Through the Heat
Independence was voted on July second. John Adams bet the second would be the day we celebrated forever. He lost by two days.
My house in Florida sits on two acres that are an island, or almost. During the season Trump/Vance signs appear on it. My island, someone else's flags. I pull them and more grow back. Democratic signs vanish. My friends were astounded when Biden was elected as all they saw were Trump signs.
I feel marooned.
Lanying and I spent last month in Asheville, North Carolina, a full twenty degrees cooler than Florida. Asheville is safe. It is also an island, a bigger one, afloat in a red sea. A foot outside the city limits you hear the banjos.
We headed west into the heat dome, and the name is honest. It's hot. The air conditioning on the dash is running full blast the generator is powering the air conditioner in the coach. It’s still hot.
But the country between Asheville and the Arkansas River is some of the loveliest ground in the United States, in the world. The road drops out of the Blue Ridge and runs the long green valleys of Tennessee, hills stacked behind hills until the haze takes them, hay rolled and waiting, creeks the color of bottle glass. Every few miles a white steeple pokes through the trees like a survey stake. Even the rest areas are green and wooded, though tight for an RV. Lanying slipped us between two trucks so close we couldn't open the door. No matter. We were just switching drivers. It was my turn.
The billboards are survey stakes too, and they educated me all the way across Tennessee. I learned that her heart starts beating three weeks after conception. Or not. I learned that god is the answer and wondered what the question was. I learned that hell is real, that Jesus is coming, and that I should call now. Whether him or the injury lawyer was never clear; they use the same font. Adult superstore, next exit. Faith is the answer, next billboard. Guns and ammo, no permit required. Socialized medicine will kill me. Vaccines will kill the baby whose heartbeat I had been reading about for two hundred miles. The countryside is Eden, and every quarter mile somebody has nailed a warning to a tree.
We're in Fort Smith, Arkansas now, spending afternoons across the Oklahoma line at the Choctaw casino, playing blackjack to keep cool. The air conditioning is courtesy of a nation the United States marched here at gunpoint. Lanying is a good card counter. A dealer once asked who the lady standing behind me was. "My card counter," I said. Everyone laughed.
The fellow on the stool to my right is from Helena. I said the founders must have named these towns after their daughters. Elaine. Marianna. He laughed.
I asked what Helena is like.
"It's full of niggers," he said.
I didn't move, but my mind drew back and I became aware of my surroundings. On my left, a man in a red MAGA hat. Across the felt, a dealer from Lebanon, pulling cards for all of us, on Choctaw land.
A chill went through me. This, I thought, in the middle of all this green beauty.
The man from Helena wasn't whispering. He wasn't testing the room. He said it the way you'd report the weather, to a stranger, at a public table, sure of his audience. Not the word. I'm eighty. I've heard the word, I was born in Alamaba. The confidence. Somewhere between the heart billboard and the blackjack table, that confidence got its permit renewed.
Two hundred and fifty years ago this week, fifty-six men declared that all men are created equal. Most of them didn't believe it either. We've been arguing with them ever since. Some decades we win the argument. Some decades we hand the microphone back to the man from Helena.
Tomorrow is the Fourth of July.
Well. On to Santa Fe, through the heat.
