Twilight

I’ve never been particularly patriotic. In fact, patriotism scares me a little – I’ve always seen it like some kind of extreme religion, even though I know that’s just silly and painfully incorrect. I guess it always struck me that patriotism was unwavering love for the country we live in – love that requires that you don’t question what happens and you just shut up and sit back and be thankful, you stuffy little ingrate. I don’t suppose it helps that the pervasive stereotype of patriotism pushes the idea of driving a beat up truck with a rear window graphic of a confederate flag and a bumper sticker that says “Git ‘r done!” in an unironic fashion. Inhabitants of the truck are usually wearing head to toe camo and have a penchant for going squirrel hunting and yammering on and on about the time they done up and ran near over that there ‘gator in the hole on their way fishin’ near their grandmomma’s trailer.

And please don’t get me started on God and religion and all of that good stuff. I don’t have it in me to bring it up or argue it or debate it.

Before 9/11, I ran from people who had giant flags dangling from their windows and I fled in horror from women who thought it was a good idea to wear red, white and blue on ANY occasion, much less nearly every weekend. And I would have cringed at the idea that anyone would think it was a good idea to bake American-themed cupcakes for a baseball game. I guess times change, and I haven’t publicly stoned anyone for such behavior yet, and on occasion, I can understand it. But although 9/11 hit me just as hard as anyone else, I failed to jump on the patriotism train and I don’t own a single flag, nor have I donned anything red, white and blue. And it goes without saying that no cupcakes have ever been baked on my watch.

But that doesn’t mean that I don’t have moments where I am just flat-out bowled over at how wonderful our country is, even if it’s just by the beauty of the landscape alone. I haven’t been to as many places as I’d like to have been in the U.S. in my relatively short life, but each one of them has been vastly unique and breathtakingly beautiful. This weekend on Sanibel was no exception. The area where I live is a hotbed of development activity. Highrises and pre-fab developments are going up all over the place like giant ant farms, and there is so much friggin’ commerce everywhere that I swear there are going to be repurcussions from the amount of nail salons per capita. Someday the pervasive acrylic fumes are going to cause me to have a baby with a giant fin on its back and I’ll have no one to blame but myself and my compulsive desire for pretty toenails.

But ahh, Sanibel. Smart zoning and a plethora of wildlife refuges make it a lush oasis in the middle of this insanely busy, freakish land. And though our cottage was an overpriced, gritty-floored dog-friendly hovel, it was about 11 feet from the Gulf, and when you can smell the sea from your bed at night, does anything else really matter? We danced on the beach and ate at fabulous restaurants and I swam in the water until my whole body became a brined delicacy. I could hear the ocean swirling around my ears, and I thought: this is heaven. A pelican swooped down and flew level with the water so close to me that for one magic moment we were eye to eye and I laughed at the sandpipers doing their swift little dance as the blue foam caught their toes.

This is such a stark change from the rolling hills of Pennsylvania where I grew up in a land of dairy farms and green cornfields. And it’s a far cry from the crashing waves of the Atlantic Ocean as it hurtled along the edge of the breaking wall during a snowstorm in Massachusetts near my last apartment. And while it’s not dissimilar to the salt marshes of the low country region of South Carolina where I lived for a time, I’ve never seen anything quite as beautiful as the sun setting over the tall grasses on the edge of the Gulf of Mexico. And all of this is wrapped up in one small section on the east coast of the United States, and there is more – more! – in the rest of the country, in the midwest, and the great plains and the west coast. There are mountains in Utah, and mesas in Arizona and towering cliffs in Oregon and snowcaps on the Rockies and goddamn, this whole place is just so fucking beautiful. And we get to choose where we live – where we go next, where we want to visit, what we want to see, and no one can stop us. And while I’m not particularly patriotic or religious, I can’t help but marvel at the wonder of it all. I can’t help but marvel at the incredibly disparate nature of each of our country’s four corners, and how lucky we are to get to live here, travel here and choose our own destiny. And I guess I’m just really thankful to whoever made that possible.

Oh splurt, I’ve just been pummeled back to reality by audible horror at the purchase of skim milk vs. 2 percent, and a certain small dog has to poop. Good thing, as I was starting to get obnoxiously earnest, and damn, it was annoying, wasn’t it?

*ELO. I am in a musical rut. I’ll be repeating myself for a while.

11 comments August 13th, 2006