AT THE MIDDLE PASSAGE By Walter Mills Gray Smoke at Evening The big cannon fired while I was still a ways off and a line of flame leapt from the barrel toward the line of trees. The sound echoed back against itself off of the nearby ridge and the young boys and the men in gray coats put their hands over their ears to keep their eardrums from bursting with the concussion. The big gun fired again and the sulfurous smell of battle floated over the field of grass and lingered in the dampness of evening. At any moment I expected to see a thin blue line of troops moving out of the trees and advancing on the small band of Confederate soldiers, Hampton's Artillery of the Army of Northern Virginia. But the Pennsylvania forest was empty tonight, 135 years after the events I imagined as I walked toward the scout troop and the local Civil War reenactment division on the grounds of the Valley Bow and Gun Club. Capt. Stephen Harter, was showing the boys, who ranged in age from 12 to 17, why it took seven men to handle a cannon of this size, and why the soldiers stood back from the chest high wheels when the cannon fired. With a half pound of blasting powder heavily wrapped in aluminum foil but without a ball, the cannon has no recoil when fired. In actual battle the gun would leap backward 6 to 9 feet, crushing anyone in its path. Even on a quiet 21st century evening in Penns Valley, the destruction and violence of war seemed near at hand. Lt. Edward Beward, something of a scholar in the troop, though all of them study the Civil War, talked about the poor quality of Southern armament, the likelihood of cannons like this one early firing and shooting into their own troops. The Civil War remains real to us mostly because it was fought on our own plot of earth, in places we can drive to on an afternoon excursion. The names of battles are always evocative, none more so than Civil War battles Chancellorsville, Manassas, Antietam, Gettysburg, The Wilderness. We hear their names and they mean this one thing and no other. This was a place where our ancestors gave their lives for the idea of a union, or for a romantic ideal of a mythical region sometimes called Dixie. In a strange and lovely essay in an old book from the early 1920's, the English author J.B. Priestley tells a tale about the origins of Dixie. According to Priestley, at the beginning of the 18th century a slave owner by the name of Dixie moved his household of slaves from Manhattan Island to the South where their lot was much worse. Over time their memories of the pleasant Dixieland to the north were turned into the dream of an ideal kingdom, "where the sun shineth night and day." There was a damp mist hovering over the field mixed with gray smoke from the cannon and the side arms the troop began to fire into the woods. I lifted a heavy Navy Arms .44 caliber pistol, a gun made for Confederate troops from Texas, and fired smoke into the breeze. The boys took their turns, firing blank loads at a distant target, and as I looked at them, boys I knew named Sam and Andrew and Matthew, 13, 14, 15 years old, I thought I could see how boys not much older than these had put on the heavy wool uniforms of Confederate or Union soldiers and gone off to battle. It was a war fought, not by professional soldiers for the most part, but by people like Steve Harter and Ed Beward, plumbers and shoemakers, booksellers and teachers, by farmers who beat their ploughshares into swords, and left their farms for their wives to run forever. We are still fighting a civil war, trying to form a more perfect union, a place where the sun shineth night and day on everyone. When the mist and the smoke from the guns parted momentarily, I thought I saw a movement among the trees, ghosts of our ancestors in a thin blue line - carpenters and plumbers, a minister with a Bible in his coat pocket and schoolboys with bayonets fixed on their rifle tips.