My Long History Rant or Humor Me

So 1776 by David McCollough is the book that is distracting me through my five mile runs these days.  Due to the untimely attack by viruses most virulent on the ol' Person Who Does the Computer Stuff Around Here's computer and what with him being out of town, I've had to listen to a book rather than watch a documentary on his computer while I putter through my treadmill routine.  1776 has proven it's worth to be greater than that of a picture show documentary.  I just love that David McCollough.

As I was beating my feet against the belt of my treadmill I found myself completely inspired by one Mr. Henry Knox.  He was a bookseller in Boston before the Revolutionary War got going.  He married himself a cute little girl from a Loyalist family and was offered a good position in the British army.  He declined.  The man knew for which cause he stood.  He cozied himself up to George Washington and figured out exactly where Washington's ear was.  During a cold winter outside of Boston where the British troops were drinking and gambling the winter comfortably away, Knox came up with a plan to beat the pants off of His Majesty's loyal servants.  He figured if he went up to Fort Ticonderoga where the British had been pushed out of the year before, he could snag up the cannon they'd left behind.  He'd bring the artillary down to Boston, push it up to Dorchester Heights, and surprise the pants right off the Redcoats.  Washington approved the plan.

That left Knox with a 300 mile journey over lake, river, hill and dale in the middle of winter with the pleasant and corpulant company of forty-three heavy brass and iron cannons, six cohorns, eight mortars, and two howitzers to plan and carry out in short time.  Knox needed the weather to be warm to cross Lake George, then snowy to move the artillary on sleds, then super cold to freeze the ice to cross the Hudson (which he did four times).  Sometimes he got snow, sometimes he got too much snow, sometimes it was too warm, sometimes it was too cold.  He needed men, oxen, and then some more oxen because the other one's were worn out.  He thought he needed about two weeks for the job.  It took six weeks.  At one point he lost some cannon into the Hudson river.  But that was alright because "the good people of Albany" helped him haul them back up again.

Then in one night at the end of this tremendously patient journey, Knox pulled all the artillary up on to Dorchester Heights, had a few trees painted like cannon just to look burlier, and waited for the British jaw's to drop in the morning in a way that I can only imagine he had already played out about five-thousand times daily in his head since he first thought of the idea.  Upon seeing the cannon above him, Lord William Howe said something along the lines of, "Ahhh!  Let's get outta here!" and ran for the wharf.  Washington's army got themselves a huge, motivating, exhilirating victory.

So listening to that made me think.  Wow.  Henry Knox did all that without quitting.  He had a doggone cannon pulled out of a river by "the good people of Albany."  He kept trudging on even when he was more than just a few minutes later than he thought he would be.  He did all that traveling in the cold, cold winter.  Man, I can have hope.  He had hope.  I can have hope.  I'm not going to give up...on anything.

I was doing a little research on the man on the computer after hearing about this and came across an article where the author maintained that what Henry Knox did was heroic, BUT "it was not heroic so much because of the labor involved or the obstacles to be overcome. Every farmer in the northeast in that day encountered comparable labor every time he cleared boulders from his land with a team and sled or tried to move goods overland on snowy roads and across ice covered rivers."

"Well geez, why was it heroic then?"

The author answered my question, "What was heroic in this expedition was that it was a stroke of inspiration, coupled with good timing, skilled logistics and luck."

Henry Knox had heroic inpiration?  Heroic good timing?  Heroic skilled logistics?  HEROIC LUCK???  Can you have heroic luck?  The only thing I could see in the list that wasn't providential was Knox having some heroic logistical skills.  Sign me up for them things.

As I listened to this story as I pounded away on the treadmill, I figured I can keep working hard in my life.  I can keep slogging through the three foot deep snow and I can keep dragging 1800 pound sleds against a stiff wind.  I'm not going to let the wrong weather or a few hundred poorly marked miles keep me from deciding to move.  I've got places to go and a cause to support.  And I'm going to do it even if it's not all that heroic just because everybody else does hard work too.  Good things for good reasons are worth doing - even if you fall flat on your sniffer (in which case you hope for the good people of Albany).  So excuse me now, but I've got some majorly heroic good luck to be persuing.

I finished my last miles on the dreadmill the other day with a pretty darn good pick-up.

* Source: http://www.nysm.nysed.gov/services/KnoxTrail/kthistory.html