All it took was a trip by one taxi, three airplanes, and a rented car to move to a different world.
It is a world without TV or radio except in the rented car. A phone is a short drive. What it lacks in electronics it more than compensates for with natural beauty: mountains, forests, streams, bluffs, seas and best of all - a glorious lack of humanity.It is a place where you can look at the United States from a great enough distance to see it in better perspective than from Washington, D.C.
What is most impressed on the mind as you look at the United States from a distance is how very, very lucky the United States is compared to the rest of the planet.
This place where I have chosen to vacation has been inhabited as long as the United States, probably longer. Who knows when the first humans lived anywhere? Columbus was met by people when he "discovered" America.
The unlucky humans were those who were in the Western world when the Europeans arrived. Here in this vacationland the natives were treated miserably. In the United States, we treated them worse.
This place of great beauty has been occupied by people of European ancestry as long as the United States. It just hasn't been as lucky.
The prevalence of old barns tells the visitor that farming has been carried on here for a very long time, probably before the Europeans came. Most of the old barns are no longer used as barns. A few are guest houses or antique shops; most just sit there with leaking and sagging roofs, broken siding and rotting foundations, waiting for a bad storm to take them down and end their misery.
The farms they once served are overgrown with more than weeds; the trees have reclaimed the land. These old farms on these beautiful rolling hills could not compete with the great flat farms of the United States. They were unlucky, and they died.
There were mines here, but like the farms, they were small. They couldn't compete with the great coal deposits of our Appalachian mountains and Western ores. As the coal petered out, so did the mines. They were unlucky, and they died. We were lucky, and we still prosper from the bounty of our immense natural resources.
In the early days, at least the early European days, the people here lived in large part from the sea and lived well. The fish and shellfish and crustaceans were bountiful, so bountiful that the Europeans who came in increasing numbers to harvest them considered them limitless.
The people were limitless but the sea was not; both fish and fishermen have petered out. Too late, the government has imposed strict limits on sizes and seasons and nets. Fishing has become as uneconomic as mining. The United States is no luckier in this. Too late our own government has done the same.
There appear to be more old houses boarded up or falling down than new ones under construction. Reading the day-old paper tells you why. The employment ads include the following: "Nursing Opportunities USA. Immediate openings for registered nurses in Florida . . ", "Florida Wants You, Excellent Pay, Benefits, Transportation."
Among the business ads, the local government's Department of Economic Development has this, "Interested in Doing Business in New England? . . ." and tells people how to go about doing business in the United States.
We think, and our politicians campaign by telling us, that we're having a hard time in the United States. In the rest of the world, and not merely in Third World countries, we are still the land of opportunity.
On our 217th birthday, it is good to see the United States from a distance, out of earshot of the fireworks and the blather.
In Washington, correspondents and commentators spend so much time on tiny transitory problems, counting the leaves on the trees and missing the growth or death of the forests.
From this distance the United States appears to be a gloriously blessed land whose people strive and compete and fight with one another, but who share the bounty of what just may be the luckiest nation on Earth.