Retracing Paul Revere's ride: No Redcoats for convention week but the traffic is intenseBOSTON TO LEXINGTON, Mass. -- The British are coming. They're coming in loud and clear on my car radio in a BBC broadcast from the Democratic National Convention.
And I, on the opposite shore, am retracing the midnight ride of Paul Revere as it takes me over the Big Dig and past the FleetCenter -- through onetime farmland, now swanky suburbs -- and on to the site of the Minuteman revolt. If Revere were with me, he would see that Americans are still up in arms about their government, from the Democrats in Boston hoping to elect John Kerry, to the Medford church along the route that posted an anti-abortion, anti-Kerry prayer on its front lawn. But much more has changed than stayed the same since Revere's famous ride more than two centuries ago -- so much, in fact, that it's hard to know where to begin. So I begin at Revere's greenish-gray clapboard house in what is now the Italian enclave of Boston's North End and set out, as he did, for Lexington. The directions provided by maps and the home's curators cannot keep up with the Big Dig, a $14.6 billion road reshuffling that has tied up the city's traffic for more than a decade. There will be U-turns and stops to check the way, enough roads that aren't where they're supposed to be to turn an 18-mile trip into an 80-minute tour. Revere needed about two hours to reach Samuel Adams and John Hancock on the night of April 18-19, 1775, and warn them that the British Regulars were coming to arrest them. But he also stopped at every house to warn his countrymen of the approaching Redcoats. He had his problems; I have mine. Revere had British warships and patrols to fear as he traveled by rowboat and horse. I am in air-conditioned and upholstered comfort, but with the ever-changing Boston roads and ever-raging Boston drivers to contend with. He had two lanterns in a belfry. I have spotty cell phone service. Revere left at 10 p.m., under the cloak of darkness. I depart at 1:15 p.m., with less than three hours to spare before the Secret Service, fearful of what terrorists could do with a tunnel abutting the convention site, plan to shut down the city's main traffic artery. I turn on the radio and the British Broadcasting Corp. is reporting that the pound closed at $1.839, a rate that would have earned Revere -- a British subject at the time -- a fee of $20.32 on the bill he submitted for his services over the ensuing weeks. Friends rowed Revere across the Charles River, where he borrowed a horse and went on his famous way. Today, he could travel on either of two bridges from the FleetCenter, where the Democrats are gathering to nominate Kerry for president, to Charlestown, the home of the USS Constitution -- "Old Ironsides" -- and Paul Revere Park. Continued... |
