LOOKING LIKE 400 MILES of bad road, I sit at a table outside the Sweet Shop Bakery in Shepherdstown, exhausted and achy but eager to walk the West Virginia town’s Civil War battlefield. On a Nashville-to-Philadelphia round trip, I have already visited a prison where Al Capone was incarcerated; a tavern on the site of a deadly Civil War munitions factory explosion; a rough neighborhood where the more adventuresome may examine the head of George Meade’s favorite horse; and world-famous Pat’s King of Steaks, where I ordered a sweet pepper-covered, heartburn-inducing steak sandwich.
Then a helmet-clad man on a whirring, humming Segway rolls up, looking like he means business.
“Are you John Banks?” he asks.
“Yes,” I say, visions of Paul Blart in Mall Cop swirling in my head.
“I’m Steve Alemar.”
Alemar, the part-time parking enforcement officer in Shepherdstown (pop. about 1,800), is president of the Shepherdstown Battlefield Preservation Association. He has secured permission for me to visit privately owned battleground on the bluffs above
