Sugarloaf Mountain

When I was a kid, it was a tradition in our family that the Saturday before Easter every year we would make the drive out to Sugarloaf Mountain and hike the trail up to the top and have a picnic. Sugarloaf had a Civil War cannon still there at the summit, ready to help defend Washington, and it was there that a group of Union soldiers saw Lee’s men crossing the Potomac in hopes that Maryland would rise up with the South. Maryland did not. Barbara Frietchie became an urban legend for supposedly leaning out her upper window in Frederick and taunting the Confederates to shoot her old gray head and shaming them for not honoring her flag and theirs, too. Actually, she was 95 and sick in bed on the day and they shot that flag up, but never mind; she had been an old friend of Francis Scott Key and had participated in a memorial service at George Washington’s passing, so John Greenleaf Whittier ‘s 1864 poem used her as a symbol of the goodness of the Union. Propaganda and future tourism and all that.

Richard and Karen and I were out and about last week when I happened to mention that I hadn’t been on Sugarloaf in decades. Karen immediately answered, “You want to go?” Richard agreed, and go we did.

You can drive most of the way up, but there is no way I can hike the rest of it now. I wanted to see that cannon again, but it’s okay; we climbed on and around the tiny stone fort there near the parking lot, which, having gone immediately past it to get up to the summit all those times as a kid, I somehow had no memory of. The fort had been something to simply get past, is all, I suppose. That and the tiny dark slits for windows and the connection to the ugliness of the Civil War, I probably hadn’t liked the looks of the thing back in the day.

We teased each other: you want to go in there? What do you think is in there? Bears? Foxes? Wouldn’t want to wake them up, right?

Ghosts of the past and stone steps upwards to see the ever-widening view, looking out. May we always learn from where we’ve been.