IHT Ep 007 America

Show Notes

Voicemail

Special thanks to my daughter, Eva Lord, for providing the voice of America’s voicemail message.

Tisallee

Actually, this is my wife, Laura’s, story. She went for years believing that Tisallee was America’s other name before someone straightened her out in the third grade.

Mountains of California

When I was 15, I got to fly across the country to work in the backcountry of the Sierra National Forest with a Student Conservation Association trail crew. I would recommend it to any young person who loves wild places. And while the over-the-top eroticization of the landscape here is hyperbolic, I really did swoon over mountains and waterfalls all summer. I like to think that I was exuberant. My fellow trail crew members, however, usually described me as giddy.

Africa

This is a true story as best as I (and my wife who accompanied me) can remember it. This particular excursion was a kind of “bonus” to a safari that we’d gone on through Kruger National Park. Neither of us had any idea that it was part of the package. But it was as influential in my life as seeing one of the greatest wildlife parks in the world.

Farmstand

This farmstand is also a real place, a place that is still just down the road from the town where I now live. Walker Farm is a 250 year old organic farm. Their heirloom tomatoes are amazing.

American Poetry

“The Gold of Her Promise” is from Maya Angelou’s poem “America.” “Let America be the dream” is from Langston Hugh’s poem “Let America be America Again.” Both of these poems manage to celebrate America and indict her at the same time. And they are both beautiful. “I Hear America Singing” is from the eponymous poem by Walt Whitman. The re-imagining of “My Country, Tis of Thee” was written by Libby Roderick, the Alaskan folk singer. Her 1990 album, “If You See a Dream” is passionate and wise and was the soundtrack to my first summer in Vermont. The final track on that album, “America, America” ends with this lyric.

The Message

Hey America, 

It’s Ben. I was kinda hoping you’d pick up. Well … Hey, listen, I know that our relationship has been complicated, and I get it if you’re not particularly interested in hearing from me right now … considering everything. But I needed to at least try … Alright, I don’t know if you’ll ever even listen to this message, so I’m just gonna come right out and say it … I still love you America … despite everything … I still love you. 

And I’ve always loved you. 

Born an American 

I mean, sure, when I was a kid, I just loved you because everybody else did. From the way they all talked, I guess, I believed that you could do no wrong. I mean, you’d given us everything. You were the wisest and most generous of them all. You’d given us all our houses and our cars and safety and plenty … and we knew that those other people out there, people with those other countries, just didn’t have the good things that we did. You’d given us prosperity, but more importantly, you’d given us our freedom. And that was the most precious thing. It was the thing that no one else had. No one else in the whole world. I had no doubt. And we had it because of you. How could we not love you?

Every single one of the guys in my Boy Scout troop had a total crush on you. Even the people who talked candidly about the mistakes they thought you were making would still show up for your birthday, and wear your colors, and put their hands over their hearts when your flag went by. I think that every one I knew genuinely believed that you were “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” 

America, you know I pledged myself to you early. Ha! Even before I really knew what a pledge was. I mean, really, I can’t be the only one who thought your first name was Tisalee … as in my country, Tisalee. It’s kind of strange, don’t you think, that they betrothed us like that before we had any idea what it meant. Anyway, whether or not I knew what the words literally meant, I knew what they were for … I knew I was promising not to falter, to be on your side, to take care of you no matter what, to protect you … if I had to with my life.

And you know, with all those others pledging their love, you’d think I’d have been jealous, but I never was. I mean, as far as I was concerned you deserved all that love. 

And then I hit my teens and ho, boy, love took on a whole new meaning

Teenage Dream

 … your body … whew … it drove me to distraction. I mean, they aren’t kidding about your amber waves of grain. Even today, when you’re showing off your mountains, I can’t talk straight. And those canyons … I swear I could get lost and die in there and there’d be no better way to go. I would hang these provocative pictures of your landscapes on my bedroom walls and I would lie in bed, full of longing, pretending that your bright blue lakes were reflecting right back at me. 

They say everybody remembers their first time, but do you remember my first time in the mountains of California. I was fifteen and I was so awkward. But you were exciting and bright  and your colors were so sharp, I cut my heart on them. You made me so giddy with infatuation, that none of my clumsy earnestness got in the way. I wanted that summer to last forever. 

Sometimes when I think about what’s happened between us since, I look back through pictures of us from those days wishing that I could somehow get them back. 

Things Change

I can’t exactly say when things started to change. I guess there wasn’t any one turning point, but  I realized that something was wrong even then. In those years of young love, all I wanted to do was get up on your lands. I would find the scars on your mountains and the cuts right through your forests, the places where you paved yourself over. And I just couldn’t understand why you would do those kinds of things.   

When I went to college, I was convinced that I could fix all that. I was determined to learn how to heal you and protect you. I chose my school and my major so that one day I’d be able to care for all your wildness … but when I got there, I learned about a whole different side of you. 

