The United States is a beautiful place.
There’s no need for romantic essays or indulgent sonnets or rhymes to thee of sea to shining sea, the beauty of America stands available for all, a sight of colors, a trigger of smells, a refreshment of breezes, a barefoot walk of sand, rock, gurgling or billowing water, and yes, alabaster cities set gleaming by a sun settling in the horizon.
Travel its roads and you’ll see we love our trees, from the spacious, glory greens of Kentucky to the spectrum of colors in autumn New England. Stop into our cities and towns and you’ll see thousands of places where residents have forsaken construction for preservation of Angel Oak and Maple, whole towns and cities where protection of trees is municipal code.
A friend spoke recently of an unforgettable, spectacular New York City sunset following a day-long storm and flooding rain. A sandstorm in Phoenix will give a sundown an at-once ominous and glorious sky as the white sun sets on red, blue, purple, green and varying shades of brown.
The pristine brooks rolling over the rocks of Maine with water that looks so pure one is tempted to drink it, the life threatening cold of the Upper Peninsula, the hot humid browning of palm trees in Galveston, San Diego and Miami, the warm days of Flagstaff that give way to chilling night cold — travel America and you can see it, feel it, become overwhelmed by it with contrast and natural wealth.
Drive it, and you’ll be even more astonished by how wide open and unconquered is the United States, especially if you’re from one of the cities, where it’s easy to believe the whole world is made up of concrete-and-rebar canyons and tricky cement suburbs and crowded unnatural flyovers that cold turns to ice.
Stop into a small town or city and you’ll more than likely find a friendly face, even if it’s just because they want to sell you something. There is something heartwarming like nothing else to meet a stranger who’ll ask you about yourself and will still today meet you halfway in conversation — if attitude is put aside — and you’ll likely find that along the nation’s side roads and in towns from South Carolina to Washington.
It can be a real vacation to stop for a coffee or a beer with a stranger and swap stories for a few minutes, even if you don’t have much time. It’s a grounding experience that can be remindful that, as someone once said, people are the same everywhere. And there is more good than bad, more caring than loathing.
There are people who will help if you ask, people who help even if you don’t ask. Think of that person who will see you stranded on a roadside and drive an extra two miles just to circle around and check on you. That same person who just might drive you into to town and help you buy a tire to replace your flat, and then drive you back to your car, just to help.
The US is full of these people, places and things. If you doubt it, again, try driving it, stop along the out-of-the-way. Or even spend a few days in a small town to break the cascading city-stress. US Interstate 40 will take you to the heartland, but so will 80, 65, 85.
And I-95 is a tour-de-force of contrasts, driven up and down or down and up. One mustn’t die without seeing, smelling and tasting these treasures and pleasures, whether the air of open North Carolina fields, or lobster from Florida or Maine, barbeque pulled from South Carolina pork or Maryland crabs baked in a buttery cake.
And if you get a few hours, don’t miss Appalachia at sunrise.
As for me, I’ll die on this hill: America is still The Beautiful. People may be the same everywhere and every nation has spacious skies, but you can still see the waves of grain here, there is every color of nature in all locations, and despite the enclaving of any one city, there is plenty of room for everything without fear.
I’ll take a night in Marietta, Florida, or a night in Los Angeles with equal passion because it took me a long time, but I came to appreciate the secrets and subtitles of the nation, and I wish with great fervor that you will come to understand it too.
There is no basis for one square mile of America to look down on another: they are both of equal splendor when approached with love and appreciation.
You’re welcome to the obvious places: Yellowstone is a vast treasure, as is The Grand Canyon, and if you talk about diversity of all kinds you’ll get around to Texas, New York and, well, California is a phenomenon of its own in all aspects.
America itself, as a whole, has a freshness: There are even those earth scientists who believe a meteor landed somewhere near the Yucatan, sending Gulf waters sweeping in a tsunami up the Mississippi River, and that’s why you’ll find skeletons of ocean crustacea at the very beginning of the river at Lake Itaska, Minnesota.
But there is a history in these United States too. It may go back only a few centuries or millennia, or precisely 250 years, or something like 150 years, take your pick…and it’s certainly not the kind of history Europe measures, because a key to these states is renewal, re-invention and resounding rejuvenating resourcefulness.
Traditions are alive but muted; landmarks are preserved but by Greek standards are practically new. The Old Days live in the languages and recipes and laws and the land itself, much of it unfettered by development, sprawl or degradation for thousands o years, perhaps, in places with names like Montana, West Virginia, and Mississippi.
America’s cities are a wonderland by night, with creative contrasting lighting that can mesmerize, making for a sparkling view from any high balcony, but by day its business sees no rival: huge stone-like masses of stacked stories that enclose offices where outrageous deals and monumental decisions are made, often in buildings that by modern standards are quaint or even antiquated. And as the aspirations of the nation’s creativity thrive, industry moves to the surrounding areas as, today, once-unimaginable, behemoth-like structures are being built to the specifics of once-unforeseeable technology.
Yet there are places you can go that haven’t changed much in 100 years, towns of modest Americans who have little use for trends and flashing conveniences like new cars and 70-inch screens, much less 5-inch screens in antiseptic electronic new trucks.
For those of us who were able to see much of the US in, say, 1960, it looks like a different place in some areas, with the worn-down gas stations replaced by fast food and multi-pumps, but the old gas stations remain in Connecticut, for instance. They’ll even check your oil and wipe down your windshield for tip. No self-service in these friendly disappearing institutions that once pumped the nation down Route 66.
I’m privileged to remember Quonset hut diners with greasy fried chicken; Esso stations with floor oil so thick its like a Slip ‘N Slide; gravel roads leading into Little Rock; the desk clerk at a 1962 Portland hotel who warned that Oregon residents don’t like strangers; the blues and jazz clubs of Memphis, New Orleans and Chicago, where one person and one piano can make an evening’s entertainment, and still can.
Unforgettable are the 20th Century towns that displayed broken down shotgun shacks, tiny wood-floor general stores about the size of a Circle K, big wooden-plank loading docks where men loaded flat trucks without forklifts, rickety wooden bridges, billboard-free highways and tired men and women who had worked the forty or fed the neighborhood, milked the cows, tended the chickens and handed out chores.
Features that still exist but must be sought, an America that remains but threatens to be extinguished from memory once the witnesses have moved on.
But yesterday and today, too: A land of fresh fish, abundant clean air, a gargantuan river, swarming with wildlife savory but protected, the unparalled food of all nations, a land of sunshine or rain or a fearsome sudden tornado, abundant energy and ingenious people everywhere making quiet and minuscule changes in our society that sometimes, in aggregate, change the world.
A land of variable points of view that features fireflies, glowworms, lighting bugs, fire beetles AND candle flies. And all can even agree that they’re all the same curious lazy-flashing floaters that stream by the dozens once the sun goes down.
It doesn’t take a de Tocqueville to see that a charm, an enthusiasm, a youthfulness, a breadth of limitlessness still permeates this land that altogether, for good or bad, is unseen anywhere else on the planet.
There is no better understatement about America than that it is indeed unique.
God shed His grace on thee.