Civil War Saturday or To the Sweaty Past in Short Pants

I’ve said it before, and I will say it again. Though I am hardly perfectly happy at the moment (and who really is?), I am glad to live in a time with running water, indoor plumbing, heating, air conditioning and for those of us who can afford it, good medical and dental coverage.

Yet, I remain fascinated by those among us who decide to spend weekends living in the past – in wool clothing in 90 degree heat, mind you.

So this past weekend my Irish buddy Shay invited me along to a Civil War reenactment on the grounds of a forest preserve in Lake County. As if forest preserves and reenacting weren’t scary enough, there was a magician doing rope tricks making jokes about the rope in his bedroom while intertwining the twine in a box.

A girl played with a wooden bear that looked more like a squirrel making it dance on a piece of wood, which was just mildly more entertaining to me than any Playstation game I’ve seen.

There were old fashioned carnival games. In one you had to toss coins through small holes or a brass frog’s mouth to win prizes, including tickets to the Ford’s Theatre. OK, that’s a lie. You could win a paper fan, a top, or a Jacob’s Ladder, which is just squares of wood tied together.

The other was “Splat the Rat” where you had to whack a toy rodent before it landed in a basket. What guy hasn’t spent a rainy Saturday splatting a rat or two?

I wonder if the entertainment was as eco-friendly at the Rock Concert for Mother Eart or whatever Al Gore's World Part was called? Save the planet - drive to a concert and drink overpriced beer in the hot sun with people not wearing shirts who should keep them on.

But, hey, I have spent a Saturday being too lazy to take a shower, but many of the guys here had me beat. Not only were they wearing the aforementioned wool outfits. Some of them explained that they never wash their wool pants. Never, as the wool is untreated, meaning it still has natural water-proofing oils.

Great, I think, the pants won’t get wet or absorb your sweat. You’ll just be standing in self-created puddles all day. And imagine how smelly and itchy body parts must get.

If I were to Civil War reenact, I’d be the one to say, hey, let’s put this cotton to good use and make some pants, some short pants even, for our days fighting pretend enemies on government-owned and operated land.

Another guy from a group from the aptly named Plainfield, a town which seems to haunt me for some reason (maybe the name – it’s so ordinary), was busy polishing his triangulated bayonet in the shade. His buddy explained that such arms were banned by the Geneva Convention as it’s much more uncivilized than, say, a depleted uranium weapon or a car bomb.

We ate lunch in the shade as myriad moths hovered through the trees, drawn to the fabrics of the past, no doubt.

On the way home my buddy stopped for cigarettes, because he didn’t find any hand-rolled ones to his liking at the campground. OK another lie. The clerk did attempt to talk his ear off about the reenactment thing, so I told Shay he should have said, “Listen, we just shot the pretend President. You forget you ever saw me or I guarantee, your name will be Mudd.”

It was the humidity talking.

Sure I make fun, but my kid’s son, who is going into 7th grade, gave good reason why we actually probably need reenactors. The boy had yet to learn who fought in the Civil War or what the war was about.

He did like the toy pistols, though. That’s a start, I guess.