Outside the motel, our old orange Honda hatchback was parked next to a much taller and shinier bright red pickup truck. The owner walked toward his vehicle preceded by his hairy black and white sheepdog. That good-natured creature turned her head my way but kept to her edge of the narrow sidewalk. She just checked quickly to see if I was something to herd, and she sniffed out a quick first impression about my life. When I paused, the dog’s owner apologized, in case his lovely dog had caused me any concern. That was thoughtful of him, and it reminded me later of the Golden Rule. “No problem at all,” I said, and we both went back to loading our vehicles. The next time we passed on the sidewalk, I noticed the words on his navy blue t-shirt, “Be nice,” in small smoothly curving letters. “I like the message,” I said. “I get a lot of comments about it,” he said. “It’s a tense time we’re living in,” I replied. “Back to basics, eh?” he said. This sounded like a question he hoped we already shared an answer to. I nodded in agreement. Soon we started up our vehicles, and half hour later my spouse and I, in our orange Honda, were crossing southern Illinois.
Highway 70 has some distractions. Beyond certain tall, bountiful corn fields, stately wind machines stand at the horizon line with their white blades slowly turning. There’s a wacky little town with a gigantic rocking chair, and also a gigantic mailbox, wind chime, golf tee, knitting needles, and more, each the largest of its kind. Those townspeople must have said to each other, “Hey, let’s stop being anonymous. Let’s do something unpredictable and extravagant together.”
When it wasn’t my turn to drive, I thought more about “Back to basics, eh?” The little sentence unfolded like a purple morning glory flower, the way the best sentences do when we make time for them. Back to basics, like being courteous when your sweet dog takes an interest in a stranger. Back to basics, like trying to live up to the Golden Rule. Crossing wide flat Illinois, there’s plenty of time to ponder. We passed little signs on farm fence posts urging us to think about guns. What does “Back to basics” mean in a tense time of national crisis?
Voting, for sure, and helping others vote, I thought. Somehow my mind turned to the novel Fahrenheit 451. It’s about a country poisoned by a government that expresses its angry power by burning pretty much all the books. In that book’s crisis, individuals can’t think realistically about saving even one library. But, unpredictably and extravagantly, little clusters of people team up to do what they can do. Little teams start memorizing individual books. Crossing Illinois, I thought, Hey, even our mighty Abraham Lincoln didn’t save America all by himself.
Part of the poison of an authoritarian government is cutting people off from each other, building mistrust in a community, and discouraging people from standing up and speaking. Poisoning the town square with angry slogans and getting people deeply in the habit of going it alone.
We Americans like our private lives. We like crossing a whole state sealed inside a car, going it more or less alone. So many novels are about a person trying to go it alone. That makes a compelling story, but in a time of national crisis, going it alone is not good enough. There was that final word the stranger spoke. When he said, “Back to basics, eh?” that muted little “eh?” at the end meant he thought we might have common ground.
Music: "Wrong Foot Forward" by Flook
