University of Virginia Library

Visiting Casco Bay

Today, the towers, their extensive
underground bunkers and the
monstrous gun emplacements are
empty, rusting, falling apart. Wooden
barracks sag uncertainly with
age, bulging under the pressure of
twenty year-old maples surging
from within. All this, as experience,
holds little for the young. Like the
upstart saplings, their lives have
come later. The scene is one of
virtual irrelevance - a place to
picnic, climb and explore.

"How paranoid they must have
been to build such things," we are
thinking, and at the same time
wondering how cold it must have
been here in February, 1944. The
cost of a struggle may be measured
in the lives consumed, the suffering,
time and energy. These are actual
but fleeting. The visible detritus
remains, signalling whatever memories
exist for those who can remember.

What it means is uncertain, but
to foresee future change it helps to
distinguish the monuments going
up in out contemporary conflict.
Ghettos, trashed out buildings and
bloody streets are best left out
being shoddy reminders and exceedingly
poor landmarks.

Try instead a cleaned-up river,
or Selma Bridge or the very fact of
New York City being not in flames
because, in part, the mayor chose
to gamble on a summer peace corps
staffed by urban kids.

With tremendous luck, and
more, perhaps such monuments of
the future are already beginning to
point the right way.