November 2, 2020 – Yesterday I left town for a quick dash up to the Red Cabin before tomorrow’s turning point in history. My excuse was to check on the hundreds of bud caps I’d stapled to the white pine saplings in my “tree garden.” I’d completed the project just before the first big, wet snow of the season, and I was worried that the weather had undone my work. This week promises to be unseasonably mild, giving me a chance to re-do the operation if necessary.
The bud-caps withstood the wet, wintry blast just fine. Now that I’m here, I can attend to trail work, making me a perfectly happy camper—in the moment.
But what weighs on me heavily, even up here in the woods, is the day of reckoning in the story of America. When the sun rises on the East Coast tomorrow, America will be one country. By the time the sun sets on Hawaii tomorrow evening, America will be quite a different country—irrespective of the outcome of the election.
As I write this, I feel as if I’m a paratrooper of the 101st Airborne Division, the “Screaming Eagles,” in the launch of the Allied invasion of Normandy in WW II. After weeks of training and anticipation, my fellow G.I.s and I are aboard a C-47 aptly named, A Wing and a Prayer. It’s just past midnight, and to avoid detection by German radar, we’re coming in low over the Channel, heading for the coast of Normandy and the drop zone. We’re nervous as hell. Some of us are praying. Others are puking. When the order is given, we’ll . . . jump into the night.
No one knows for sure how the jump will go—whether we’ll come in too high and open ourselves to anti-aircraft flak or too low and our chutes won’t have time to slow our descent; whether we’ll land in the designated drop zone or plunge straight into enemy fire. And assuming we survive the drop, how will fate treat us in the coming battles? In all events, one certainty awaits us: gravity.
Every American is now a “Screaming Eagle” about to jump (or be pushed, paralyzed by fear) from a C-47 over territory fraught with danger. From the pandemic to financial hardship to the effects of climate change, grave realities await us. How we will do combatting these challenges is still . . . up in the air. Once the election is over—once we’ve leapt into the dark—we must keep our wits about us. We must land, roll, and stand. We must then cut our parachutes, regroup, establish our position, and identify our objectives. We must not only survive but fight to make our country safe again for Democracy.
And we must fight despite the fact we’ve become the United States of ME. We must fight to restore the United States of America to its former good standing not only among nations of the world but among US . . . of America.
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© 2020 by Eric Nilsson
