Running (through) a historic site

I have been thinking a lot lately about landscape history and how the natural world plays into interpretation at historic sites.

I am working at Fort Ticonderoga this summer, a place that is both historic site and museum, and which has a history that is inexorably intertwined with its landscape. The earth has risen and fallen as wars have been fought, garrisons have come and gone, and defenses have been lifted and lowered. Mounds of earth still stand where the French, British, and Americans built their redoubts, where sieges were won and lost. To understand the landscape is to understand the fort itself, given that the very earth of this northern place was used to construct the original works on this site.

My own method for interacting with landscape in most places is simple—taking a walk or run. While I am by no means a professional runner, nor a fast one, running is my preferred form of daily movement. When I am on a run, it is my time to destress, to relax, to listen to music and forget about the stresses of the day.

Arriving in Ticonderoga, I was eager to find a place to do so. I quickly found a half-hour route that takes me down the winding road toward Lake Champlain and through the meandering path to the fort.

I have taken to running early in the morning or after the heat breaks in the evening, when the echo of cannon and crunch of feet on gravel are gone. With the parking lot empty, I let the slap of my feet against the road add to the slow hum of the natural world.

Along my route, I stop from time to time. At the gate, to marvel at the simple pleasure of being the only human being within the walls of an otherwise-empty public space. To say hello to my friends, the handsome oxen Mick and Mack, and the sheep, who gaze lazily at me as I pass by. To enter the soldiers huts out in a distant field, the smell of freshly hewn logs still sharp. To take a photo of an ominous-looking cloud in the distance which only adds to the atmospheric nature of the space. To stretch for a moment on the glacis-turned-parking-lot as the sun pokes up from between the palisades.

One day, I stop for too long and get caught in a sudden rainstorm, become drenched to the core as I slog through puddles that appear seemingly in an instant. I can’t help but think, as I slosh in my soaked sneakers, that I have it easy. At least I can go home to a warm, dry place. It is so much more than many here could say.

As my feet pound the earth in an often predictable, sometimes stilted rhythm on these runs, I think about the people who have walked this land before me. Long before there were paved roads or an entry booth, before ideas of romantic reconstruction or sites of American heritage, before there was an America, there were people here who felt the land in their bones. For food or defense, for creating a permanent home or scrounging together a false one, they used the land, this land, to make a life. This same earth, overturned, overwrought, trampled, strewn, flattened, resurrected, has stayed as we have come and gone. This same earth now the cloak for some who never left.

I like to think that by running through these sacred paths, I am in some way reinvigorating this space, repurposing it by looking at it anew. In reality, it is the landscape that is reinvigorating me, reminding me that history is just below the surface, that lives saturate the ground like cold rain.

I say a silent prayer for the people whose identities lay deep beneath my feet, lost to time and rising ground, and thank the earth for catching my footfalls another day.