An Advanced look at Volume 4 – The Battle for Arkansas
Spring in Green Bay lasts about three weeks. The snow melts, pot holes appear everywhere, garbage that has been hidden by the snow is now visible at every curb, but people smile. They are happy they can take their parkas off, and they are happy they have a few days before the mosquitoes arrive. In other words, these are the best days of the year.
Things were also good for Elise and me. We had the National Cathedral reserved for our wedding May 28, and while we knew we would have to postpone until fall when the political scene was more stable, politics was trending in the right direction. The April elections had shown the Heritage party to be weaker than it had appeared. Where some had expected it to take over the Louisiana Legislature, it only had a slight plurality. It would form a government there, but it would need the involvement of at least one other party -- a power-sharing arrangement that should moderate their damage – at least in theory.
My classes were winding down, and while I had arrived back on campus a week late (and completely unprepared for class), there had been no serious repercussions. In fact, my contract had been extended for an additional year. Maybe someone called someone. I don’t know. In any case, my graduate students were doing pretty good work, and were getting used to the idea that maybe the U.S. was not the worst country in the world and had a history worth studying. My undergraduates still thought the U.S. was a pretty awful place, and I was incredibly prejudiced, but they at least became a little more accurate in the names and dates of events they chose to hate.
Elise was still working long hours, but she found one evening a week to spend with me, and Saturdays she was now sometimes home early in the afternoon. Sundays she spent an hour answering emails while I made breakfast, but then she stayed away from her computer and phone while we went to mass and then to her parents’ home for Sunday dinner.
Like the rest of green Bay, I thought these were the best days of the year. If only they had lasted a little longer. But the second week in May a training base for Canadian reservists declared it was only responsible to take orders from the “legitimate provincial government.” Back in the good old days, the base commander would have been put some place until he sobered up, but these were not the good old days. The commander – and it appeared most of the senior officers at the base – made a public statement to the local media, and then locked the gates. Insubordination was bad, of course, but two things made the situation much, much worse. First, this was not some tiny base with fifty fat reservists who had cabin fever from a long winter. This was one of the largest and most well-provisioned and well-staffed bases in the country. And second, the base was in Arkansas.
Maybe the location was the most important. If it had been Louisiana, the problem might have been seen as just one more provocation from an extreme corner of the country. But Green Bay had been working on Arkansas. Elise and half her department had been down there all winter giving out dollars for government projects, and hoping to make friends in the process. If Arkansas stayed with Green Bay, then Louisiana was isolated, and so weakened it was less likely to provoke anything leading to independence. But if Arkansas joined Louisiana… The alarm bells ringing all over government offices in Green Bay were deafening.
I lost Elise for a solid week as she went to endless research and strategy meetings. She got home most nights too tired to talk, and when she did talk, there was a limit to what she could tell me, but it was clear this was a surprise. No one had prepared any response. No one had even considered such an eventuality. They had no idea what to do.
Back at the university we were just getting started on exam week. As you might predict, I was asked multiple times – “Will we still have exams?” That call was up to the Chancellor, but based on what I was hearing in faculty meetings, the academy was to continue as usual. That’s what I told students, and that’s how I prepared. I got some fairly creative excuses from a few students about why they should be excused from finals and still pass the class. I told them to take it up with the dean. I figured he could use the entertainment. For the vast majority of students, we just kept with the schedule. Something disturbing was happening in Arkansas, but that was pretty remote, and while it might lead to all kinds of bad things, for the moment at least, people still wanted grades and diplomas, and the jobs they would get after graduation.
The spring social scene in Green Bay revolves around lacrosse. Any new player on the team got face time on the evening news, and water-cooler conversation involved intense discussions over which team might challenge in the division. Lacrosse matters in Green Bay. We might think it is silly that anyone would waste time on anything other than cricket, but the French are the French and that is the way their world turns. I say all that to preface the first real incident after the base closure that had an impact on the average person in Green Bay.
My father’s company had a reserved box at Lambeau Field, and that is where I spent my Sundays. Why not, Elise was now in the office pretty much non-stop, and the food was free. The company used me as a kind of social link to various government folks, so you could even claim my attendance was a kind of “work.” So I was there about two weeks after the base announcement when the incident happened. Historians are always reluctant to name the real start of any war since so much can be assigned the blame, but when the full history of this war is written, I expect many to say the first “bullet” was fired that afternoon at Lambeau Field.
It started with the worst scheduling idea in the history of sports. Months before, some genius decided to invite the Arkansas Otters up for an exhibition game. It would be a chance to build friendships through sports, etc. Whatever back room marketing genius picked that matchup had never ever actually attended a lacrosse match and seen what fans look like. They sit out in the parking lot and drink endless bottles of cheap wine near their cars, a routine they call “tailgating.” Hours later they stagger in the stadium and shout obscenities at opposing players for the entire game. “Friendship through sport” existed in the imagination of people who watched too many movies.
As bad as these things always are, with the constant harassment of opposing players (and any opposing fans dumb enough to attend), this Sunday it was worse. The revolt at the reserve base had people angry, and maybe scared, and if you add barrels of wine to that mix, you get thunderous chants accusing the hapless Otters of any kind of vile obscenity known the man or beast. The Otters could have just put in ear plugs and waited for three hours until the clock ran out and they got to return to the safety of their province. But these were not normal men, these were lacrosse players. You weren’t going to tell them they had mated with farm animals and get away with it. No sir. They had their honor to uphold. So we were no more than ten minutes into the match when three of their guys get off the bench and go charging up against the seats, only to be drenched in wine thrown from a hundred cups. This would have been a real good time for cooler heads to call the match and get everyone to safety, but cooler heads weren’t running the match, lacrosse team owners were. The match would continue, after all, it was needed to achieve friendship through sport.
While that was occurring, there was the usual mayhem on the field that occurs any time you give twenty men a chance to run around and attack each other with sticks. The body checking was rough, tripping was almost universal, and then one of the Lambeau Loons totally lost his mind. In replays you could see he had just been hit really hard by one Otter as another tripped him from behind. It was dirty, but not that uncommon for lacrosse. But what people saw was his response. Getting up off the ground, he bent his knees, reached back with his stick, took a full swing with all his muscles tensed, and hit an Otter across the neck. Hundreds of folks will tell you they could hear his neck snap from clear across the field. The man was dead before he hit the ground. The Jumbotron showed the murder on a screen a hundred feet high. Everyone saw it, and everyone reacted. And – here’s where it get
s really bad – the first reaction was a cheer from the crowd.
To me, that was the real start of the Canadian Civil War.
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