Sunday in the park with George Washington

If I ever want to get a bridge named after me, I need to contribute to national unity.
I’m more or less incapable of uniting anything more complex than peanut butter and jelly. This makes the job rather difficult. But I am not discouraged.
I focus on the fact that Americans are known for self-improvement, and also that there is nothing you can’t get if you quietly slide it into an 8,000-page omnibus bill.
To gain a better perspective of what it takes to unite a nation (and also of where my bridge could go), I took a trip to a place known as the crucible of the revolution: Valley Forge.
Now, I may not know exactly what “crucible” means, but nobody knows what “Valley Forge” means either. I always thought it had something to do with blacksmiths. It doesn’t.
It’s a camp. It’s where the Continental Army cheerfully roasted marshmallows and sang campfire songs before steamrolling the British.
Just as a point of historical fact, I have to mention that there was a lot less marshmallow-roasting and singing than there was freezing to death and misery and disease and freezing to death and starving and suffering and also freezing to death.
I wanted to go in the middle of winter and walk the whole park on foot to relive the Continental Army’s experience.
We know the story: how the soldiers marched from Trenton to Princeton, how they took refuge on the Schuylkill for the winter, how their frozen feet left the snow dyed red.
Right off, Dad nixed the walking plan. He said the sentiment, rather than the literal experience, was more important.
So at the beginning of summer, we followed their footsteps in an air-conditioned Toyota.
Winding around the miles of camp, passing people throwing tennis balls for their dogs, it was hard to imagine this being an army’s quarters for half a year.

Soldiers housed in barracks that were scarcely more comfortable than my college dorm nevertheless managed to make us a country.
In the full year I spent with them, the only thing my college roommates ever managed was to melt the little spinning plate at the bottom of our communal microwave.
Yet here I was, at a place that looked like a wildflower meadow, holding a gimmicky audio guide warbling facts that I’d never remember, trying to imagine how anyone could ever do drills here, march here, or die here.
The enormity of Valley Forge is offset only by the smallness of the lodgings. Away from the main part of the camp, there’s a dinky little house by a train station that General Washington lived in.
He lived in the house, not the train station. It probably would have been more comfortable the other way around.
The ceilings in that house are so low that the tour guide said Hamilton and Laurens and the other aides-de-camp were always banging their heads on them. No wonder our government ended up the way it did.
But end up it did. Small miracle, that.
As we head back home, tracing the path of the Schuylkill, I take some time to reflect. Perhaps small necessities bring people together. Perhaps great ideals do.
Perhaps it’s just sharing a laugh from time to time.
So, Congress, how about that bridge?

Copyright 2025 Alexandra Paskhaver, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.