Quantico, Virginia

I just spent four strange work-weeks at the U.S. Marine Corps Officer Candidate School's (OCS) Iwo Jima Trail, part of their facilities, once used by Confederate forces to stop Union gunboats on the Potomac River. We stayed in nearby Dumfries, Virginia "Virginia's Oldest Town" named after a place in Scotland, home for many years of the Scottish author Robert Burns ("Auld Lang Syne" comes to mind wee bairns). A bustling town next to Triangle, Virginia it is on Route 1 (called "Jeff Davis Hwy" there), and also the Washington-Rochambeau route to defeat General Cornwallis at Yorktown, Virginia mentioned in previous posts about the "Kings Ferry" on the Hudson River in New York State.

The Iwo Jima Trail was archaeologically tested for possible eligible to be nominated cultural resources perhaps overlooked in the histories and other events, i.e., prehistory of the region. At the entrance to Quantico (and the Marine Corps University among other facilities, OCS, NCIS, FBI and DEA training) is a large statute of the famous photo of the US Marines raising the flag there in the Pacific campaign of World War II. The Iwo Jima Trail is one of many named after the US Marines legacies in many places here and abroad, one of the oldest services, a part of the US Navy, used in many maritime battles. There's a Khe Sahn Trail, Inchon, etc., through the woods. One the Civil War Trail has the remains of semi-subterranean huts built into hillsides used by the Confederate forces.

The story I heard was the nearby radar tower is to be improved and certain areas around the Iwo Jima Trail have trees that have to be harvested as they are too tall, and a joke heard was that it was wished the radar could be raised, the various trees are very large and beautiful with an under-story of American Holly growing here and there along with the rather large climbing poison ivy (an almost "furry" vine attached to vertical surfaces, water vines in wet areas, cut will drip water) and other foliage which we watched as spring arrived, the forest silent before the recent nor'easter, now full of the sounds of birds and other wildlife. Ospreys are nesting atop poles there, and an eagles nest is in the top of the spire of the large chapel on base. The mechanical Ospreys V-22 were also on and off the runway in various numbers, along with other materiél, including "Marine One" the US President's helicopter transport to and from the White House nearby in Washington, D.C. as he or perhaps someday, she, chooses.

Being there in the "Sleep Inn" or "Comfort Inn" during the massacre at Virginia Tech was sad. It was reported in the New York Daily News, that perhaps the student's parents, in the dry cleaning business, had unknowingly exposed their son repeatedly to a now considered dangerous form of dry-cleaning fluid now ordered to be replaced in all facilities in New York City with "PERC" cleaning fluid, the safer environmentally "friendly" replacement. Formerly trained in hazardous materials protection at the old Bellevue Nurses College and having completed a "health and safety" course for supervisors, and a number of refreshers at the Elmsford, NY Fire Safety Training facility, I would like to express my sympathy for the victims and hope future events can be stopped.

A "murder" case resulted from exposure to toxic fumes, creating brain damage, described in one of my classes. I have also worked in a very large machine shop, Gasser and Sons, where precautions were taken to prevent such exposure, and on sites where different levels of safety are required, though I've only been on a tennis court in a full Level A hazard suit in 93 F degree heat, right after the superheated steam conduit explosion in then nearby Gramercy Park, which was draped in plastic and cleaned of asbestos fibers for a number weeks. I had business relations with one of the Con Edison workers victims, (George B. Cortelyou was once its early CEO) when he was an employee of the U-Haul we used for our winter archaeological investigations in JP Morgan's former summer home, now Bowdoin Park, renting a generator and toboggan to get it to our site then to be a sewerage treatment plant, at the former hypothesized original Dutchess County settlement "landing" and subsequent early ferry to Marlboro, NY across the Hudson River, and below the city of Poughkeepsie, NY.