Forgive me for not writing earlier. I had a self imposed deadline on the super secrete film script and while I had time to work on it, my concentration couldn’t include my writing these letters to you.
Today is the Fourth of July. My family spent some time in Sitka. Finn, Emily and Arthur went camping in a wilderness cabin and they spent time visiting with old high school friends and dabbling in the tide pools on the beach in front of our old house. Jan went to Sitka to visit Nancy Ricketts and to clean up the Whale Lab. Dot and I stayed home, writing and walking the trails.
The cabin at Fred’s Creek on Sitka Sound.
I’m going to post photos of Arthurs first big camping trip, because we used to love camping in the summer and I associate these images with July 4. I’m posting two old photos for my brother and sister because holidays make me nostalgic.
The Fourth of July is a patriotic holiday, often reserved for expressions of our love for America. For some, the whole issue of Patriotism becomes entangled with self identification. Some patriots have their own bellicose expressions; a kind of “Love It Or Leave It” sentiment. Some give off the impression of becoming unapologetic supporters of every war America has ever fought. Some feel alienated by this zeal.
Arthur discovers the thrill of throwing rocks into water.
Since I am alone on this Fourth I thought I’d try to define my own sense of patriotism. I love my country and here is why.
I love the land itself: the mountains, the plains and the eastern cities. The waters of Puget Sound, fields of Iowa and the immense kinetic sculpture that is New York City. . I went to horse shoeing school in Riverton Wyoming and I remember having to walk to the edge of town each Sunday night to call my parents from a lonely phone booth. I get shivers to this day thinking of the dark plains spreading out all around the phone booth with its one flimsy light. The wind rumbled under the booth’s creaky folding door There were no lights on the horizon. I was on Native land. The Shoshone Indian reservation. I had hitch hiked to get to this place and it was both lonely and beautiful.
I love the small towns of Iowa where I went to college. I had a girlfriend who loved to hitch hike to the tiny farm towns.. We would eat in the cafe’s and talk to anyone who would talk with us. We sometimes went to the local churches and we would eat at community potlucks where we would bring a six pack of soda and grocery store macaroni salad then eat our fill of casserole and fried chicken. We were welcome all the same. At night we slept in the one old and dusty downtown hotel which had sagging bedsprings and a pitcher of water on the nightstand.
I love the beautiful new England towns, with their white churches and rivers running through them. I loved living in New York City and the people I met there, where my friends and I played football in the middle of the side streets. And I loved the Metropolitan Museum of Art where I went every weekend to meet girls, which I never did and had an almost OCD list of paintings and sculptures I would visit in a strict almost ceremonial order: the mummies (in honor of Holden Caufield who was my spirit guide during my early teenage years) Rodin’s “The Kiss” for my fierce but frozen sexual longing, Chellini’s Cup for my mother who loved it. and always always Van Gogh who fascinated me then , and still does.
I volunteered teaching in Harlem and Hells Kitchen, where the kids confounded all my expectations, because they were so lively and fun. I was told that they were desperately poor but they were smart and their parents clearly took pride in their clothes and appearance. They were loving towards me even though I was just passing through their lives. They exhausted me each day.
I love the Cascade Mountains and every national or state park I ever visited. I love the smell of a cold morning of a hot day in the mountains. I love seeing a bear shambling across a meadow, and a snake sunning itself on a rock. I love the lonely roads of Texas. I love Jazz, and American Film, I love country music and rhythm and blues. I love John Steinbeck and Richard Wright, I love Pattiann Rogers, Toni Morrison, Herman Mellvile, Malcom X, and Crazy Horse. I love the bigness and sloppiness of American food: the thump and bang of American pop music, and I still love museums which broaden my view beyond America’s borders.
Yes I’ve met racists and evil Americans. I have met people who do not accept the terms of ending the Civil War, which is long past due, and I’ve met Lakota Sioux people who will never accept the ending of the Indian Wars… which they shouldn’t. I am no Pollyanna about America. There is a lot to be reconsidered and to resolve. A lot to be thrown away and a lot to preserve. But I know I love it, flawed, childish, brawling and infuriating as it can be. Yet still, America is almost all I know of beauty.
Happy Fourth of July.
Here is a poem I wrote about The Battle Of The Wilderness.
