Opinion by Neil King Jr.: What I learned about America at 3 miles per hour
? “Attention,” the poet Mary Oliver said, “is the beginning of devotion.” She paid attention, like all great poets.
You get a deeper understanding, walking the small roads, for the back-and-forth wash of memory and oblivion. The Indigenous villages on the colonial maps where not a physical trace remains. The sunken graves to forgotten luminaries in the all-Black cemeteries. The rail beds in northern Maryland where proslavery forcesin the days after the Battle of Fort Sumter. The once-proud manor houses gone to seed and the one where 10 generations have kept their stone home perfectly neat.
The thing about these details is they round out us humans, too. We all have our attributes that help forgive our faults. We have our many facets. If you come to know just the objectionable ones from afar, you’re missing the whole person. We do a lot of that now with the flattened people we fume about on television and Twitter.
There was the bearded auctioneer in Pennsylvania who said God no longer loved America for all the ways we were sinning, but then beamed when showing off the vintage tractors he would sell at auction in the morning; my phone had died, and he gave me good directions to get to where I was going. Or the drywaller in New Jersey with the MAGA flags fluttering from his pickup who lavished me with snacks and jokes when he heard what I was doing; as we talked in his driveway, he gave me a cold beer.
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