Day 310: Freedom Trail

Gary and I topped off our weekend in Boston with a walk on the Freedom Trail. On a chilly, misty evening, we walked the full 2.5 miles of the historic path through old Boston. We had no guide but we did have this quick guide on our phones, and plenty of time and privacy to linger over whatever interested us.

I first felt the gravity of it when we saw Samuel Adams’s grave:

We saw the church where Benjamin Franklin was baptized. I knew that Franklin was old when the Revolution began, but it had never really sunk in that he was born in 1706.

My favorite part was Paul Revere’s house, the last remaining structure in Boston built in the seventeenth century. I was too busy gaping at the shuttered windows and hitching post to remember to take a photo.

I did take one of Old North Church and the tour where Revere lit his signal lanterns — “one if by land, two if by sea.”

As night fell, we walked up Bunker Hill and around the memorial, the first of its kind when it opened in 1843 with 100,000 people in attendance. On this chilly spring night, it was just us, a few other tourists, and a group of about ten kids playing games. Somehow it felt uniquely real that way.

As an immigration lawyer, I’ve developed mixed feelings about the American Revolution. On one hand, had I lived at the time I likely would have been a Patriot, and it’s worked out well for me personally. The British Crown deserved no great love. But on the list of the Top 10 most oppressed people in history, the colonists don’t really figure. And today, the U.S. government excludes would-be immigrants under a rigid definition of “terrorist activity” that the Patriots themselves would have failed.

Still, as we walked the Freedom Trail, we had a sense of the enormous risks for those involved. I remembered again my awe at the political experiment they set in motion — simple, unprecedented, flawed, and genius — a political experiment that has fascinated me since adolescence. I’m still enthralled by it and wake up every morning grateful that I have a small role to play in making it work, and in making it work better.