I’d like to tell you about the evening I first entered my father’s apartment after his death. It was like entering the mines of Moria — a beautiful place with the light inside it permanently snuffed out. Crossing that threshold was, and always will be, one of the worst moments of my life.
But amid the emotional wreckage in what had been our family home for five generations, we found my father’s books and notes. He was reading a lot of history before he died — the history of the early Kievan Rus, the history of the Soviet space program, and the history of the many wars fought in and by the United States. Generally speaking, history was his favorite subject, and it never failed to make him happy.
This is why, after I returned home to America after burying him, I set out to do geolocation challenges in places that had particular historic meaning.
My good friend Robert Bateman, a veteran, like my father, and a historian, suggested the following location last weekend (and took us to it, because he is a fantastic person):
The first correct answer arrived about twenty minutes in, from a person who recognized the view:
But they didn’t stop there! The tide tables helped them determine when we visited the place with Bob:
Scott didn’t immediately recognize the area, but of course he found it anyway. Anyone can find anything is the motto of this newsletter, and the internet will always prove me correct. And Scott was kind enough to give a detailed breakdown as to how he went about it:
Bob had originally thought that I had given too many clues to my location away, by tweeting stuff like this before posting the actual picture:
But to be honest, the clues are just for fun and to get people excited about doing the challenge. The landscape behind me is quite distinctive. In fact, if you realized I was in Maryland (my public Instagram was SCREAMING as much), all you had to do was google “Maryland marshland” before seeing several areas to explore. AND you could then zoom in on the buildings in the background to confirm the location via satellite pictures on Google Maps if you so choose:
Here are the same elements as seen from above:
(If the above seems confusing, go ahead and explore the area on Google Maps on your own, and don’t forget to juxtapose the different elements and zoom in. If you’re having trouble, consider exploring an area you’re very familiar with — such as the street you live on. By seeing the way your perception of the street can be matched up with satellite imagery, you train your brain to process said imagery better)
On the map above, you see a place called Pig Point. As Bob pointed out, it is the site of a memorable incident in the War of 1812 (flip to pages 12-13 of the brochure if you follow the link). I hated learning about that war in school, simply because of how boring it struck me next to the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. But my father, having turned from war participant to war nerd, disagreed with me, insisting that the most important details about this country’s history and this society’s development were buried in seemingly boring plot points. “You can’t even understand the National Anthem without understanding the War of 1812!” he used to say.
The older I get, the more I understand that he was right about this one.
As many people noted, I posed with a very distinctive laptop case:
It looked like a bit of abstract art, but it was also more than that:
And while Alex was the first to figure out that the guy pictured was Arnold Schwarzenegger, Nate was the one who found where I bought it from:
Arnold was one of dad’s favorite actors, and Terminator 2, which inspired the image above, is my favorite film (I can write an entire essay as to why and maybe I will soon), and it was in dad’s top five. As dad used to say, “Let’s put on Terminator 2, I want to live after watching that movie.”
From a security standpoint, you can probably see how much of myself I’ve revealed with that single picture. Aside from where I shop and what nature spots I love, I also revealed that I am grieving and vulnerable. This kind of information is always useful to scammers and con artists — while I’m pretty well-equipped to deal with it, many other people are not.
But also, I wanted to tell you a story about the person I lost. Fall was dad’s favorite season, especially fall on the lush East Coast, the time he would pile us in the car and drive us to the beach, or deep into the Appalachians. He was a lover of long trails, foraging, talking to squirrels (they frequently chattered right back), telling ghost stories in the evenings, and telling stories from history when the ghost stories ran out. He would have loved serene Jug Bay.
Visiting places that he’d never been to but would have appreciated has become my own way of paying tribute to him. Also, it’s my way of making myself happy, because happiness was all dad wanted for his children, and I’d rather not fail him, if I have any say in the matter.
Please stay with me as I explore more places and do more challenges in honor of dad! And thank you so much for reading.
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