Land of Our Births
During the summer of 1975 before Jim and I moved to the Sierra Nevada mountain foothills in northern California, we spent about seven weeks visiting many islands in the Caribbean. We had gone there for a combination of reasons: to enjoy its beauty, especially snorkeling among the coral reefs and their colorful inhabitants; to take a vacation from the U.S. culture—its overall lifestyle, expectations, television, movies, magazines, and news; and possibly to find another place to live that had a slower pace. The escalating pressures in southern California had affected both of us. One day Jim had come home from his office to announce, “This place is so ungrounded in basic reality, it’s going to fly off the face of the Earth.” (Obviously his perspective at the time was primarily as a Midwesterner.)
In later June 1975, we flew to San Juan, Puerto Rico, visiting the huge fortresses and fortifications the Spanish had built to protect the land there and its sea lanes. Then part of a day was spent at a wharf in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, where workers who were loading small boats with produce and goods told us not to go to Grenada—too dangerous they said.
We travelled light—with a medium-sized cloth suitcase for each of us and another one for our snorkel equipment. We were using Fielding’s Guide to the Caribbean, 1975, as our resource for information about our choices.
After Trinidad we stayed at what was called at the time an inn, perched above a beautiful bay on the island of Tobago. We read that during the time of worldwide European colonization, the island had been fought over for almost 200 years by competing Dutch, French, and English naval powers. Finally, it was formally ceded to England by the Treaty of Paris in 1814. We found remnants of this past, in various forms, all over the island.
One Saturday morning on Tobago we rented a car to drive to the local weekly market, stopping along the way to give a ride to a very large woman who was balancing on her head a very large basket that contained a very large fish. When she asked us where we were from and I said California, she commented, “You sure is far from home!” At the time I held back emerging tears.
That afternoon, after snorkeling in the cove waters where we were staying, while lying on the beach the tears flowed. I told Jim that when the woman had talked about us being far from home, I felt homesick. I went on to say my feelings included being sick about our country and what was happening to it. I was also engulfed with the realization that the U.S. was the land of my birth; I loved it and its people. When I said I had to go back, from an expanded depth I knew that somehow I had to play my part, to do what I could, whatever that meant. Jim agreed. He too had to go back and figure out how to create a different life.
I think at the time I was expressing the Love many people around the world have felt and feel about their country and fellow country people. And I think the deeply-felt awarenesses that day provided some of the energy pathway later—to our new location, new home, and forthcoming studies along with writings.
Following that afternoon on the Tobago beach, Jim and I went on with our relaxing summer. We didn’t read or hear anything from a U.S. viewpoint. Instead, we immersed ourselves in the tempos of the islands we visited and their people. We listened to their music, read the background histories of each place, talked with some residents and other visitors from all over the globe—and enlarged our perspectives.
One day on the French-flavored island of St. Barthélemy (St. Barts), after lunch at the small family-owned motel where we were staying, we began talking about our return to the United States. We agreed we couldn’t go back to a life Jim hated and one I was disturbed about. Like a magnet we were both drawn to a northern California community that had somewhat interested us during a car trip the previous spring vacation, whereas up to that moment we hadn’t known where to go, nor had we even discussed it.
By late afternoon we were on our way to San Francisco instead of Los Angeles, with stops along the way at Sint Maarten/St. Martin, Puerto Rico, and Miami, Florida. When we arrived at the San Francisco airport we rented a car, found a family-owned motel that we used as our base in the small foothill community we were investigating, and discovered we both loved being there. We were in an area that was located at an elevation of about 3,000 feet, on the western side of the Sierra Nevada mountains, where there was a four season climate with fairly mild winters.
Within a few days in the new locale we had purchased three plus acres of land, hired a draftsman to draw up house plans, and hired a master builder who would bring his two assistants. We would all work on the construction, where Jim would be the general contractor. After that we drove south in the rental car to the townhouse we were renting following the sale of our beach home the previous spring. I quit my job, and Jim took care of what he needed to do with his business, which would include servicing clients for a while from our new location along with periodic trips to southern California. We packed up our belongings that were then put into storage in our new area during the time the house was being built, and we each drove a car back to the motel cottage with a small kitchen that would be our home for the next three months. During a snowstorm in mid December 1975 we moved into our new home, exhausted after finishing the inside of the structure ourselves!
As noted in earlier chapters, Jim and I have spent a lot of time during our lives together studying. These studies included many experiential events such as a six state trip we took in the early summer of 1976 for about a month, as we hiked into and explored some wilderness areas. We were also seeing for ourselves what was taking place environmentally in the western portion of the land of our births.
As I look back, what I aware of is that during all of our studies, our Love and Compassion for this country and its people have grown, and then grown even more to include land and people everywhere.
How I see the world in the present is that to Understand the United States and our global world-of-today, I think it’s necessary to at least go back to the time of worldwide explorations and colonization by the European countries. And to place within that context the unfolding story of the United States.
Even though today’s U.S. continental land mass initially attracted explorers and adventurers who were seeking gold, silver, animal furs, and other natural resources, such as was being done elsewhere, there was also a movement of colonists to this land along the Atlantic Ocean from European countries, primarily England. Many of these colonists brought with them a spirit of independence, entrepreneurism, and the background of various English legal precedents and procedures that secured personal liberty and civil rights for some. They came with dreams to bring forth something better than what they had previously experienced, including having freedom to practice their religion. For many, this has been a country of opportunities.
