This can be the summer of the American spirit

Old Glory flies unfettered on a ferry crossing Delaware Bay on Feb. 19, 2020.

The pandemic lends perspective to our individual — and collective — lives.

Just when I start feeling sorry for myself and how the coronavirus has crimped my lifestyle, I read a headline like this one in the Houston Chronicle: “15M in rental assistance runs out in 90 minutes”.

Whoa.

Talk about perspective. I’ve been sidelined by the coronavirus pandemic but my season isn’t over. My life was on pause anyway while I figure out my next move — the pandemic just puts that pause on pause.

My life pause was fully planned and is well underway. Over time I withdrew from professional and civic obligations, and last summer left a job in which I was quite comfortable. I simplified in every way possible so that I could spend maximum time on the great American highway.

Why? Because I’ve always wanted to. Because I’m fascinated with sense of place, with where you’re from. Because I want to see and learn how being American permeates every corner of the United States. Because I believe we’re a lot more alike than we might think or want to think.

And because I love this great big sprawling country of ours, every bit of her, and I want to see all of her. From sea to shining sea. From the mountains to the prairies to the oceans white with foam. By the dawn’s early light and the twilight’s last gleaming.

From her physical attributes to her dreamy notions of human equality and the power of the individual, she cuts a long swath through my psyche. She always there and I never forget about her.

I was thinking about all that last fall as I headed west out of Denver on I-70 on a beautiful September morning. A TV weatherman had said earlier that so far, it was the hottest September on record in Denver. I guess. The sunrise from my hotel overlooking downtown Denver had been spectacular and everything was right for a long-anticipated drive through the heart of Colorado’s Rocky Mountains.

The moment exceeded expectations. It was like a punch in the gut, only in a good way. I was short of breath, almost dizzy as the mountains pulled me into their bosom, not so much inviting me as letting me know that I was expected, that I was as welcome here as in my own home. And in fact I was home, because as an American this land is my land, just like this land is your land.

While we’re still relatively new as a nation — in Old World years anyway — there’s no doubt a national spirit, an unseen force that binds us through our ideals and our values and the concept of self-determination that’s at the core of our consciousness.

There’s a notion in psychology called the collective unconscious, which posits that we carry things with us from those who’ve come before us. As Americans we just know what it means to be American, as the ideal has evolved over the nearly 250 years of our existence. Each generation passes its “Americanism” along to the next and the notion embeds itself deeper.

Yet we’re still remarkably individual, we Americans, and really, our notions of this country are as individual as we are. We feel it in different ways. We express it in different ways. I once heard it said that there’s no single reality but 8 billion versions of it, as in, every person on earth sees things a little differently. Step that down to America. There’s no one way to look at America — there are 330 million of them, based on our experiences, values and beliefs, and our collective unconscious.

I thought about all that again as I emerged from the Rockies and Colorful Colorado and entered the craggy canyons and freaky formations of Utah, where America again smacked me in the face. I imagined adventurers and pioneers and Native Americans and those who came before me. I wondered what they thought about America and what it meant to be an American. I wonder if they felt like I imagine they felt. Hope. Opportunity. A new beginning, a fresh start. Everything is possible.

I think about it all the time, really, but it’s more upfront and powerful when I’m on the road. I got a good dose of it on a trip back East earlier this year, after lapping the Florida peninsula and heading up the Atlantic coast to Ocean City, N.J. I thought of the colonists breaking away from Europe and boldly seeking a new life in a new land, a chance to create something different, an opportunity to start over.

And I’m reminded of it now, as the nation emerges from the coronavirus lockdown. The pandemic has tested our national mettle like nothing in my lifetime and has made pioneers of us all. No one knows how the post-Covid world will look so we’re all explorers now, seeking to conquer and settle a new world. It’s at once frightening and exciting, but as Americans we’ve been here before. Our response to the coronavirus spread has been uneven and less than perfect but we persevered and now we have a chance to reinvent ourselves. I hope we use that power for good.

Still, though, for all our faults, our foibles, our outright fecklessness sometimes, there’s no other country like the United States and there are no other people like Americans. Connected in more ways than we know or maybe can imagine, we are unique among the world’s nations. There are other democracies. There are plenty of places with stunning natural beauty. But there’s only one United States of America.

And there’s no place like home.

rpdgraham@gmail.com