The Rural Life (13 page)

O
n the Fourth of July, the instinct is always to look backward in time, to the first news of that great Declaration, or to
the days when Emerson could truly say that “the vast majority of the people of this country live by the land, and carry its
quality in their manners and opinions.” That habit of looking backward is a little like taking a rowboat under the pier once
a year to see for ourselves that the pilings are still sound. It restores our confidence. It also reminds us how many transfigurations
this nation has gone through over time and assures us that through all those changes there is a discernible continuity of
political purpose, the same vested interest in independence. We still carry the scale of this land in our manners and opinions,
if no longer the actual touch of its soil. We carry something, too, that our ancestors couldn’t: the scale of our own history.

One of the things you notice while looking backward on the Fourth of July is that everyone you come upon is looking forward.
“It is the country of the Future,” Emerson said in 1844. Anyone else you might turn to, anyone else who has taken up a pen
on the subject of America, says something similar. What Emerson meant, in part, was that his generation, as well as the young
men he was speaking to, had devoted themselves to creating institutions whose benefit would be realized when they were long
gone. “We plant trees,” Emerson wrote, “we build stone houses, we redeem the waste, we make prospective laws, we found colleges
and hospitals, for remote generations. We should be mortified to learn that the little benefit we chanced in our own persons
to receive was the utmost they would yield.” Emerson’s future was not an abstraction. It lay in the institutional and social
and physical landscape around him.

Looking back, you come again and again upon a jubilee of prose, a feast of optimism, an unparalleled faith that nature itself
will redeem the American enterprise. That’s the Emersonian strain in our history. But alongside that strain you can always
hear the question that Crèvecoeur asked in his
Letters from an American Farmer
in 1782: “What is an American?” Men and women have given a lot of thought to that question, trying to puzzle out how the
influences that shaped this nation would weigh out. The question hasn’t changed in all this time, though the influences have.
A country born in a sense of limitlessness has found its natural, geographical limits. That day was always bound to come.

In a way, those early generations of Americans were unable to think of themselves as the future someone else had intended.
Some were present at the revolutionary rupture with the past, and others, who were not, helped articulate its moral and political
implications, which still felt as fresh to them as last night’s rain. But we must think of ourselves as the future someone
else intended, because we are. Every eighteenth- or nineteenth-century attempt to suggest the potential of American liberty
is a prediction of sorts. Some of them are sober and some wild beyond belief. But we’re living in the shade of those trees,
in those stone houses, and under the aegis of those prospective laws. It’s still the country of the Future, but it’s also
now the country of a rich, embracing Past.

T
he Fourth of July steals over a small town daydreaming the summer away. A young boy rides his bicycle in a serpentine pattern
down the middle of a dusty street. Blue sky divides a broken pavement of clouds. The road out of town seems to stretch farther
than usual before it fades out of sight between fields of corn or soybeans, alfalfa or cotton. Near a railroad siding, the
silence of noon is broken by the sound of a mechanic’s hammer ringing against steel in the darkness of a repair shop. An old
horse sleeps in a small corral behind the drive-in. The mail fails to arrive. A firecracker goes off in the alley.

It’s hard to believe that such towns still exist. Harder still to realize how many of them there are, once you leave behind
the cities and the suburbs and the unincorporated sprawl and break out into the open. But in those towns the Fourth seems
to come into its own, whether it’s a hamlet like Texas, Ohio, little more than a bait shop on the north bank of the Maumee
River, or a place like Lander, Wyoming, where the Fourth goes off like the crack of doom.

The Fourth has no precise rituals. Some families serve potato salad at their picnics—those who have picnics—and some serve
coleslaw. The bunting comes out of mothballs, and the high school band—in some disarray now that the seniors have graduated—prepares
to march down Main Street playing Sousa. If the town is small enough, the parade will turn around and go back the way it came.

The self-reliance of small towns is easily mistaken for complacency, and the casualness of the Fourth in such places can be
misread as indifference. The Declaration of Independence isn’t read aloud, nor is the Gettysburg Address. But when dusk comes
and fireflies and crickets begin to go off under the trees, the park fills with people who have walked the few blocks from
home for the fireworks. Grandeur isn’t on the program, nor is exaltation, just some modest municipal detonations, some rockets
that rise shrieking over the fairground or river, worrying every dog in town. The sound of pale thunder breaks right overhead,
and for once the lightning lasts long enough to see, raining earthward in a shower of sparks.

