Ask me what my favorite holiday is and I will tell you Independence Day. I don’t like cookouts, fireworks, or parades though, so my celebrations typically consist of walking myself to a contented exhaustion on public, federal lands, while contemplating John Adams. The Saturday before the 4th this year, I was driving when I saw, by the side of Route 125 in Barrington, New Hampshire, two people holding cardboard signs. At first, I thought they might be looking for money, but as I got closer, they didn’t look that part. They were representative of the average state demographic: white, over 60 years old. They were a man and a woman, he in jeans, collared shirt, and ball cap, she in a long skirt and long sleeved blouse. Stopped at the light, I read their simple signs. He held “Pity the poor immigrant” and she “Families Belong Together.” Neither of them waved to the passing cars, or had any facial expression. They stood side by side, quiet, gnarled, and knobby as two knuckles. As the light turned, I beeped my horn, and the woman raised her eyes, unsmiling, wondering, I think, if the person beeping was expressing support or opprobrium. I raised a thumbs up and she stoically returned the gesture.
I thought about them as I continued north, and about the marches going on all over the country as my playlist of songs went on, and then unexpectedly in the mix, was Paul Simon’s “American Tune.” My gut twisted up as these final lyrics landed:
Oh, we come on the ship they call the Mayflower
We come on the ship that sailed the moon
We come in the age’s most uncertain hour
And sing an American tune
Oh, it’s all right, it’s all right
It’s all right, it’s all right
You can’t be forever blessed
Still, tomorrow’s going to be another working day
And I’m trying to get some rest
That’s all I’m trying to get some rest
I sometimes I think what an accident of birth it was that I was born American, and I suppose in one way it was, if you think souls wander the Earth and then settle into babies wherever the winds deposit them. But that’s not what I think. It wasn’t an accident that I was born here; I am the assembled traits of immigrants who crossed the Atlantic over a span of centuries. French-Canadians come down through Maine, Irish, Italians, and English, all bearing their parts of me. Some were driven by hunger, some by poverty, some comfortable at home, but suspecting even greater riches might await across the ocean.
When I was a kid, we studied local history in school. Growing up in Massachusetts, that meant Pilgrims, and Puritans, and the women from my county killed for witches, and the mills. We went on a field trip to a mill museum somewhere along the Merrimack River, with massive looms lining a cavernous brick space. My classmates jostled and joked and got the side eye from our teacher, but I was fixed to the spot, listening to the clamor and clatter of the machines, and becoming convinced that my ancestors had been mill girls in this exact room, with the sun coming in just this way through the windows, big to maximize light, and thus, work time. I held myself apart on that trip, thinking about the lives of those company girls, lives constrained, whatever ideas, thoughts, wishes they ever had lost to the past.
Ever since then, I have gotten swamped, from time to time, by thoughts of all the human enterprise, invention, intellect, and curiosity spent in liquid phase since there have been humans subjugating other humans–salt sweat watering tobacco fields, or sluiced away in gray washwater, spent in spit to moisten a thread, or the tip of a radium tainted paintbrush in a watch factory. Childhoods are liquid phase too, different from the adulthoods all around them, unpredictable, unfixed, special, like mercury, alone among the metals in being something other than a solid at room temperature, skittering in beads across the floor. All the public health experts I hear on the radio talk about kids being resilient, but with limits. Kids stressed too much for too long will suffer long term, often permanent, consequences. The kids separated from their parents at our border are some of these. The experts tell us that every day counts for these kids, before the harm becomes irreparable.
Every year, for the 4th of July, I read the Declaration of Independence. It strikes me differently each time, the high minded ideals, the weird list of grievances, the occasional whininess. This year, I came up short at this line,
“He has endeavored to prevent the Population of these States, for that Purpose obstructing the Laws for the Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their Migrations hither, and raising the Conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.”
Astonished to have never noticed it before, or to have forgotten it, I read it over again. Choking off the flow of immigrants takes its place as one of the usurpations of a tyrannical king alongside taxation without representation. There are dark elements to this without question: the colonies sought white Europeans to settle the frontier, drive out the savage natives. Twenty years after the Declaration, the higher ideals would warp and devolve into the Alien and Sedition Acts, which, among other things, made it harder for immigrants to become citizens, and allowed the President to deport non-citizens deemed dangerous–a nebulous prospect in any century. Still, from the outset the colonists knew their economic prosperity relied on a constant influx of immigrants.
Much of the time these days I cast around trying to think of what I can do. Reading an article about a young Salvadoran man making an illegal crossing into the United States at great risk and expense, I found myself wondering again about the waste of it all. The money, the lives, the quicksilver childhoods, the makeshift graves in the desert, a woman in an immigration court asked if she had any questions half whispering, “Only, when will I see my little girl again?”
The day before the 4th this year, I went hiking in the White Mountains. I chose a route up to Middle and South Carter mountains. From the top, you can see across to the Presidential Range: Washington, Jefferson, Adams, and Madison wreathed in intermittent cloud. It was an astonishingly humid day, with a risk of storms later in the afternoon, so I was up the trail early, but even so, the sky started to darken. Having already made the summits I’d aimed for, I hustled down into the trees, trying for safety in case the weather closed in. The views to the Presidentials occluded, clouds sailed up from the ravines and scraped their fog hulls on the ridgeline as they passed, wetting the summit rocks where I’d been.
thestagecoachroad 