There are a few subjects that I tend to fixate on as the smoke curls around my face and my glass sweats in the evening heat. Most of these I’ve been more inclined to write about; prayer, land, beauty, and God. For some reason, I find an ease in slipping into Mystery, like a warm bath after a tough job. Perhaps I am attracted to the spaciousness of the topics, the things I say about them are more or less easy to retract (or ignore) after there has been some change on my part on account of an “evolving conciousness” or a “development in my thinking.” Paradoxically, there is also a comfort in knowing in the sense that I have applied myself to arrive at a concrete, absolute truth. Of course, I never totally arrive, and I guess that is part of the thrill of the journey.
Until this point, however, words have escaped my grasp for one mysterious question in particular—what does it mean to be an American, or what does it mean to me? It has eluded me so much so that I have avoided the topic altogether, even in casual conversation. It is not that I have no experience as an American, I’ve never known another country as my home. I also have a kind of education in being an American, I had civics classes and observed national holidays. Nonetheless, as seems to be common in my generation, I typically fall into the more or less apathetic camp when it comes to my “American-ness” and therefore fail to see a need to even delve into the question in the first place. In recent months, I cannot help but find “love of country” impossibly attractive. I read recently of the Knights of the Round Table and the fables of Arthur waiting with them in the forest to restore Britain to her former glory, but what lore exists like this on our American continent?1 I tend to be so averse to love and lore of America because it seems that anyone who loves this country typically loves a personal, amalgamated idea but not a country, or loves the government of our country so blindly that it cannot really be love at all. I, for one, simply cannot stand for the evils and ills inflicted upon people by the American government, mercantile2 economy, and landless, globalist ideologies born in this country. I’ve done too many deep dives into modern American wars and read too much of Native history to belt out “Proud to Be an American” for no apparent reason other than the small fact that it is the Fourth of July and I’m excited for good food and some fireworks. I too—like most Americans have vocalized in recent years—have grown tired of the constant babbling back and forth between our Federal politicians as they duke it out for the lobbyists that are in their pockets. You can see why, for many reasons, my relationship with my heritage feels quite problematic and I suspect that I am not alone. Perhaps it is naïvety to think that it would be a little easier to love another, but I have little ignorance coming up with the shortcomings of my current state and therefore struggle to love it.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been reading an essay called “Walking” by Henry David Thoreau with my eighth-grade class. Now, I’ll preface my brief exposition of his thought with a disclaimer: there’s a lot that Thoreau gets wrong. He seems to, first of all, have a vague and misinformed view of who has a spiritual connection to the land and why.3 Additionally, there is this strange tension between free use of the land—which I wholeheartedly support—and subjugation of the land. He can be forgiven, for he likely had never had any real interaction with Native people apart from the twisted lore passed down from the early colonies, and the consequences of the farmer’s ‘superior’ tools had not yet been found out or seen to their end in his own day. There is still much to love about his essay, which opens poignantly with the lines, “I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil—to regard man as an inhabitant, or part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society.” The main thrust of the essay is a swelling love of country that I could learn to adopt. This love is not based on the superiority of the American system of Government or the idea of “Freedom,” (both of which I am not quite convinced would hold up to a remotely thorough inquiry) but on the wonder of the Wild in the United States and the affect it imprints on the humans that inhabit it. Simply put, this love of country is for the land itself, and Thoreau encourages us to love the land as inhabitants of Nature “contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil.” This is the most mature, nuanced love of country that I can conceive of, and Thoreau, for his faults, demonstrates how this Wildness can and should be instilled in the hearts of men, “I would not have every man nor every part of a man cultivated, any more than I would have every acre of earth cultivated: part will be tillage, but the greater part will be meadow and forest, not only serving an immediate use, but preparing a mould against a distant future, by the annual decay of the vegetation which it supports.” The United States is, I believe, unique among Western nations in the sheer vastness of land available to the people and the potential for us to still cultivate this Wildness in us—we haven’t destoryed it all yet. This fact was unknown to me as a child in Oklahoma, and it makes sense that I could not grasp it till I sojourned to other areas of the country. Unlike Oklahoma, which has been so inundated with private ownership of land, other states have preserved public use out of a recognition of its obvious beauty and the imminent need to give people an experience of it. This is not to say that the Great Plains are not as beautiful as the hills of Shenandoah or the Ozarks are less becoming than the Rockies, but perhaps there is a point to be made that the beauty of our land is the only thing that, for now, is remotely preserving our freedom and where that freedom has not been preserved, beauty has been undervalued. Free-use land—or land that is more or less freely used—can be found in national forests, acres owned by the Bureau of Land Management, or in areas so wild that they could hardly be called ‘owned.’ It is not my intention nor my place in this essay to divulge all the secrets of land ownership and put forward a solution for common ownership nor develop an economic model in which property and free-use land work in tandem.4 Instead, I wish to grasp at the few pieces of America which remain free: her forests, her mountains, and the hospitality which still lives in a few of her people.
