Homage to America the Beautiful

I spent August in New England, in some of my favorite places, the Maine coast and the Green Mountains of Vermont. These two places are only a two-and-a-half hour’s drive apart, but they are different worlds. There’s the rocky coast of Maine with the salty, fresh air sweeping off the vast Atlantic to the east. And to the west, just across the narrow state of New Hampshire, are the richly forested mountains and sparkling crystalline rivers of Vermont. Practically everything is different about these two places.

On a map of America the space between them seems to be practically insignificant. It’s tiny compared to the vast dimensions of a country that stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific. That demonstrates something. If there is that much variation between these two places, what are we looking at with the entire United States?

From York, Maine, to Brattleboro, Vermont, is 134 miles. With today’s cars that can move at more than a mile a minute, it takes only a small part of the day to go from one to the other.

But in between those two spots on the map is a cornucopia of variation. There are farmlands, pastures, horse ranches, forests, mountains and rivers, towns and villages with historical churches and buildings that speak of ages past.

Just try to extrapolate that degree of variation spread across the whole width and depth of this nation that stretches 2800 miles across and 1600 miles north to south. I submit to you, that not only is America beautiful, as the song says, but it’s practically inconceivably vast and diverse in every way.

There are no adequate superlatives to describe what America is. Our perceptions are distorted by what we see on maps. From childhood we are used to seeing that space representing one country. But the scale is much more than our minds can comprehend. It’s practically as large as all of Europe. And the more I discover of the United States, the more I appreciate the enormous diversity in America.

Mentally we can group things together as one thing. That doesn’t make them one thing. Maine and Vermont are grouped with several other states as “New England.” But there is as much diversity across that whole region as there was in that little strip across the state of New Hampshire.

I am from the Midwest, but I still tend to fall into the error of thinking of it as a homogeneous mass. It is anything but. It’s a mosaic of countless landscapes, towns, cities and cultures. The diversity of America is underestimated because it’s so vast. When we don’t know something, it appears to us as a blank.

It is richly diverse in every aspect you can name. Culturally it is fed by people from all over the world who have converged here to become part of the American Dream. When so many international cultures converge in one place, the cross-fertilization of culture spawns an infinite variety of new cultural forms and innovations. We can see that in the many artforms, styles and sports that have sprung forth from the United States, such as blues, jazz and rock and roll, or baseball and American football, barbecue, cheeseburgers, apple pie, the short story, and a list that is infinite.

People sometimes dismiss the history of the United States as being only a couple hundred years long, while in Europe, cities can be traced back thousands of years. But that’s an error.

It’s 400 years since colonists came to America. That has created a long and complex history. And beyond that is a history of thousands of years of the native American cultures that were here before the arrival of the colonists. That’s something about which little is known, but the pre-Columbian history of America is a fascinating subject to explore.

The people who have come from Europe, Asia, Africa or Latin America brought their cultures and histories with them from everywhere they have come from. It is all part of American culture. Even though we are officially one country, united by language and government, we are many different countries, in a way.

I have traveled to all the continents of the world, and have loved them all. But it took traveling internationally for me to appreciate America as much as I do now. No matter how much I travel abroad, America remains a shining place, with its own unique natural and cultural beauty.

I heard the song “America the Beautiful” sung so many times when I was still in grade school I probably became numb to it by repetition before I ever had any idea what it was saying. But now that I’ve seen much of America and much of the world, I think the lyric does an admirable job of paying tribute to what I have said is too vast to be comprehensible. I could write pages and pages of prose and never come any closer than that one lyric in trying to express the beauty of America.

“Spacious skies” indeed! If you have been west of the Mississippi, you know what spacious skies are. “Purple mountain majesties”? Yes! There are the mountains of the Appalachian system on the eastern flank, but the Rockies are something else entirely. They reach into the heavens with a magical mystery that is impenetrable. I can get very verklempt when I hear those lyrics now.

Woody Guthrie did another admirable tribute to the beauty of America “from California to the New York island” in his song “This Land is Your Land.” That song says with the heart what can’t be put into words.

If we live in America, we may assume that we already know it and want to just hop overseas to see what is really worth seeing. But that too would be a sad error.

Living in one spot in this country does not automatically give you knowledge of the whole country. It doesn’t even give you knowledge of the next town over. And I’ve seen a lot of variation from town to town. In New York City, you can walk one block and find yourself in a different world.

While my passion for international travel is in no way diminished, it has helped me to appreciate domestic travel more than ever. I’ve traveled America more than most people. But right now I am feeling a deficiency when I think of how much of it I have never seen.

I have traveled from coast to coast, from the Gulf of Mexico to the Canadian border, and combed through many of those areas in between that don’t get much attention individually. But there are whole states I have not been in, and huge spaces between the places I have been.

You may travel cross country from California to New York, and that’s a wonderful thing, but to then say you’ve seen the whole country is a gross exaggeration. You have drawn a line from one end to another.

It’s when you get down into all the spaces in between, to the side, back and forth and up and down that you begin to know the country. I believe you could spend your whole life exploring and studying this country, and you would still only experience a tiny part of it.

It was said that Franklin D. Roosevelt could name every county in the country. But even if he could not literally name all 3,244 counties, it reveals an intimacy with the land he developed from campaigning that few will ever match. I know I will never see more than a fraction of the country, but there is much of it that I would yet like to see while I can.

So while I still have a burning desire to travel internationally, travel in the United States is right up there with travel anywhere. Just because I was lucky enough to be born here, I don’t want to take it for granted, not for one minute.

Your humble reporter,

A. Colin Treadwell