Homage to America the Beautiful

I spent August in New England, in some of my favorite places, the Maine coast and the Green Mountains of Vermont. These two places are only a two-and-a-half hour’s drive apart, but they are different worlds. There’s the rocky coast of Maine with the salty, fresh air sweeping off the vast Atlantic to the east. And to the west, just across the narrow state of New Hampshire, are the richly forested mountains and sparkling crystalline rivers of Vermont. Practically everything is different about these two places.

On a map of America the space between them seems to be practically insignificant. It’s tiny compared to the vast dimensions of a country that stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific. That demonstrates something. If there is that much variation between these two places, what are we looking at with the entire United States?

From York, Maine, to Brattleboro, Vermont, is 134 miles. With today’s cars that can move at more than a mile a minute, it takes only a small part of the day to go from one to the other.

But in between those two spots on the map is a cornucopia of variation. There are farmlands, pastures, horse ranches, forests, mountains and rivers, towns and villages with historical churches and buildings that speak of ages past.

Just try to extrapolate that degree of variation spread across the whole width and depth of this nation that stretches 2800 miles across and 1600 miles north to south. I submit to you, that not only is America beautiful, as the song says, but it’s practically inconceivably vast and diverse in every way.

There are no adequate superlatives to describe what America is. Our perceptions are distorted by what we see on maps. From childhood we are used to seeing that space representing one country. But the scale is much more than our minds can comprehend. It’s practically as large as all of Europe. And the more I discover of the United States, the more I appreciate the enormous diversity in America.

Mentally we can group things together as one thing. That doesn’t make them one thing. Maine and Vermont are grouped with several other states as “New England.” But there is as much diversity across that whole region as there was in that little strip across the state of New Hampshire.

I am from the Midwest, but I still tend to fall into the error of thinking of it as a homogeneous mass. It is anything but. It’s a mosaic of countless landscapes, towns, cities and…