America in the Rearview
We’re at the bottom of Puget Sound this weekend, the mizzus and me, encamped in a milkhouse we rented next to an old barn not too far from Olympia. Just up the road is the old railroad bed that ran to a jetty five miles north out into Woodard Bay to haul out logs, load them on train cars and pull them to the Weyerhauser Mill in Everett. The barn, the railroad tracks, the wharf, the mill in Everett are all part of history now. So is this milkhouse, presently a cottage on AirBnB.
The farms out here have been parceled to five acre farmettes, mostly horse pastures, a few nurseries, some small gardens, a couple of McMansions and plenty of double wides and modest homes. The agrarian landscape has definitely been downsized, if not lost completely. Our milkhouse now sports Wi-fi and Blu-Ray.
We breakfasted in Olympia at a café I’d eaten at a quarter century ago, half restaurant, half tavern with a cigar bar at the entrance back then. The McMenamin chain has bought it now, refurbished it, prettied it up and charges outrageous prices for eggs and coffee. The hostess who found us waiting at the Please Wait To Be Seated sign five minutes after we arrived informed us we’d be seated in twenty minutes. I guess nostalgia won over impatience so we waited. The food was okay, the coffee was weaker than a 7/11 dispenser in a truck stop franchise. You can profit on history, restorations, reproductions, all that yearning for what has been lost to strip mall America, but it’s a thin veneer, slightly flimsy. Just costs a little more.
I hear tell there’s a hunger in the land to Make America Great Again. Maybe you know what that means but I haven’t got a clue. Bring back the timber? Bring back the salmon runs? Bring back those coal mining jobs, the textile mills, the steel factories? Bring back the family farm and the industrial age? They’re gone, I hate to tell the folks who pine for a new Gilded Age. Go ahead and drive a restored Packard but don’t think Detroit is going to tool up to assembly line them again, I don’t care how much Kool-Aid Trump doles out to the yearning masses.
We’re packing up to leave in an hour. Going back to our old 1915 shack and our hand built twenty-five year old house. Going back to re-imagine our own piece of America. You ask me what made America great once — and I know you didn’t — it was our imagination. It was our optimism that the future could be shaped by that faith in ourselves to transform the world in our image, to create new art, new literature, new music, new dance, new architecture, new businesses, new inventions, new visions. To go boldly forth where none have gone before, to trek the stars. You want the old America, go to a museum. You want America to be great again, stop looking backwards. Turn off the TV, start using your imagination. And for godsake, everybody, stop the whining, stop blaming the other party, stop pointing fingers. Believe in yourself. Think bigger, dream larger, be your own hero and start painting your own life. It may not make this country great again, but it’s a good start.
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Really well written. I forwarded it to three people.