At the top of my essay, I featured a beautiful Thomas Cole painting that I first encountered in high school. The Oxbow is often interpreted as the propaganda poster for Manifest Destiny and the Dominion of Man, but I think that Cole, too, was grasping at these few freedoms he realized we were losing to the Machine we built.5 The storm which lingers over the Wild on the left, after all, encroaching upon the farmland to the right whether they like it or not. I take a slightly different perspective on the painting: Nature cannot be conquered and will always come back to reclaim her lands. We must learn to keep this in mind as we balance a cultivation of the land that provides enough for us to live and continue to respect her power, presence, and beauty. I am firmly convinced that when we have found this balance, and only then, could we be permitted to be called Americans, for the first inhabitants of America before it was even thus known carried this balance in their own nations. We cannot, nor am I sure that we should, restore this United States to the hands of those First Nations and expel the ancestors of the colonizers, but we must assimilate to them (not them to us) by falling in love with the land we live on if we are ever to love this country. The love of our land can not be long-distance, it cannot be digital or even just in our own backyard. To love the land we must get out on the land—to sink our hands into our dirt and every square acre of dirt within a one-mile radius, to climb the peaks of the Rockies and meander the meadows of the Great Plains, stand at the cliffsides of the Pacific and hike through the forests of the Shenandoah. If we are to love this country, we must become real inhabitants of the place we live. Buy your groceries from your neighbor, not from the back of a semi-truck or shipping container. Live where you stand, grow where your feet are planted, as the old adage says. We will be Americans when we become people of this dirt and no longer foreigners battling a strange beast. Don’t be mistaken, we need not exclusively venture into the Wild to do this, but also into the cities and villages too. We must come to terms, truly, with what tortures we have subjugated Nature to and consider sincerely what these instruments of torture are doing to us. We will have a framework for understanding this torture and subjugation when we have seen Nature run rampant in the hills only to come back to our homes to see Nature domesticated. For some of us, this requires a little more traveling, but when we have traveled America in sincerity, we are on the path to regaining our love of country that so many of us have lost.
If the thing to love most about America is her land, as I have suggested, we must work to preserve it. Preservation of our soils is not just in the hands of conservation offices in our local governments, it starts with us too—and I don’t mean our votes. Again, we must see our own communities flourish by actually living there. To grow where we are planted, we must not let our branches spread too broadly. This requires us to become “hyper-local” people. Live in a place where you can walk to the store, and if you can’t walk to what you need learn to grow it. Still, we can’t all raise beef and dairy in our backyards, so find an honest farmer in your county (or if you must, your state) and support their work to keep Nature free. Our love for our country will swell when we get back to living with and loving our neighbors, get back to block parties, and get back to leaving our front doors unlocked so our neighbors can stop by and say hello. So, knock on your neighbor’s door and ask for sugar, don’t order it from the delivery app that strips workers of their right to love and leisure by locking them in a car all day. Share what you have as much as you can, and give away what you own as quickly as you come to own it. Charity and Generosity (for our neighbor and for our soil) will draw us together, and over time we might learn that we should have chosen them long ago. Demonstrate the value of living in the place that you have chosen by growing relationships in your community—sit on your front porch, say hello as people walk by and invite them up for a beer. Likewise, take long walks in your neighborhood and ask the house a few streets over about their garden and when they plant their peas. Learn to love your neighbor again. It is no secret that we are in an extremely divided political climate, so let’s get out of politics.
It may sound like a rosy, naive solution to an elephant-sized problem, but if we all take a bite we can stomach it. We will be free of the constant rage of the Machine if we belong to our neighbors and the dirt beneath our feet. Then we can truly love our country, the land we live on again. For now, you still won’t find me howling “Proud to Be an American” from the back of a pickup, but you may hear me strumming “This Land is Your Land” on my front porch from time to time. I’m still not quite sure why it’s a proper thing to love one’s country and maybe one day I’ll know, but all I can say at this moment is that I’ve found the reason why we should love this one: the joy of falling deeply, madly in love with our land.
I have, at times, considered what I call the “Eliot Option” instead of growing into a love of my own country. Like T.S. Eliot, I could simply find a country that I can find a greater love for and revoke my American citizenship in favor of my newfound homeland. Eliot, of course, managed to pull off his flight to the United Kingdom before he was married so it seems that this Option has expired for me.
This is an essay that will have to wait for the gap in my knowledge to be filled. Mercantilism seems to be the name of the game these days (not capitalism, surprise!) but I have a pretty strong distaste for both. To give you a taste of what is to come, I waiver between some form of distributism and socialism (I know, that treacherous word!). Don’t hold me to it, though, I’m still thinking through the implications of and potential “programs” to enact each in local communities.
One passage, in particular, made my skin crawl as we read aloud in my eighth-grade class, “The very winds blew the Indian’s cornfield into the meadow, and pointed out the way which he had not the skill to follow. He had no better implement with which to intrench himself in the land than a clam shell. But the farmer is armed with plow and spade.” Perhaps, Mr. Thoreau, he had the skill to follow, but he knew that living where he was is quite enough. As for that latter comment, the plow and spade—readers of the Grapes of Wrath should know—is the predecessor of that terrible, mechanical beast: The Tractor. Again, I’ll save these pontifications for another day.
The best model for this is the Scottish Croft Townships, a system where a township of landowners that possess small-acreage “crofts” with high-quality forage (where they calve and finish their cattle) co-manage and share rights to the larger, wilder pastures in the highlands surrounding them. There is a great four-part podcast series that talks about this as an alternative for small-scale farmers in the U.S.—I have thoughts of a model based on crofting for rural (and potentially suburban) communities, but yet again, I’ll save that for another day.
Take a look at Paul Kingsworth’s Substack for a more developed idea of the Machine.
I have long been struggling with the same question regarding being American. I am not a patriotic person, but the beauty of the land has caught hold of me, and I am slowly learning what it is to have a sense of place. Though I don't live where I grew up, the mountains and valley where I currently live are gently showing me what it means to come home.