Regular readers will know that I’ve offered my share of critiques of the United States in this space over the years. I offer them not because I hate America, but because I love her enough to believe she can be better, and I trust her enough to know that in the long run she will end up doing what is best (often, as Winston Churchill once quipped, “after all the alternatives have been exhausted.”)
I love the infinitely varied beauty of America’s landscapes. I’ve road-tripped through 47 states (I have yet to see Alaska, Florida and South Dakota) and have not yet been to a state that did not have some sublime vista.
I particularly love the untamed and seemingly limitless wilderness of the inner west – the area roughly between the back side of the Sierra Nevada and the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains. You could fit all of Western Europe into that space and have plenty of canyon-split sage-flecked loveliness left over.
I first explored this area a couple decades ago with my friend Mark. We rented a 4 wheel drive SUV (“we won’t take it out of state – honest!”) and set out one day in early December. Our general plan was to take Interstate 80 to the approximate middle of the state of Nevada, and then turning north whether there was a road there or not.
We more or less stuck to that plan, spending long days navigating dirt tracks and washboard roads through serene, unnamed canyons and ascetic mountain ranges until we were well into southern Idaho. One night, somewhere out in the empty vastness of that leg of our trip, we came across a double line of high, floodlit, razor-wire-topped chain link fencing, with signs promising that intruders would be shot, buried, dug up, revived, and then killed again if they so much as slowed down in the general vicinity of the installation. We gave it a wide berth.
Looking at that fence, it occurred to me just how enormous the American West is. In the mid-1940s, in another installation hundreds of miles to the south in New Mexico, the U.S. government set off nuclear weapons – at night – and did so in complete secrecy.
We arrived in Jackson Hole, Wyo. a few days later, and despite the bitter cold – Wyoming in December is a decidedly nippy place – spent half the time out of our vehicle alternately taking pictures and staring in slack-jawed awe at the scenery. If you have never been to that part of the country, you owe it to yourself to get there, particularly during the off-season.
I love the instinctive generosity and good-heartedness of the people I’ve encountered in every corner of this vast land.
On my last major road trip six years ago, I was making my way along Interstates 90 and 94, which roughly parallel our northern border with Canada. After driving the entire day, most of which was devoted to crossing the indescribably vast state of Montana, I could feel myself reaching the limits of my endurance and began looking for a place to spend the night. By this time I was in North Dakota, and the next city of any size was Bismarck, which I reached a little before midnight.
I tried a couple of hotels, only to find out they were completely booked due to a convention being in town, a gathering of electricians as I recall.
I pondered just spending the night at a rest stop sleeping in my car, but the temperature was 20 degrees and falling fast, and I did not want to end up as an “Idiot tourist freezes in car” headline in the local media, so I decided to persist in my search.
The guy working the front desk at the next hotel took one look at my weary, crestfallen face when he gave me the bad news about his place also being booked solid, and said, “Look – let me call around and see if anything is available.”
After calling one place after another, he finally started scribbling on a notepad and shot me a quick “heads-up” look. It turned out that the very last hotel room in Bismarck was the VIP suite at some national chain, and the price was in the hundreds of dollars, but it was pretty much that or else freeze, so I said simply: “I’ll take it.”
And that is how, on a freezing night six years ago, I came to spend a sumptuous night sipping 12-year-old scotch in a hotel suite that included a living room with a big-screen television, a conference room, three bedrooms with king-sized beds, a bubbling whirlpool bath and a window with sweeping views of a snow-swept North Dakota night – all due to the dogged persistence of a kind-hearted night manager at another hotel.
As we watch the fireworks on Monday, let’s reflect on the remarkable achievements of our ancestors, but let’s also be inspired not just to add to their successes but to correct their failures. Let us forge a more perfect union.
Happy Fourth of July, everyone.

Matt Talbot is a writer and poet, as well as an old Benicia hand.

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