Nov 11, 2013

Veterans, Prairies, and Much Needed Vacations

Here in my home office, I have a series of random items hanging on the wall. They're collected from experiences I've had or items I've been given over the years. I have a heavy, wooden tennis racket from the 70's that was purchased at a garage sale to satisfy the room's required kitsch factor. I have a few of my youngest daughter's drawings posted to give her confidence and pride in her abilities.

My M.A.diploma, which sits in a plain black frame, simultaneously reminds me of both personal successes and bittersweet missteps. There's also a framed group photo of my maternal grandfather's Army company before they shipped off to fight in World War II. Near it is a frame displaying his medals and patches from his time as a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne. He's been gone for well over a decade now, but echoes remain in my mind and in the world around me.

My recollections of my grandfather aren't well-suited to the kinds of proud, lionizing rhetoric I'll read or hear about today. He was a retired, confused man by the time I knew him and most of his days were spent drinking, reflecting, shooting gophers from his back porch, or underlining certain phrases in copies of National Geographic and the Reader's Digest.

It's hard to imagine him as a young man dropping from the sky, heralding the death of Axis soldiers in Italy and the Netherlands. In a box in my office, I have his war-time Gideon Bible. It's beaten, aged, and has the names and apartment numbers of women he knew, in the biblical sense, while fighting in Italy. He lived a long and complicated life, filled with contradictions, defeats, and victories.

Yet, his medals rest in their display case on my wall, reminding me that he overcame a struggle that required far more bravery than I've ever had to muster for anything. So, on a day like today where we're meant to honor all who served our country in the military, I think of his service and how his extraordinarily fortunate survival is directly responsible for my existence, not only as a free American, but also as a human being.

As is usual, I try spend a bit of time before most holidays to reflect upon what the holiday means to society, what it means to me, and how divergent those meanings might be. I don't know if most people do this, but I suspect that they don't. I try to believe the best about the people around me, so I'd like to believe that  we're all constantly trying to align our perceptions of the present with our interpretations of the past. It just so happens that a holiday provides a more definite window of opportunity through which we can defenestrate our ponderings.

My ponderings took me to the internet, to find out the history of the holiday. As it happens, the Congressional Representative responsible for the bill that created our modern version of Veterans Day hailed from Emporia, Kansas. I say this because I drove through Emporia twice this weekend on my way to an Iron & Wine concert in Kansas City. Aside from being the home of a few famous people like R. Lee Ermey and Coach Dean Smith, as well as a small college, Emporia also calls itself the "Front Porch to the Flint Hills."

 The Flint Hills of Kansas. I don't see a front porch. Or much of anything.

As I drove through the Flint Hills, both coming and going from Kansas City, I was stunned by the starkness of the landscape. The absence of trees or traces of humanity made the land seem otherworldly, as if it were some sort of moonscape image transmitted by a NASA rover, ten million miles away from home. I've seen this landscape before, in the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve in Osage County, just west of my hometown. I'm sure I was more focused on the bison or whomever was with me in the car at the time to see the beauty of this part of the country.

Yet here it was, still and silent outside the window of my fleeting automobile, appearing to have been unspoiled by the avaricious persistence of certain kinds of pioneers. When I returned to my house, I read more about the Flint Hills. Geologically, they're beyond ancient. They're largely unspoiled because the land is unsuitable for farming, though some small patches of agriculture were present as I drove through. 

More importantly, the Flint Hills and the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve are worth beholding because they've survived. Most of the Great Plains looked this way when settlers arrived here with their plows. Natural grassfires would scorch the landscape, burning nearly a third of it every year. More than that, the massive fires also gave the land the possibility to grow and flourish. In that austere beauty, a survivor's narrative appeared. Despite the fact that an abysmal interstate bisects the land, it persists and resists. It would seem that destruction, survival, and revivification were literally infused into the grass and soil.

It is a veteran of its own great war and it bears its own scars to prove its courage. So little of it remains, much like the ever-decreasing number of beings that are veterans of my grandfather's war. We take time to memorialize their service in eternal granite, knowing that it was a brave and stunning decision to put themselves in harm's way. We've taken efforts to set aside tracts of land as memorials or open-air cathedrals celebrating the survival and resurrection of a threatened place. We honor the inimitable beauty of their service and their survival.

Time will carry us into the future and subsequent generations will undoubtedly lose any sort of personal connection to veterans of certain wars. Their struggles, if not properly remembered and protected, will evaporate into the nebulous haze of our collective forgetting. That's what today's holiday is meant to struggle against. In my last post , I was thankful for the ability to forget. Today, I'm thankful that other people have worked diligently to ensure that I remember.

And in the spirit of that, I'll leave you with Iron & Wine's cover of New Order's "Love Vigilantes." Its spare, unadorned arrangement creates in my mind a nexus between the Flint Hills' survivor's narrative, my grandfather's heedless bravery, and the wondrous, delicate magic that allows me to never forget why both of those matter. So there, on my wall, his medals will remain, as commonplace tributes to uncommon courage. Have safe travels out there. If you happen upon scenery that triggers reflection, be sure to keep the car between the lines.

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