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| Friendly locals. |
America’s
relatively young age, especially in comparison to nearly the entire
rest of the world, affords people the ability to visit the intact
remnants of one of its first commercial and cultural capitals. Unlike
the historic sites of other countries, Colonial Williamsburg is still
essentially a livable, functioning town, provided you’re cool to give up
the comfy stuff like internet and toilets.
We
are both huge fans of most forms of entertainment dealing with time
travel, and visiting the dirt roads of Colonial Williamsburg is probably
the closest we will get until the flux capacitor becomes available on
the retail market. While laden with history lessons and authenticity,
Williamsburg retains its charm amidst its pristine appearance (we were
sure there’d be more horse poop on the streets) and talented period
actors. They all spoke like they were witnessing the birth of a nation.
It is their version of Groundhog Day, proclaiming to every
tourist that TODAY is the day the Virginia Declaration of Rights is
being debated at the Capitol Building, every single day.
One
tavern proprietor on Duke of Gloucester Street tried to entice us to
visit her establishment pub for the town’s best “wild game pye.” When
Alex mentioned the guard at the Governor’s Mansion recommended it, the
restauranteur told us in a slightly hushed aside that the pye’s meat is
the most tender in town because she gets her supply from the native
Cherokees, who sneak up on their prey, which keeps them from tensing up.
When she heard Alex’s hoarse voice and deep cough from a week-long
sinus infection, she demanded we instead go to the apothecary for
horehound drops. He responded with a quip that he hoped he would be bled
with leeches as treatment. She gave a hearty laugh and wished us both a
good day and for better health soon.
Everyone
in modern garb looks like a tourist here, but that is not a bad thing.
However, everyone’s a tourist in a place no one lives, against what the
friendly tavern keeper and other honest Colonial folk want you to
believe. Neither of us have any shame in saying that we looked and acted
like tourists the whole day, snapping photos at every turn, including
the obligatory photo in the pillories for counts of buggery and making
winds on the Sabbath.
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| Arrested, tried, and convicted for breaking ye olde wyndes on ye Lord's day. |
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| Clearly, arrested, tried, and convicted (within 20 minutes!) for buggery. |
Some
people are Disney obsessives, and they go to one of the parks every
single year. For others, a pilgrimage to Graceland is necessary while
passing through Memphis. For two history geeks like us, it’s a place
like Colonial Williamsburg that does it for us. We kept cracking each
other up by prefacing every possible noun with “ye olde.” Ye olde cheese
shop. Ye olde iPhone. Ye olde hydroelectric power generator.
As
a country obsessed with progress and modernity, it is astounding to
visit a place in America so diligently preserved for the sake of its
history, a subtle and often unseen wink to the radicals who made it
possible for a government such as ours to exist. While visiting the
Capitol Building, our lively guide kept referring to the brewing
conflict between the colonies and the Crown as one that could either be a
massive victory for personal freedom, or an embarrassing defeat. The
austere pages of a history book tell a rather flat story, but hearing a
description of the American Revolution from a person playing a character
from that period, reminded us that these familiar faces from marble
sculptures, coins, and dollar bills were far more than just recognizable
oil paintings. Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and George Washington
were all regarded as local noblemen, holders of property (a true symbol
of status), owners of slaves (an even bigger symbol of status), and
friends of the loyalist colonial governor until the time of the
conflict.
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| The Capitol Building |
With
that perspective in mind, it was slightly unsettling to think that our
founding fathers, had they lost the conflict they had waged, would have
been executed for treason, never mind that we would be driving on the
left side of the road, eating boiled beef for Sunday joints, and calling
cookies “biscuits.” What codswallop!
We
truly have come a long way from being a population with essentially no
rights. While there is still work to be done - women’s rights, gay
rights, religious tolerance, to name a few - it is easy to forget where
we have come from. At the end of the Capitol tour, we felt something we
had both been without for years: national pride. The tour guide looked
towards the future of what would become democracy and referred to it as
“the great experiment, one that could change the face of the entire
world.”
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| Our guide speaking in the very courtroom where we were tried for our respective crimes. |
His
profound optimism, though delivered in character, struck both of us and
we couldn’t help but smile. Walking back to our motel from the grounds
of Colonial Williamsburg, we talked the whole time about how inspired we
were. Perhaps if people today considered themselves subjects within
this “great experiment,” we could fill the gaps that divide us as a
nation on both cultural and political fronts.
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