Life on the Road

The 4th of July (known as Independence Day before a major movie company had to monetize even that) has always been a local holiday in my mind. I mean, I know it’s a nationwide ad campaign holiday. It celebrates the founding of our nation (with dirt-cheap cell phone plans).

But when I was a kid growing up, it meant the following things:

• Getting up early in the morning to camp out on the parade route so we’d have the best seats. No Ticketmaster available for curbside views. And outsourcing just meant my mom parked my sister and me there for a few hours while she ran the errands.
• Going to the park before the parade to participate in the watermelon spitting contest, the 3-legged race, and the scavenger hunt. Do kids even do traditional scavenger hunts anymore, or are all the scavenged items sent in by text message?
• Watching the parade with my family, including aunts, uncles, and grandparents.
• Sometimes, walking in the parade to represent my volunteer activities– I marched with Safety Town, the Girl Scouts, and the high school Marching Band. I doubt Safety Town even exists anymore; it was all about empowering children to say no to adults and situations meant to harm them, and our society puts more value on shielding kids from the things that can harm, rather than actually helping kids do something about them.
• Going home after the parade, a little sunburnt, to sit on the front porch with some lemonade. Relaxing. Setting off snappers and snakes in the backyard. Playing with the dog. Lighting sparklers (even though it wasn’t dark enough for them to have much impact).
• Helping Mom make an enormous fruit salad to have with dinner
• Having dinner with my extended family. There was the fruit salad, corn on the cob, burgers and hot dogs, and Mom’s specialty: Baked Alaska with sparklers on top. She tried it every year, and almost always, the thing was a glorious disaster. You can’t buy a Baked Alaska– it’s an ice cream brick (Mom used Neapolitan) covered in merengue and baked lightly until the merengue browns. In Chicago in July, the ice cream did not often survive long enough to be covered in the protective merengue, and melted, which dissolved the merengue, leaving a messy puddle. (On the upside, the 4th of July was one reason our oven was cleaned at lease once a year.)

Today, I look around me at the campground, and I see families enjoying a fine summer day. The kids are at the pool. The parents have loaded up firewood and are ready for the cookout. In every little town here in the Adirondacks, there’s a musical event, followed by fireworks. Parades are still a local phenomenon, a local celebration of community.

I really am sick to death of nationwide ad campaigns to get Americans to spend every last penny they earn (plus credit!) and the continuing legislative erosion of our ability to think for ourselves, and the constant pull of online games, worlds, networks, and bling-blang. But sometimes I travel right through a town’s annual chili cook-off and I realize that, out in The Rest of America, people are meeting their neighbors, playing with their kids, teaching each other to live in this world, make things with their own hands, look each other directly in the eye.

The quest for these places, even as I am myself caught up in the e-world, is a large part of this journey, and the purpose of this blog.