Freeway-Free in France: Ceremonies (LATC July 3, 2019, for our Veterans)
I had the good fortune to be among the 12,000 + invited guests at the 75th anniversary ceremonies commemorating the D-Day landings in Normandy.
All 12,000 + guests were brought in by shuttle buses from staging areas in nearby towns (except for the VIPs, like Presidents Macron and Trump and their supporting cast, who arrived by helicopter). The security lines were long, but we passed the time checking out the helicopter arrivals, and applauding the mostly wheelchair-bound, heavily be-medaled D-Day survivors as they wheeled past on the way to the VIP tent.
We were among the last 4000 to arrive at the American Cemetery, and the stage and podium seemed several football fields away in the distance. But giant Jumbotron screens gave us close up views of Air Force One (both jet and helicopter) and its occupants as they landed, and of President Trump’s ceremonial greeting of guests President and Mrs. Macron onto what is considered American soil.
When we took our eyes from the screens, we looked out over a sea of white crosses, each decorated with a American and a French flag, stretching beyond the audience area for even more hundreds of yards. So many dead buried in tidy rows, as if drawn up for a regimental parade. An occasional Star of David marked a grave instead of a cross. A rare cross with gold lettering indicated a Medal of Honor recipient. An occasional soldier is “known only to God.” It seems right that all the soldiers are equal in death, except for those singled out for their valor. The son of a US President has the same marker as an unknown soldier.
Before the speeches, national anthems were sung. During the speeches, 12,000 people listened quietly. President Macron thanked the veterans who were present in English, and presented four of them with the French Legion of Honor (including air kisses on both cheeks). President Trump told stories of the heroics of two D-Day soldiers, then turned to shake their hands personally on the stage.
Afterward, the ceremony continued. We heard taps played by a distant trumpet, followed by a 21- gun salute, delivered by three mighty howitzers aimed out over Omaha Beach. Five fighter jets flew over in the missing man formation. A platoon of other military aircraft filled the sky, emulating the flocks of fighters and bombers on D-day. Finally, a second squadron of nine jets, trailing red, white, and blue contrails, roared across the sky.
The whole event was both humbling and satisfying. We had paid appropriate homage to those who fought for us, and in doing so honored those who are still fighting.
Our French guide had told us that, in France, the D-day landings are never referred to as an invasion. Instead, they were the forces of liberation. Tomorrow, if this piece is published on schedule, will be Independence Day. Let’s celebrate our own liberation with due ceremony, while remembering those we owe it to.
[Article first published in the Los Altos Town Crier this summer; still appropriate as Veteran’s Day approaches.]
The weather was perfect: warm, no fog or wind, as we left Hearst Castle.
Further up the road there was an even bigger slide, with an obviously temporary one-lane road perched nervously across the new ground. But it was fascinating to watch the big diggers roaming and scooping atop huge mounds of dirt and stone. And that road remains a marvel of impossible engineering, spectacular vistas, and a maddening plodding pace behind the inevitable road boulder, often a “Rent-Me-RV” whose first-time RV driver is scared to death of his rig and the road. And they won’t pull out to let the long line of vehicles behind them to pass, which is the law, or, if it isn’t, there oughta be.
At the time of my visit, the museum had thrown the traditional chronological arrangement of its art right out the window, and had rearranged its El Greco’s, its Goyas, its Gauguin in alphabetical order by subject. So the Gauguin was exhibited under A for ART, taken out of its frame and put between glass panels so you could see the paint smudges on the edges of the canvas, and some scribbles by the artist on the back of the canvas. In the same room were examples of art by paleolithic artists as well as moderns ones. It made me think about the Gauguan in a completely different way.
I have mentioned before on this blog that I am something of a connoisseur of
Register at the entry inside the big wooden doors of the Main Library. Then head up the stairs to the rotunda. On the day of the birthday, there was a harpist playing near the center of the rodunda, the delicate sounds reverberating in the giant space. When I was a student, the Stanford Choir would give impromptu concerts on the stairs, especially wonderful at Christmas time, when we were swotting away in preparation for final exams.
The stairs alone are worth the price of admission, as each wall is covered with giant reproductions of antique maps and charts, covering everything from a visual representation of the longest rivers on earth vs the highest mountains, to a 3-D rendering of Manhattan Island in the 50’s, and much more.
OK, I’m cheating a little. We actually spent quite a bit of time on the freeway on our way to the Big Bend area of west Texas – there is no other way to get there.
So off we go out of Austin and past places that we have visited before, into the unknown spaces of the Big Bend country of southwest Texas. We move out of the area where bluebonnets and scarlet paintbrush are blooming and into an area where odd geological formations punctuate the skyline like very broad pencils with sharp tips. Scattered yuccas bloom like pale torches among the scrubby bushes. The occasional farm augments its income with pumpjacks in the valleys and windmills on the ridges, hedging its bets between the old energy and the new.
Marfa, in the Big Bend Country of Texas, is the home of the mysterious 
But the real mystery of Marfa is not the lights, but how a town of scarcely 3000 manages to maintain not just the grand old 
Why do we yearn over battlefields and lost causes? At the Battle of Gettysburg, the High Water Mark of the Confederacy gets more photos than any other monument. Even on our cruise in Alaska we toured a battlefield – the last stand of the Kwakiutls or some such. We are in awe of places where lots of young men died for reasons they and we no longer understand. And here we are at Culloden, where young Scotsmen in kilts wielded swords and battle axes against British cannon and riflery, and died bravely for a prince who escaped the carnage and lived out a wastrel life in Italy. .
You see, you understand.
I can’t say I knew Scotland better after a whirlwind tour, and certainly gained no real insiders knowledge of its captital, Edinburgh. So I will give you a bullet list, and some photos, and leave you to explore this fount of history and legend as you will.
Allyson Johnson 