Whoever first said, "you can't go home again..."

...deserves a big, fat, wet kiss for being absolutely right. Sarah and I came back from our trip to Gettysburg, PA, on Monday. We spent three days there; Sarah courageously tried to find all the monuments scattered around the battlefields (there's over 1,000 of them, and Sarah's a Civil War nut. She may even someday join those wacky reenactors), while I photographed and tried to drum up old memories. I grew up in Littlestown, right next to Gettysburg. It's where I lived with my mom and grandmother, while my father came to pick me up every other weekend and take me to Harrisburg. Mom and I used to go to the battlefield a lot, which at my age was more like a playground. I loved to scramble around the boulders at Devil's Den, not even giving a thought to the people who died there 120 years prior. I also visited the house I grew up in (now painted a different color and minus the multitude of trees that once nearly obliterated it from view from the road) and, for the first time, my grandmother and grandfather's grave. Grandma died in 2003, and I never met my grandfather. He died back in the 60's.

I wasn't sure what to expect going back. I thought maybe that highly charged memories of an often rocky childhood would flood back, but they didn't. While many things were familiar and I could even point at nondescript areas along the roads and paths and say "that happened to me here," I never felt overly emotional about it. No butterflies in the stomach. No movie-style childhood flashbacks where I zoned out for minutes on end. I was, at best, at peace with it all, and at worst, just plain neutral about the whole thing.

Maybe part of it is because the area around Gettysburg has changed since I was a kid. The town has always been pretty commercial and tourist-oriented, but now it's also homogenized. Many of the outlying farms are divvying up their land and selling it to developers, so there's a whole slew of those ugly, lifeless, residential communities springing up. Littlestown is not so little anymore. A McDonald's is being built near the center of town. The school I used to go to, and where I had a rough time with bullying as a kid, has expanded - a lot. Overall the area just seemed to have lost some of its quietness and originality, real or imagined.

The battlefields are even changing. In recent years there has been a push to restore the battlefields to how they looked during the 1860s. As a child I remember Devil's Den and the area behind it sprouted with youngish trees and bushes. That has all been cleared away to make it look like the pastureland of 150 years ago and to give visitors a more "authentic" view of what the soldiers would have seen. I think I understand the reasoning, but it still strikes me as odd. They're making artificial pastureland. No cow or horse is ever really going to graze here again. It's almost as if the land itself has become a reenactor of the Civil War.

So anyway, while there I used my half-frame camera (it takes half-size pictures on a roll of 35mm film; you get twice pictures for your dollar! And of course this highly practical camera is Russian) to make "panoramic" images of the battlefields. This was done by standing in one place and making a series of images as I panned the scene in front of me. You can see some earlier versions of this technique in a blog post I made a couple of months ago. I like the jerky look of the panoramas, the way the horizon sometimes jumps or objects are seen twice between photos. To me it's a more realisic way of seeing a full landscape than an official Panoramic camera records it. Your eyes can only focus on one point in a scene at a time. To get a sweeping view, you need to pan it with your eyes, looking at it in sections while your mind "stitches" them together in a way. Try it sometime. Look outside. Where are your eyes focused? What else in that scene is just part of your blurry peripheral until you move your eyes to the left or right?

I have no idea yet how or if these panoramas (I'll hopefully scan the negatives and post some images soon) will play into my work, and how or if I'm going to connect them to my memories and my feelings. No doubt, though, it will be a part of a larger monthly paper down the road. In the meantime, it's back to daily life in upstate NY, filling our heating oil tank with $700 worth of fuel, and taking care of two kitten brothers who were mysteriously orphaned on our doorstep. We've named them Calvin and Hobbes.