Look, I won’t belabor it. I’m not here to accuse or blame. God knows I’ve made mistakes here too. But there’s no way around what it did to me … to us … when I found out about what you did … not just to the buffalo and the wolves … but to all those people… to your very first family … to the ones who had cared for you for over 10,000 years … to the ones you kidnapped and enslaved … the nations that you stole from and manipulated and coerced and even destroyed.

I felt … I don’t know … I don’t know how I felt … betrayed, I guess … confused. Mostly, I felt blind. I’d been living with you for twenty-something years, how could I have missed the signs. Maybe I just didn’t want to see. You know, you never think that you’ll be the one in that kind of relationship. Until you are. 

But for a while all I wanted to do was leave. 

Africa

I thought of swearing you off entirely, surfing from couch-to-couch, hooking up with whatever country would have me. 

You know the first time I left you, I really left–all the way to Africa. It’s painful to read my journals from that time. It’s so clear that I’m looking for a rebound. Here I am, this entitled, white kid so earnestly trying to look over the walls of my own privilege … by flying halfway around the world with my Lonely Planet guide and a yoga mat. 

And, yes, I did seriously bring my yoga mat to Africa. The irony is not lost on me. 

This was right after that whole Bush v. Gore hanging chad thing. I want to say, I wasn’t really angry at you. Maybe I should have been, but I wasn’t … mostly I was just … God, it seems so juvenile in retrospect … but …[long pause] … I was embarrassed of you. Embarrassed to be associated with you. All these people that I met kept asking what I thought about how you handled yourself through that whole ballot crisis thing. And they were all kind of laughing about it … and I just thought of ironing a big red maple leaf patch onto my backpack and telling everyone that I was from Ottawa. 

Anyway, it was in Africa when I met this guy. I wish I could remember his name. He invited some of us youth hostel vagabonds to come stay with him for a day and a night to see what he’d been working on–a kind of teaching school for the children of his tribe whose families had gone off to Soweto or Jo-burg or Pretoria to find jobs and make lives for themselves. He had built this little cluster of whitewashed rondavel in the bush. There was a big, round, thatched-roof classroom and a floor of dried dung, like cement. And this guy would bus in children and teens … kids who’d never known anything but the city streets and he’d immerse them, for a week or two, in the culture and the dances and the stories and the lives of their ancestors. “This is who you are,” he would tell them, “This is who. You. Are.” 

And here I come, this entitled kid from 8,000 miles away–who had never learned anything practical in my life–who could not fix a refrigerator or change the brakes in a truck–with nothing useful to offer in return except a few hundred rand and some angsty poetry. And he spends his whole day telling me about his heritage … his most precious gift. We made rope. We wove. We cooked. He offered one of his rondavels for us to stay in. He told stories. He sang songs around the fire. 

And then, when the embers had burned low, he asked us one simple thing. “Now you,” he said, “Now you share with me something from your countries.” And he sat down to take in what we had to offer. 

And I could think of nothing to say about you, America … Nothing … after having lived with you for so long. 

In my defense, I wasn’t alone. There were a bunch of Aussie guys there, a New Zealander, a British couple, and another American. All of us shrinking back from the firelight and studying the beers in our hands or the dust at our feet. 

It was silent a long time before our host realized that no one had anything to say. 

I will never forget the look on his face … the man who had devoted his whole life to holding together the fragmenting pieces of his culture … who believed in his culture’s ability to save the hearts and souls of his nieces and nephews in the way that some people believe in God. 

His face was stricken … a kind of surprise, a kind of disgust … Did we care for our heritage so little? Did we not have ONE good thing to say about the countries that had raised us, taught us, given us so much that we could fly around the world because we just felt like exploring. 

I think I saw another look there too … a look of pity. 

“You’ve got to have something,” he scolded us, “This is your heritage. You have to take pride in that” And when we still didn’t say anything, he said, “When you go home to your country, you must find something about where you’re from that you can be proud of.” 

But all that passed through my mind were strip malls, fast food joints, hazardous waste sites, and police turning back protesters with fire hoses … and hanging chads. And I was ashamed, America. I’m sorry. 

Eventually, one of the Australians led us in a drunken off-key rendition of Waltzing Matilda and the Scottsman led us in a drinking song. One of the English guys leaned over to me and said, “Can’t you do a verse of ‘Yankee Doodle?’” 

But I didn’t. I excused myself and laid on my sleeping bag in the rondavel and wished that I was someplace else. 

Homework Assignment

“You have to find something about where you are from that you can be proud of.” For years afterward, I could hear his voice in my head, reminding me of this unfinished assignment he’d given. 

I knew he was right. I knew that’s what I had to do. 

I watched you carefully after that, America … but always from a distance. I was afraid of getting too close. Didn’t want to get my heart broken again, I suppose. But something was different somehow. I mean, It’s not like I stopped seeing all of your faults, but I stopped basting them in surprised indignation. God knows I’ve hurt people too. So has everyone else I love. What country doesn’t. What person doesn’t. Whoever among you is without sin, y’know? 

