Last weekend we had a reenactment in Tewskbury, MA, in honor of the town's 275th birthday. (Happy Birthday, BTW).
It was a fun time, although in some ways not the world's most authentic of reenactments. I say this because we had the two armies encamped on a couple of soccer fields, fighting battles on a big hunk of playing field, complete with a large baseball backstop in the middle. This is fun, and I'm not complaining, but it's not the way to get a "period rush."
What, you ask, is a period rush? A period rush is that moment of "oh, wow, this is what it must actually have looked like/been like/felt like," when the modern fades into the background and the 18th century comes to the fore. I've only had a handful of these moments, but they are pretty amazing.
The first one I ever had was during one of the first Battle Road reenactments I ever did. We were at the North Bridge in Concord, shots had been exchanged, and the Brits were running away. There wasn't much of a crowd of spectators for some reason, so all I could see was relatively decently dressed militia (we keep trying to improve!) and the backs of the retreating Brits. There was this sense of having been transported in time, if not space, to something real.
Fortunately, "real" doesn't extend all the way to the level of people getting killed and wounded!
The other major "period rush" moment I can remember was during the 225th Battle Road in April, 2000. We were waiting for the British to come onto the field at Meriam's Corner, basically hiding along the tree line. The British started to display onto the field. There were a lot of them. They kept coming and coming and coming, and I realized that this was probably more of them than I had seen at most events I'd been to up to that point. They kept coming and coming and coming, and then I realized that this was only the advanced guard. Then, as the main body of the British force came onto the field, I started thinking "you know, if I was actually a farmer, I think I'd be thinking about my crops right about now, and about how I really needed to get out of here in order to tend to my spring planting."
Fortunately, if not always wisely, our forbears stayed where they were and, by and large, did not head off to take care of their planting that day in 1775. I always shudder when people start talking about honoring the sacrifice of our ancestors, predecessors, and so on, but at the same time, one has to recognize that they did some pretty darn amazing things.
