By Mitch Lee
When I was a 12-year-old boy growing up on Limekiln Lake I dreamed of meeting the grand characters from the many historic novels I poured over.
I could not wait for the Wednesday bookmobile to arrive with my new book selection on the men who steered us to victory during the American Revolution.
I spent many evenings under my reading lamp with pages revealing the human side of those great men.
I never really thought it possible to reach back in time and spend a quality afternoon with any of them.
They were just words on paper accompanied by an occasional print or painting in the book’s jacket cover.
Though, as I read and reread each diary, I felt as if I knew them all personally and would have chosen them as my friends.
For the past 30 years I have found a way to live among them and fulfill my dreams of visiting with them.
I took up a lifestyle to recreate the life of a soldier from Central New York.
This passion/hobby/lifestyle has afforded me one weekend a month to travel to the many historic sites I had always read about and to step back in time.
Over the years I have carefully hand-stitched my many uniforms, trying to capture not only the look and feel of the culture of 235 years ago, but the unseen stitches that only I could know about.
I prided myself in copying the manner of speech, dress, food-stuffs, and internal notions about the world that these mean possessed.
This past weekend I made the long journey to Mount Vernon in Virginia, the home of General Washington.
Hundreds of like-minded historical lifestyle enthusiasts joined with me in traveling from all over America to meet at the tomb of the first great leader of our country.
Having traveled so often from my Adirondack home for these sorts of trips I knew I was leaving the last of snow piles behind…the further south I drove the greener the ground cover and trees would become.
As I pulled into the famous historic site it was littered with thousands of tourists with their sunglasses and swinging cameras.
Children pulled at their mothers’ hands while fathers diligently read the map of the grounds.
Tour buses unloaded school groups of teens who, from the dour looks on their faces, appeared as if they had been sent to a hanging.
I thought, with this Disney-like atmosphere I would never be able to truly feel as if I was walking back in time.
Once dressed in my 18th century attire my soldiers and I paid a visit to the Tomb of General Washington.
With our muskets at our shoulders, the forty of us marched quietly down the pathway passing visitors who appeareded shocked by our presence.
Arriving at the Tomb where signs asked visitors for silence, the Mount Vernon docent unhooked the sacred chain and allowed us to form in front of the sarcophagus.
Here we paid our respects mourned our arms and in that single moment I was able to step back in time and live my every childhood dream.
Mitch Lee, Adirondack native & storyteller,
lives at Inlet. ltmitch3rdny@aol.com