But watching from a distance wasn’t cutting it. Looking at you through the stories of your endless feuds in the news and the tabloids. All that gossip about who you went behind closed doors with at the G-8 summit or the latest insensitive comments that someone caught you saying on tape. If I was going to find my way back to you, I was going to have to meet you face-to-face again. 

And that’s when we bumped into each other … totally by accident. I was just on my way back to my new apartment, and I stopped at that little farmstand … the one on the shoulder of Route 5 as it passes through Dummerston. I didn’t even know you were working there. 

I looked around at the little cartons of heirloom tomatoes and the sweet corn and the funny broccoflower hybrids you had grown … that pillowy, handmade challa bread. And I thought … you made this … America made this. And suddenly there you were with me.  

I got to admit, it wasn’t like automatic 4th of July fireworks between us. I didn’t say much. You didn’t either. But … in that moment … I knew I’d started the work I needed to do. 

“You have to find something you can be proud of.” 

And I thought … I am proud of you for this … this one little roadside farmstand … for growing good, green things from the place where you are, for nourishing the health and heart of the people around you in this most direct way … for caring about soil and honeybees … 

That may not be all of you, America, but it’s part of you … and it’s a part of you that I love. 

You, America

I bought my vegetables and wished you a good day and drove home. But things were different after that. I started bumping into you everywhere. I’d catch glimpses of you, sometimes from a distance. It turns out, America, there are so many things I love about you. You have done so many amazing things. 

Like that time you decided that the most beautiful places wouldn’t just get sold off to the highest bidder for strip-mining or condominiums or fenced off to become the exclusive playgrounds of the rich. That was you, America. You invented the idea of a national park, a park that belongs to everybody. 

You are the one who decided that every single child had the right to learn to read–and you made it so that no one could keep them working in the fields or in the factories with the machines that ate their hands. You decided that everyone gets to have poetry and algebra and science–the most beautiful things that people had ever made would belong to everybody. 

You are the country that first made libraries truly public. The country that still, in the quiet river valleys hosts town meetings where neighbors sit together to figure out how to keep the roads plowed and the lights on at the fire station. 

It’s true … you turned the dobermans on peaceful protesters, but you were also the ones protesting. You were the one who had the courage to show up to that protest knowing what the police would do. And it was you who sat at the segregated lunch counter and quietly demanded to be treated with dignity. It was you, fighting back at the Stonewall Inn and calling out with pride that you would not be ashamed of the lovers who shared your bed and your heart. 

It was you who said, so radically and so loudly and with such audacity that “all men are created equal” and it was you who gathered in Seneca Falls to declare that it was not just men. 

It was you who lifted a torch to light the way of “the huddled masses,” you who dreamed that your children would be judged “not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

And it IS you … it is still you who gets up every day to fight for that vision even when it seems that that dream is as far away as it’s ever been. 

Where We Are Now

When we were first a thing, I thought I knew who you were, but I just have no idea anymore. I think I’ve just kind of accepted that. So many of the stories people told about you when I was a kid were true! And so many of the stories that they didn’t tell were true also. You are such a mass of contradictions. Sometimes I think that inside of you, you have 330,000,000 different personalities, all arguing with each other. You are so full of hate and swagger and stubborn ignorance, and simultaneously with courage and brilliance and grace. You are so greedy and entitled, even as you quietly get up each day and fight for the equality of all. Somehow you are both “Make America Great Again” and “Yes, we can!” You walk in flip-flops through the streets of Paris loudly declaiming the French as if none of them understand English, but you are also quick to smile at strangers and invite them over for beer. 

I guess what I’m saying is that I’ll take you with all of your contradictions. I may not be in love with your flag or your Constitution, or the government that you built or all those tacky two-car garages, but those were never you anyway. 

You once said that you “were conceived in liberty” and I think that is as close to the heart of you as I can get. Beneath all the fireworks and the red, white, and blue sequins … that’s all you are … that burning torch in all of us, that yearning to breathe free, to finally break our chains and walk together, hand in hand, with liberty and justice for all. For all. For. All. 

I think what I’ve learned from my “homework assignment”… from that guy who was building his little cultural park … is that I had to stop thinking of you as “you.” Because you only made sense when I thought of you as “us.”

If I could go back to that campfire in Africa, I know what I’d say. 

I wouldn’t sing Yankee Doodle. 

But I would sing. 

I would sing 

“The gold of her promise has never been mined.” (Maya Angelou)

I would sing 

“Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed

Let it be that great strong land of love

Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme”

I would sing 

I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,

Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs. (Walt Whitman) 

I would sing

My country dear to me

Sweet land of liberty

To thee I sing

Land where my people died

Land of the Native’s pride

With justice as our guide

Let freedom ring 

(Libby Roderick. America, America)

End of Message 

Anyway … I don’t know what’ll happen to this over-long message … maybe you’ll just see my name in your call list and remove me from your contacts. But … even if you never answer … even if you never rise up to become the country you dream of being … I just wanted to say thank you. You’ve given me so much more than you know. And … I do love you. If you’re willing to give us another chance … well … I’d like that. Maybe we could find our way together. 

You know where to find me.