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America’s story needs to be retold, or it will be drowned out by the noise of these postmodern times.
What I remember most about our nation’s big bicentennial celebration in 1976 was the bears in Cherokee National Forest. We awoke one morning to three or four of them calmly ransacking our campsite, as my parents, my sisters, and I watched from inside the Volkswagen camper we were driving across the country that summer.That was half a century ago, and maybe we weren’t as aware of wildlife best practices. Or maybe we just weren’t expecting bears. But as one pawed its way into our styrofoam cooler, we watched with a Disney-dulled fascination — and a misplaced confidence in what that VW Westfalia could withstand, should even a moderately sized black bear find it interesting.
The bears soon moved on to other campsites without incident, but my sisters and I spent much of the rest of the trip spinning increasingly gruesome stories about how the Bear Encounter could have turned out if the bears had known about the peanut butter crackers in the back seat.
Yet with the bears came a revelation to my 12-year-old mind: America was still at least a little bit wild. And America being wild felt proper and good — not a tame lion.
That trip helped to form my view of the United States as something big, bold, and wonderful. My love for America can be traced back to the hot summer days we spent traversing her forests, fields, highways, and historical sites. Reagan hadn’t made his famous commercial yet, but it truly felt like morning in America.
But does that America still exist? I’m taking some time this summer to find out. In the classic, The Devil and Daniel Webster, we learned that if you go to Webster’s grave and call his name aloud, you’ll hear his deep voice ask, “Neighbor, how stands the union?”
Perhaps that’s what I’m asking today.
1976 vs. 2026
In the summer of 1976, just as now, we were a deeply divided nation. The fall of Saigon was still a fresh wound on the nation’s psyche, as was the Watergate scandal and its political fallout. Georgia Gov. Jimmy Carter was building up a massive lead in the presidential race (up 30 points after the Democratic National Convention in July). Inflation was a driving factor; the Ford administration was never able to bring inflation down, though Carter himself would bring about a new measure of economic misery: “stagflation.”
None of that mattered much to me, though. I was in it for the camping and the battlefields and the fireworks and the fanfare. I suppose I bought into the hype. In school, we studied the Founding Fathers, we painted the fire hydrants patriotic colors, and my family spent hours with a road atlas, planning possible routes.
But it didn’t seem like hype then. It felt as if we all, despite our divisions, had come to a consensus on one thing, at least: America is pretty great and worth celebrating.
We did what many families did at the time; we sought to commemorate the bicentennial in our own way. We drove from our home in northern Florida to Montreal (and back). The trip lasted six weeks, and that was only possible because my parents were teachers. But as teachers, they must have saved money for months to make it happen.
Our VW Westfalia camper was built in 1968, with a 1.6-liter engine that could work itself up to a whopping 50 horsepower. Our top speed was about 55 mph (downhill), quite in keeping with the new federal speed limit. But the truth was, we couldn’t speed if we wanted to. There was no air conditioner. VW didn’t offer AC even as an option for that model year. But that wasn’t uncommon; we simply kept the windows open and the radio on.
I brought as many books with me as I could. That summer, I was reading biographies of our founders and other figures from American history, and I didn’t stick to the ones written for children.
We had a camping box (built with the help of my dad’s friend, the shop teacher) and a Coleman tent. That was enough for all five of us. We had a rough itinerary, with drives of between 200 and 300 miles between sites. We visited the big ones: Mount Vernon and Washington, D.C., Gettysburg and Appomattox, the Liberty Bell and Niagara Falls. Watching the tall ships sail into New York Harbor left me with a lifelong love of sailing and ships.
Our trip began at the Open Pond campground in Conecuh National Forest near Andalusia, Alabama, only about 100 miles from home. We were well familiar with that campground, and that first night served as a shakedown cruise of sorts. Our usual camping habit was to get a few miles from home, then one of us would remember something really important, and we’d have to backtrack. By starting close to home, we ensured that whatever was left behind wouldn’t cost us more than a few hours.
Much later in life, I found a verse from Emily Dickinson that truly captures the feeling of the start of a trip: The sailor, she writes, knows “the divine intoxication of the first league out from land.” The poem is called “Exultation Is the Going,” and she gets it right. It’s that nearly impenetrable joy when the trip is all promise (so far) and no disappointments (yet). All of America was before us, and we had a road atlas — a thing I still take immense joy in, even as GPS renders them quaint. Exultation was in the going.
Were there disappointments? Of course. I didn’t know it at the time, but we weren’t a wealthy family. Pay for a high school band director in 1976 was $12,000 to $13,000 per year. That wasn’t bad (about $70,000 today), but there were five of us, and travel can be expensive. I don’t remember a single restaurant on the trip, though I remember the hot dogs, pork and beans, Bisquick pancakes, and endless peanut butter sandwiches we ate along the way. --->READ MORE HERE
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