Hey Team,

So much happened over the last few days I’m not exactly sure how to condense it. So maybe I’ll just give you a quick outline and some pictures and the next couple days can fill in the blanks.

**Disclaimer: This is fair warning. I’m almost guaranteed to screw up lots of buzzwords in this post so all you people reading this that are actually familiar with reenactments can just lay off. So there.**

Two of the officers from the reenactment picked me up in D.C. and gave me a lift to New Market, Virginia where the appropriately named Battle of New Market happened in 1864. Along with the “Chesapeake Volunteer Guard,” a group of reenactors that invited me to the battle, I would be depicting a private in the 1st West Virginia Regiment.

I had a few other offers from reenactment groups but I chose to throw my green hat into the ring with these guys mostly because the email from their Major warned me: “We are a hardcore progressive group that highly values authenticity and are more on the extreme edge, if you will, of the hobby.”

How can you turn down an invitation to anything that comes with a warning like that?! Not choosing these guys would have been tantamount to running across an “Enter at Your Own Risk” sign at an abandoned factory and choosing not to run into the building without thinking. And that’s just silly.

I don’t know what comes to mind when you read an invitation like that…because frankly I’m not sure what came to mind when I read it. It just struck me as a warning that promised adventure and that’s a tough thing to turn down. BUT, now that I am intimately familiar with EXACTLY what “We are a hardcore progressive group that highly values authenticity and are more on the extreme edge, if you will, of the hobby,” means I can provide you with a much clearer picture. (An “Enter at Your Own Risk But Watch Out For That Hole In The Floor Directly On The Other Side Of This Door” sign, if you will.)

In as few words as possible that warning can be translated roughly to mean, “When you reenact with us you will spend the majority of the time hungry, dirty and uncomfortable but we WILL provide you with a thin blanket to lay over the top of you so no one can see you bent in the fetal position all night laying on rocks willing yourself not to freeze to death.”

Yeah. I think that about sums it up.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t provide you with a very clear picture of how fun that actually was (okay, the “sleeping” part could have been better but I’ve spent the last ten months getting used to nights like that anyway). In a lot of ways it reminded me of the motorcycle rally in Daytona Beach. I was surrounded by a lot of people who were very knowledgeable and passionate about a topic I had absolutely NO experience with…and those are some of my favorite situations to be in.

We spent a lot of time drilling as a company and marching in scratchy, nipple sanding, wool clothes that ended up every bit as wet as they would have at a pool party where all the cool kids push the dorks wearing funny clothes into the deep end; battles were a little bit like paintball…minus the satisfaction of causing the other team small but intense feelings of pain and frustration; and reenactments were an exercise in pretending you don’t know how to stay alive. But the feelings of camaraderie and the connection created to a time well past is hard to underplay.

Overall it was an intensely satisfying experience (with an emphasis on the word intense) and easily ranks in the top ten adventures of the last year.

Hopefully that gives you an outline of the weekend. I’ll shoot for some more specifics tomorrow and the video will be up Wednesday. Thanks for hanging in there while I was separated from Charley for the weekend, Team!

I’m done.

Brett.

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This entry was posted on Monday, May 19th, 2008 at 2:17 pm.