My Grandfather Issachar’s War
"Part I: Rediscovery" Each furnished with his staff and knapsack, And some provisions for the war We ventured on without conceiving, What trials lay yet before” — Issachar Bates, “A Winter’s Journey to Busroe” (1811) History is all iteration, wrote Melville. While going through an old file cabinet looking for the rain-stained pencil and ballpoint journal from the summer I hiked the Appalachian Trail, I found a selfie from 1972. Judging by the small stream running behind me where the trail used to be, I’m guessing this was taken in the Blue Mountains of Pennsylvania right after Hurricane Agnes. The Blues run about 150 miles from the Delaware Water Gap to Big Gap. At their southern extent, the western flank slopes down into the Cumberland Valley, which extends off into Kentucky and Ohio. I was 25 then, but I didn’t learn until I was 70 that my ancestor, Shaker poet-singer-songwriter Issachar Bates, had walked that way nearly two centuries earlier, perhaps even on the same tr...
