God’s Country: Three Vignettes

Sunset over Panacea, Florida, July 2021

I’m Jetskiing through the tidal swamps off the Sopchoppy and Ochlockonee rivers of Panhandle Florida — actually, co-Jetskiing, behind Brenda, my Airbnb host. Brenda grew up in these waterways, and maneuvers the clumps of tall, bright-green grasses, small islands, and pond-like openings, some of which offer three or four exits, with the ease of a native and the joy of a waterhound. Shouting over her shoulder, she points out sights of interest: a slightly wilted, bright-white spider lily, which blooms for one day a year; a silent family of ducks; the nearly submerged nose of an alligator.

“There’s Malibu Beach!” she shouts, pointing to a small island whose palm trees bend to the water. The bank is almost entirely white. “Those are all shells left by Indians,” she says. “It’s an ancient spot for big festivals or oyster roasts, I guess.”

We buzz on in the warm breeze. “This is God’s country!” she shouts.

“Yes!” I shout back.

***

In the waiting room of a truck stop garage in rural Pennsylvania, I meet a trucker , a short, stocky African-American man, 50ish. We get to chatting, and he tells me he lives in Detroit, but is originally from Orangeburg, South Carolina. He’s been there for decades, and the winters are getting to him. Also there’s no way he can afford a house with a yard there. His plan is to retire soon and return to South Carolina, where all his relatives still live.

“I’m gonna get a little house with some land, so I can park my rig in the yard,” he says. “There’ll be room for people to pitch tents and stay there during family reunions,” he said.

This dream is well-rehearsed, developed over long weeks of traversing America. Why would a retiree need a giant rig, I wonder. I don’t ask. I tell him about my journey, and where I’ve been so far.

“Wooooh … all by yourself?” He pauses, clearly wondering whether I was all right in the head. “Well, be careful.”

“I will. You have a wonderful day.”

“Thank you. You be safe — have a blessed day.”

And indeed, despite the delay and hassle this emergency truck stop garage stop had caused, I do feel blessed. My car is in good shape, and I am free again, to travel the Pennsylvania backroads to Ohio.

***

At the general store in Goldfield, Nevada, Diana Christianson, proprietor and local historian, tells me about the 19th-century miners who still haunt Goldfield’s streets, about forsaken love in the Old West, about living here today. When I ask to take her picture, she demurs at first.

“Oh no, you don’t want to do that — I’m old and fat,” she says.

“No, you’re so beautiful,” I say. (She is.)

As I’m leaving, she says, “Thank you, dear. For the pictures. And God bless you. God bless you.” She holds my eyes for long enough that I know she means it.

Heading back into the desert toward Beatty, the gateway to Death Valley, I feel blessed indeed.

***

There are those — non-traditional believers, non-Christians, sceptics, atheists — who flinch at blessings, prayers, and references to God in secular settings. It disrupts this country’s foundational belief in separation of church and state, and the ignorant presumption that we are all Christians — or Deists like the so-called founding fathers, at the least.

But, real talk: Do these blessings actually encroach upon our freedoms?

I for one need all the mercy and general good will I can scrounge up, however grounded it might be in beliefs I don’t share. Why throw the blessing out with the holy water?

Also, and more to the point, as I tramp through this country’s beauty, ugliness, wilderness and wasteland, I am certain only that I have no good “explanation” for how these wonders came to be, and what sustains and destroys them. Divine intervention? Laws of physics acting upon matter? How could one small human brain know for certain?

The infinitesimal part of this universe that I know of is complex and vast, intricate and ever-morphing. How is that less than a permanent Wonder? And, to land back on Earth: how wondrous that any of its citizens sends blessings to another, or in expressing the joy the universe gives her, credits some amorphous magician?

So bless me. Bless my day in God’s country. I’ll take it and treasure it.