My Country Tis of Thee

by Katharine Niles

Blog Last Updated; 7/8/2009

Well, I went to Silverton. I'd been hearing about the magnificent 4th of July fireworks for several years now, and I tried to bribe my son and husband into enduring the crush to go. Every year it seems to become a bigger and bigger phenomenon, and this year it went viral. A friend of mine said the RV magazine featured it, and we all know that's a death-knell to Best Kept Secrets around these parts.

My little family was not interested in attending, however. My son, at 11, has not quite outgrown his fear of loud noises, and when he heard that half the fun was listening to the booms echo off the surrounding mountains, he said no thanks. My husband is not into crowds or traffic jams.

I was saved by my friend Karen, who summers in Santa Fe after taking jobs back east and realizing there is no place like home in the Southwest. An anthropologist, she and her husband try to do research with hunter-foragers in Venezuela when Hugo Chavez' henchpeople will let them. Unfortunately, the henchpeople are getting more and more stubborn, so her husband stayed to grovel at the feet of government hacks for permission to do their work, and Karen came home. I hadn't been camping all summer ? a sacrilege ? and neither had she. So we set up a tent half way to the famed mining town-turned-fireworks-host, and left to attend the festivities.

I am not sure what I expected, but it was not the scads of Navajos up from Arizona, nor the wads of Hispanic-Indian-White New Mexicans and Texans. The Strictly Whites tended to be of the RV and ATV set, at least where we were perched, but overall the place was crawling with Desert People Dying to Get Out of the Heat. The party next to us spoke Navajo and offered us coffee, which was cool. The vehicle behind us was a long trailer with about five ATVs on it.

"Guess who they voted for," said Karen, allowing herself a brief liberal swipe.

Well, yeah. I am of the persuasion that Woody Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land" should be the national anthem, not that paean to war, "The Star-Spangled Banner." Never mind that I confess to goose bumps when I hear the latter; on principle, I believe in the awe this land's natural beauty inspires, and is espoused by Guthrie. More importantly, I believe in the song's sense of responsibility. This land is your land: take care of it. The rockets' red glare is a cheap high by comparison.

For eight years of unholy war against all of what I considered to be deeply American values, I want to take back the word "American." I am NOT "un-American" for defending our wild places, or our planet, for that matter. I am not "un-American" for believing that free market capitalism is a seriously flawed economic system and an even more seriously flawed myth. I am not "un-American" for believing that we do not torture people, nor hold them without right to legal counsel. I have come to tears at the insult regarding this. I'll be out hiking and come across an elk in the gloaming by a river bed, and in less than a second I know all over again that such moments have saved my life.

Years ago, I remember talking travel with someone who, when asked what he was most impressed with in all of his roaming, said, "North America. We have some of the most astonishing country right here." And I knew he was right. So to be told that the very territory that has uplifted, awed, saved, cradled the ecstatic, held me in all my love affairs and profound hurt, allowed me to vote, given me the right to write nasty letters to my congressman, etc and so forth, was somehow not really mine to claim, still upsets me mightily.

So I'm not going to smirk at the ATV-riding Texans and tell them they are somehow way off the mark about what America is. I'm going to understand that the lashing out from that quadrant has, in its own way, to do with a profound hurt, a sense that some myth they thought was sacrosanct has been corrupted. I will say I think that myth is a fallacy, insofar as I understand it to be some variant of John Wayne. No doubt this is a gross oversimplification. But no matter ? I respect the hurt. I also respect that we probably see eye to eye on more things than we realize. Karen's tales of Venezuela gone bad under a megalomaniac leader brought that home.

So what I was most proud of in Silverton? That I was in a country where I could sit next to Navajos who still spoke their native tongue, as well as a zillion other stars and stripes of human critters, and that we all got along. We were all polite. We all loved the show. The booms echoed off the mountains so deeply both Karen and I thought a tsunami must be coming. Those under the fireworks directly thought they were falling right on them. And even the traffic getting out wasn't bad.

Nestled in our tent later, we talked till 2 a.m. At five a.m. I briefly woke to a hooved animal chomping at something outside. At 6:30 I got up right as the sun was hitting a big lily pond and saw a beaver swimming in the distance. I did a little yoga, meditated. But most of all I was in a reverie (liberal word), or prayer (conservative, if you will) of gratitude.

Only here. Only here. Ka-boom.