S
ince the first Fourth, Independence Day has been celebrated in just about every possible way, with emotions ranging from a
throb of sanctity to irate mockery, with fireworks, parades, doubleheaders, hot dogs, speeches, demonstrations, and long afternoon
naps on what feels delightfully like the second Saturday in the week. This is still the least commercial holiday in the American
holiday roster. No one has figured out a way to sell the public on exchanging Independence Day presents, and you can only
use so much red, white, and blue bunting before the front porch and the eaves start to look overdressed. The few things that
always sell well for the Fourth—explosives—are illegal in most states. One good flag lasts a very long time.

In some celebrations of the Fourth—not many—there still exists an attractive vein of rationalism, a recognition that what’s
being celebrated is both an event and an idea. Rationalism doesn’t sound like a very patriotic emotion, or much like an emotion
at all, but it’s the spirit in which the Declaration of Independence was written, and it reflects a historic part of the American
character, a brusque, native skepticism that’s rarely honored enough these days. In the phrasing of the document, in the way
it was promulgated, there was an assurance that reason was preferable to sentiment and that the reason embodied in the Declaration
of Independence would be sufficient to dissolve whatever feeling still bound Americans in that era to England.

You hear it said repeatedly that the Fourth is America’s birthday, which is true, but not true enough. The emotion the holiday
most often summons is patriotism, love of country, which is good, but not good enough. A rodeo queen in sequins races into
the arena in a western town, circling the crowd on a fast horse, standing in her stirrups, the American flag she holds snapping
in the wind while the announcer lets his voice overflow with feeling. Everyone in the grandstand rises and their hearts rise
too, mostly. This is a fine thing, but it’s not what has carried us all these years, not this alone, no matter what form it
takes.

By now it’s almost impossible to read the words of the Declaration of Independence—especially its unequivocal statement of
self-evident truths—without emotion, without acknowledging, at least, that its rhythms ring with a familiarity next door to
emotion. But the Declaration doesn’t adjure its signers or the people they represented to strong feeling or, for that matter,
to patriotism. It adjures them to a sober consideration of causes and first principles based on the laws of nature. It speaks
not only to the idealism of its first audience but also to its pragmatism, its sense of justice. These are the qualities that
have preserved the fundamental idea with which this country began. We speak as though conviction were always an emotion and
as though emotion were the deepest experience a human could know. The authors of our freedom knew better.

A
mosquito lies on its back, dead, on a sheet of white paper on a desk. Its banded legs are thinner than script from the nib
of any pen, and they point straight toward the ceiling. Under a magnifying lens the mosquito—a female—resolves into a hairy
thoracic ball, delicately fringed wings, a segmented, countershaded abdomen (dark above, light below), a pair of antennae,
some mouthparts called palps, and eyes that seem to focus, cross-eyed, on the tip of its needlelike proboscis. She looks like
what she is: a drilling rig with wings. She died from effrontery. She floated down through the lamplight and into full sight
on the inner arm of the human who killed her. He was able to watch the mosquito deliberate as she stalked slowly into position.
When her legs stiffened and he imagined he could hear the hydraulic whine of the drill about to bore into flesh, he struck.
Without anger, without vengeance, but not without pleasure.

Insects tap and flutter against the window, borne in through the darkness on a tide of light—mayflies and caddis, moths and
beetles, pulled off course by the glow from a reading lamp. Out in the night itself, fireflies have nearly reached their summer’s
peak. Where the lawn ends and the field begins, a wall of vegetation has grown up, thicker and for its height more impenetrable
than any rain forest on earth. Above the grass heads and seedpods and leaves and fronds, the fireflies stutter like slow sparks.
They constellate and then, for a moment, they all go dark at once.

Mosquitoes never blink to each other, nor do they flock to a lit pane on the side of a house. They are not so easily diverted.
Before converging on a victim, they seem to pause, to create the illusion that this one summer evening will be biteless. It
must be quite a sight to see a human through skeeter eyes. There he stands, hatless, barefoot, in T-shirt and shorts, an incandescent
pillar, a beacon of warm blood at the edge of the field. On his face there’s a slow-footed look. He thought he would just
walk down to the field to watch the fireflies for a minute. He thought the night would be empty except for the bugs he could
actually see in the dark. But the night is not empty. He swats at the shrill pitch in his ear and gets bit behind the knee.
He bends to rub it and gets bit on the ankle. He scrapes his shoulder against his neck and slaps at his arms. He thinks he
can stay ahead of the bites, but he is always behind. Each prick on his skin is already farewell. He pretends to saunter up
the lawn to the house, as if nonchalance mattered to the mosquitoes drifting in upon him. He stoops once more, stops sauntering,
and starts to run.