Never before in my life had I been liberated by sound.
And it was constant. And loud. Yet it was the kind of sound your ears heard always at first, and within hours became among other of the earth’s music drowned out by familiarity and thought. Like the sound of evening insects, the mind identified and ignored this constant among nature’s calls.
It was the sound of Water. Gushing, running water of a river bending downward off the earth, plummeting a hundred feet into chaos, then serenity of the land below. Our encampment shared a proximity with one of gods most magnificent spectacles, obscured to us from our imprisonment at it’s top, and granting us a view blasphemous compared to the picture it would bestow upon an onlooker below.
I was not the first to be liberated by this sound. Weeks we had spent marching, and weeks we had spent in hell. Prisoners to our kin, we were thought of as animals and treated far less than. A young man, newer in our company of veterans, was of the first to accept god’s blessing, and to look out upon the waters edge and see freedom in the face of certain death. Of this I saw a smile among my men for the first time since reaching this horrid place.
He had seen a future beyond the darkened moment, and I was naive to assume this was joy in the hope of a lesser evil. An avoidance to our suffering. So simple, to enter the gushing water outside our quarters and be taken to the plains below, swept off our thinned legs and carried to freedom from this place. I believe it to be the reason our camp was made here in the first place, to dare us to try and hope for our failure… and therefore hope for one less mouth to feed.
What awaited us down there?
More confederates with rifles, poised to execute the brave carried beyond the blue edge? Or perhaps a regiment of our own, with coffee and tobacco, blowing trumpets and happy to welcome their comrades home. I had cursed the first of the boys as cowards, fearful to lose them to the equalizer which awaits us all. I prayed for an end to the war, waiting for a liberation to take us, all of us, home. But my leadership had been undermined by god and nature, and the river spoke to my friends more true than I ever could. Their weakened bodies abandoned care for this cause, and sought peace for their pain above all else in the world.
Soon, all the men smiled, for to stay here was now a choice. They sang, they smoked, they rejoiced. I remained stubborn, plugging my ears at night to push back against the sound of the running water beside me. I would return to my wife and children. At the end of my long life I dreamed to sit atop my porch with grandchildren in my lap and tell them of the war. I would wipe tears from my eyes when I remembered my brothers that had died here and along the way. I would remember those lost to the river. I would not be among them.
But in time, as all men are, I was broken. Beaten and starved and made lonely by my refusal to surrender, as so many of my men had done, I accepted the call of the water rushing around me. I had so long failed to acknowledge death at my door and greet him as a friend, instead of running my body and mind ragged with fear. My hair long and thin as my body had become, I saw him in the black mud beneath my feet creeping toward me with each passing day. The water, the executioner, had become an answer to this suffering, and like the others I now smiled, knowing as long as the running water was heard, an escape from hell was but seconds away.
In the end, we went together. Stories of defeated armies and camps being set ablaze presented the few whom remained with a choice of execution: at our hand or the hands of our captors. The river sang to us like a siren, and we sang back to her as she led us home. Our captors fired muskets into a sea of blue, making a final desperate effort to rob us with any sense of serenity, but the rushing waters like a protective shield whisked us from their torment and returned us to the earth.
Men had begun to sing about the river in the months leading to our universal acceptance of her merciful allure, and in that our final surrender to the fate laid before us, a union choir joined the echo of the falls in the most beautiful harmony heard by my ears. The sound, more so than the water itself, had liberated us from that place. And to the end of the war, my boys and I went together.
Oh, Shenandoah
I hear you calling
Hi-O, you rolling river
Oh, Shenandoah
I long to hear you
Hi-O, I’m bound away
‘Cross the wide Missouri
Missouri, she’s a mighty river
Hi-O, you rolling river
When she rolls down
Her tops’ll shiver
Hi-O, I’m bound away
‘Cross the wide Missouri
Farewell my dearest
I’m bound to leave you
Hi-O, you rolling river
Oh, Shenandoah
I’ll not deceive you
Hi-O, I’m bound away
‘Cross the wide Missouri