy of George Washington's Journal for 1754_, edited
               by Donal H. Kent
  _French Cooking in Early America_, Patricia B. Mitchell
  _Cooking in the Young Republic 1780--1850_, Patricia B. Mitchell.
Also a small book of colonial tunes for the penny whistle. Oh, and a penny
whistle.

Well, that's about it. We drove through some stunning countryside,
suffered land envy nearly everyplace we went, and we totaled about
$330 US in books declared at the Canadian customs station at Queenston
Heights. (This is about half our record in books purchased on
a trip to the States.)

Of course, the depressing thing is always seeing how large a stack
the books make when we get home. I did better reading this trip
than I usually do (mostly by being antisocial for the visiting first half
of the trip), finishing Livy volumes IV and V (out of fourteen), finishing
_A Forest of Kings_ by Linda Schele and David Freidel, __Brave New World_
by Aldous Huxley, _Beyond Good and Evil_ by Friedrich Nietzsche, and
_The Road to Serfdom_ by Friedrich Hayek (*Wow!*). But the effort always
seems so little when there's so much good stuff yet to read.
 
                Mike Morris
           (msmorris@watsci.uwaterloo.ca)



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