Bombs Over Baghdad

Illustration by Tom Chalkley

This article was originally published Dec. 23, 2009 in Baltimore City Paper

On March 19, 2003, the most powerful military force on the planet began raining bombs on buildings across Baghdad, attempting to decapitate the most evil head on the planet from its oppressed corpus. A shattered leadership would soften the resistance for when the tanks rolled in. Six-plus years later, we know the premise was bogus: there were no bio-weapon tractor trailers, no chemical-bomb caches, and though a few right-wing wonks insisted otherwise, no connection to al-Qaida. Six-plus years and hundreds of thousands of deaths.

My wife and I decided to get married in February 2002, well before the Iraq invasion, but well into the Global War on Terror. U.S. and allied forces had invaded Afghanistan and deposed the Taliban. The president gave his "axis of terror" speech, so we knew it was just a matter of time. No way could we have predicted that 10 days before our ceremony bombs would drop on Baghdad.

Maryrest Cemetery, Mahwah, NJ

Suz, Owen and I left Kelly and Dustin's converted cabin in Glen Spey, NY Saturday morning, hoping to get to Brooklyn by about 2 p.m. to catch the Mermaid Parade on Coney Island. Suz spent the last 2 days painting a mural in the nursery set aside for Kelly and Dustin's fast-approaching baby, which you can see on her mural website Wallybee.com (well, pretty soon anyway, as soon as yours truly updates the site).

Once we rounded up all our junk and said goodbye, we drove along the Delaware River, through Port Jervis and into New Jersey, pretty much following the same route as my trip to High Point a couple days earlier. Before we were to drive into the city, I wanted to do some more family soul-searching. After my ghostly experience at the High Point State Park, what better way to sort through the past than visiting the graves of my father's family? So we set off for a little Catholic cemetery near Ramsey, our old hometown. (My father is buried in the sandy earth of Spring Hill, Florida, the area where our branch of the family settled in the 70s.)

High Point Monument, New Jersey

Highway 23 in Sussex County, northeast New Jersey, is a steady, weaving climb from the Delaware River to the highest point in the state at 1,800-odd feet. This is the kind of road our diesel Mercedes is built for--the massive compression and torque just pushed the car up the incline. I kept pulling down the rear view mirror to smile at and talk to my 18-month old son Owen, who was strapped into his car seat, happily yammering to himself. The roads were slick, and fog drifted between the trees, revealing lush meadows and marshy clearings where birds took flight into the mist. We were heading for High Point State Park, a place I hadn't visited since 1975, when I was nine years old. That's when this picture was taken. I'm at far left, with my brother Mike and my mother. My father, with the camera, had worked at the state park when he had joined the Civilian Conservation Corps in the early 1940s, but not on the construction of the monument, as family lore recalls. He was on a crew that improved the park or built some of the massive granite walls that weave through the park, because he would have been only five years old when the monument was finished in 1930. The park, incidentally, was designed by the Olmstead Brothers, sons of Central Park-designer Frederick Law Olmstead, and who left a string of beautiful public parks in their own wake, notably Druid Hill Park in Baltimore.