Moreover, the early settlers came to a continent that was rich in natural resources, where the native people had lived in fairly harmonious relationships with fellow species. To use some of today’s terminology, the human footprint had been light.
I also think that in order to Understand the circumstances of how we became citizens of the United States of America, it is important to have some perspectives about what had been and was happening in Europe in those days, including long-held rivalries between France and England, and how France helped the colonists—both financially and militarily—break free from English rule.
Then during President Thomas Jefferson’s first administration, in 1803 a vast area of land between the Mississippi River and the Rockies, stretching from the Gulf of Mexico to the Canadian border, was purchased from France for about $15,000,000. It was called the Louisiana Purchase, doubling the size of the United States. In May 1804, the Lewis and Clark expedition set out to explore the newly acquired territory and survey for a land-water route to the Pacific, setting the stage for the later expansion west by many adventurers and pioneers.
Florida was purchased from Spain, first becoming a territory and then a state in 1845. In December 1845 Texas became the 28th state. In 1846, in a treaty with Great Britain, the U.S. gained territory in present-day Idaho, Oregon, Washington, and part of Montana. And in 1848 after many battles with Mexico, the United States gained more western land to the Pacific Ocean.
So, as people in the newly fledged United States of America moved west, they pushed the native people aside. “Manifest Destiny” was a term used to describe a belief structure during the 1840s in this country, that because of the U.S. economic and political superiority, and its rapidly growing population, it should rule all North America. As I understand it, there was also an intermixed belief that those in the United States of America had been and were special recipients of God’s favor.
The Erie Canal had been completed in 1825, joining the entire Great Lakes system with the Atlantic Ocean. It crossed New York state from Albany and Troy on the Hudson River to Buffalo on Lake Erie. The canal provided a route over which manufactured goods could flow into the west, and raw materials could pour into the east. It also provided a route for settlers, some of whom were Jim and my ancestors.
From my perspective of today, when gold was discovered on a river in northern California, January 24, 1848, a new era in the west began. Jim and I have explored and hiked some of the California gold-mining areas extensively, Understanding the results in terms of what happened to the rivers, the land, and native people there.
The Homestead Act was passed by Congress in May 1862. It provided that any person over twenty-one, who was the head of a family, and either a citizen or alien who intended to become a citizen, could obtain the title to 160 acres of public land if he lived on the land for five years, farmed it, and built a home there. Or, the settler could pay $1.25 an acre in place of the residence requirement. My encyclopedia says the sponsors of this law believed that the land was worthless before it was improved.
I’ve read that thousands of settlers were attracted to the west: from 1862 to 1900, the act provided farms and new homes for between 400,000 and 600,000 families. The opportunities offered by the act were widely advertised in the U.S. and Europe. The encyclopedia goes on to say that Congress granted much of the best land in the west to railroad builders or to the states for the support of agricultural colleges.
Spreading all this out, it seems to me that many factors came together here in the United States over the years, including influxes of immigrants who added new vitality and provided a low-wage work force, to bring about the country we who live here today call “home.” The immigrants were in addition to people who were brought from Africa early-on as slaves, who helped build U.S. prosperity. And in my opinion, we here in the U.S. are still experiencing the legacy of slavery.
Additionally, there were also many technological achievements in the 1800s and 1900s, machines for all types of purposes that facilitated U.S. prosperity. These included railroads, cars, trucks, and airplanes to transport people and commodities. After World War II, when the United States was the main industrial power that had not been ravaged by war, as a nation we were able to convert to peacetime activities—and to bring about very materially comfortable lives for many people.
In the Sunday Parade section of our newspaper on January 14, 2007, there was an article titled “Is America Still No. 1?” It started off by saying the U.S. remains the most powerful nation in the world, having its basis in military might and in the enormous strength and reach of the U.S. economy. We are said to make up less than 5% of the world’s population, yet lead the world in Nobel Prize-winners, the number of billionaires, and the number of gold medals and total medals in the most recent summer Olympics. We here in the U.S. are also said to grant the most patents, produce the most energy and electricity, have the most Internet users, the most roads, airports, and railway tracks.
I read in the Parade article that we spend almost as much on the military as all other nations combined. We have more deliverable nuclear weapons than anyone else, and we lead the world in the value of the arms we sell to other governments.
The Parade magazine statistics about the United States relative to other countries, I saw as indicators in a shifting, changing, interconnected world of global warming and other environmental happenings. The following adds more to what else was going on:
- We in the United States have a huge federal debt that continues to climb, especially with the ongoing expenses of the Iraq war.
- There are rising overall health-care costs.
- Aging baby boomers, in increasing numbers, will be collecting Social Security and Medicare payments. The Federal government has spent and continues to spend the excess Social Security tax money that is supposed to be accumulating in the Social Security trust fund, so there is nothing there except a future promise to pay. This will mean increased taxes or seriously reduced benefits, or both.
- There’s a crumbling infrastructure—of highways, roads, bridges, sewer systems, levees, and other aspects of the country—that needs repairing.
- The Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation (PBGC) is being stressed due to retirement plan defaults by many businesses. There are also government guarantees to other parts of the financial structure.
- There's a large amount of U.S. personal debt.
- Along with this, Jim and I live in a state—Michigan—that has been hard-hit economically because of the problems the U.S. car industry has been having.
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