Early Battlefields: Journalism & Running

Posted by Andrew Leibs Aug 7, 2009

I coasted downhill on my brother’s dew-soaked 10-speed, balancing a notebook. The hill dropped steeply before a blind left turn. I squeezed the brakes. The bike sped up. I tore over the metal grate, took the turn, and waited for the fall. But I stayed up, and shuddered down a less-steep section of the hill, eventually getting a foot down to stop myself.

I thought grace had preserved me as I pedaled on to cover the Battle of Oriskany’s bicentenary for the school paper—my first assignment—on the eve of my first road race, a 20K. It was August 6, 1977.

I reached the battlefield, panting into a sea of 15,000 swelling the woods and every dome and dip of the grassy field, awaiting a reenactment of the minor battle on Saratoga’s bloody undercard, taught to us as a Revolutionary War turning point.

There was a rumor that Henry Fonda, whose 1939 film Drums Along the Mohawk indirectly references the battle, would show up. He didn’t.

I was confused and clueless, no line of sight or story, caught in an incoherent ebb and flow of action. Later, I sat on the grass watching musket loading and line volley demonstrations, trying to ignore the increasing rain. “That’s just heavy dew, folks,” quipped the tinny megaphone voice. I sulked with the responsibility of turning these opaque tableaus into news. I wandered the field for hours, looking for strands of narrative.

I ran into a cross-country teammate dressed in a blue coat and tri-cornered hat. He asked me to turn pages as he sat on the piano bench accompanying his compatriot on the Oriskany Bicentennial Trio on the trumpet. I said I would, though I had no idea how I’d know when to turn the pages, or why the trio only had two people. I stood stiff, oblivious to his nods. He turned the pages himself. He wasn’t angry, but suggested I interview one of the Indians by the monument’s iron gate.

I saw a gaunt face, tomahawk, and a fluttering of leather fringe. I asked him where the Iroquois lived now. At last he said, “Oh, probably all over.” I helped him. “Well, where do you live?” “Me, I live in Oriskany.” I later found an actual Native American, a woman from Ontario, who took my notebook and pen to expedite the recording of my asked and unasked questions.

With ink on paper, I wanted to bolt, but was hailed by a teacher back from a stamp dedication in Rome. “I’m going there tomorrow,” I said. “For the Fort Stanwix race.” We stood by the field’s 85-foot stone monument, the race’s midway point. She said, “Oh I know; I’ve seen you go by my house every day this week, practicing.” Practicing? I let that word, perplexing and somewhat patronizing, punctuate the day.

The 20K was far less enervating than walking those fields. That fall, after winning junior high JV meets, I was moved up to varsity. That same week, however, I saw that my rambling battlefield narrative wasn’t in the school paper. The advisor said they’d decided it was old news, an explanation I found irksome yet fitting, even ironic, as I then understood the term.