My great-grandfather, Archibald Strachan, was such a lover of Jefferson that he emigrated from Scotland with his three near-adult children in order to homestead on Brulé Sioux land newly opened in what is now South Dakota. I don't know why he saw an equivalence. A fourth child was born here. Archibald's oldest son, Sam, had been raised and educated in Scotland. He was my grandfather.
When Sam's children were roughly the same age as he was when his family immigrated, they emigrated to Swan River, Manitoba, where they raised potatoes, ran a small ag equipment franchise in Brandon, and sent the youngsters to Winnipeg for college. Sam's wife developed a major life-threatening goiter and to protect her life the family moved to Portland, OR. My father scouted the territory by earlier earning an MS in agriculture at Oregon State University in Corvallis.
This history meant that the family had high consciousness of nations but also moved freely among the ones that spoke English. They were leaving the traditional farm life at the beginnings of the industrial revolution. My father expressed his patriotism by a great respect for the power of US iconic patriotism: the historically noted conflicts, the progressive public works between the wars, and the importance of "the very spot." Therefore, every August, he somehow found the resources to drive the family through a different section of the United States. Probably the most memorable included Boston with a side trip to Concord. He was not concerned with the thought patterns they represented, but impressed by their "status."
The actual facts were at variance. When we got to Boston, my father couldn't figure out the cowpath rationale of the street pattern, so that we drove for a half hour trying to reach the Old North Church. We could see the steeple but not get to it. Finally we came to one of those notorious multiple-street intersections with a traffic cop stationed on a podium in the middle My father, desperate, drove right up to him. "Which way to the Old North Church?" shouted my father.
"Anyway you wanna go, Bub! Just get the hell outta here." No one in my family EVER swore. Stunned, we blundered out of Boston. I went back only as a forty-year-old UU clergy person. No one shouted at me. Homeless people were living in doorways with their dogs, all they had left.
A happier event was visiting the The Peach Orchard, a Gettysburg Battlefield. The peaches were ripe and far far juicier and sweeter than any available for sale today. My father bought peaches, but made no explanations. We were merely witnesses. As soon as possible we went back to the comic books that kept us semi-orderly.
Nevertheless, the images are real, sensory, eloquent -- just mysterious. I was more impressed by ferry crossings than forts. National borders lost their reality. Nations meant less to me than the landscapes that unrolled over the miles. My father was more inclined to explain the land. He should have been a geologist.
My mother's understanding was a mix of rural and small town. When it was time for a national election, she was on the vote-counting panel that met in the unheated basement of close-by St. Andrews Catholic Church, a near-cathedral where teachers and neighbors were members. Preparing for a long night, she searched for her warm pants and captured my little portable heater, the one capable of setting fires if unattended. (Pay attention!) The vote counting was treated as a festival among people who knew and liked each other. Election preferences were beside the point. This is the icon of democracy that I choose and part of my contempt for voting machines. Okay, it's a resistance to modernity and its corruption.
This morning I watched the congressional committees begin to grind out justice and law. The bulky, expensively dressed, bigshots with barely disguised contempt for the congresspersons, who were often black or female or even (at last!) genetically Chinese, were competent. The Trump-appointed con men were shook. Their hands shook. They clicked their ballpoints in ceaseless staccato dread.
"Anyway you wanna go, bub. Just get the hell outta here."
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