JOE’S POND, VT – We’re on vacation this week at Joe’s Pond (formerly “Injun Joe’s Pond”) in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom. Swimming, canoeing, reading on the dock, getting sunburned, walking down to the little store for an ice cream after dinner, hearing the loons call at night.
It’s the kind of vacation I had as a child when my dad would take his one week’s respite from work and the whole family would drive up to a small lake in Ontario. The latitude’s about the same, the same warm days and cool nights, the same lumpy mattress, the same vague aromatic evidence of a bed-wetter’s occupation of the space before we arrived.
There are differences. I’ve been marveling all week at how cut off we used to be. No mail, no phones, no radio, newspaper or tee vee news. I’m sure my parents must have given the neighbors a means of getting a hold of us in case the house burned or some other emergency, but nothing like that ever happened.
In an act of questionable judgement, the “beach book” I brought along on this trip is Rick Perlstein’s “Nixonland,” which covers the years 1965-1972 and the fracturing of American politics. Sixty-five through seventy-two were among the years my family spent our summer sojourn at Sparrow Lake. Every summer brought a raft of distressing news – the war in Vietnam, riots in the cities, the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention, the Pentagon Papers, Watergate. No wonder my folks were happy to get away from the news and spend a week thinking about something other than the nation we’d left to the south.
Times have changed – somewhat. There’s no phone in this cabin and no cell phone signal. There’s no Wi-Fi and while there’s a tee vee, it doesn’t work. There’s a teenaged girl, deep in the throes of Facebook withdrawal, sure that her social life will have forever left her behind if she can’t check in at least once a day.
So we find a little Wi-Fi now and then. I admit, I log on, too, if for no other reason than to delete unwanted messages, so I won’t have to plow through five or six hundred at once when I get back to town. I try not to get sucked into the news, but it’s hard.
Tuesday evening, the radio in the cabin was tuned to a little station on the New Hampshire line that plays “all the normal songs” (according to the teenaged girl). The CBS Radio News came on at six o’clock. Here was the line up: The leaked documents on the war in Afghanistan, the Afghan war generally, a potential new oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, an update on the BP oil spew, the new CEO at BP, Congressman Charlie Rangel decides he might want to cut a deal on ethics charges after all and the imminent debut of the Arizona immigration law.
I stepped back outside to tend the grill. The sun was starting to decline toward the Green Mountains in the west, the pond lapped softly against the dock. Since it was mid-week, there were few jet skis or speedboats on the water. The older folk in their pontoon boats, canopies rigged, cruised like the Pharaoh’s barges on the Nile.
In it’s odd way, “Nixonland” is a comforting book. It’s thesis is that the seeds of the divisive politics that so wrack our country today were sown back in the ‘60s with Nixon’s invention of the “Southern strategy” and self-pity of the so-called “silent majority.” (If they would only lapse back into silence.)
Somehow, we got through. Let’s hope we always do.
© Mark Floegel, 2010
Vacation, Then and Now
JOE’S POND, VT – We’re on vacation this week at Joe’s Pond (formerly “Injun Joe’s Pond”) in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom. Swimming, canoeing, reading on the dock, getting sunburned, walking down to the little store for an ice cream after dinner, hearing the loons call at night.
It’s the kind of vacation I had as a child when my dad would take his one week’s respite from work and the whole family would drive up to a small lake in Ontario. The latitude’s about the same, the same warm days and cool nights, the same lumpy mattress, the same vague aromatic evidence of a bed-wetter’s occupation of the space before we arrived.
There are differences. I’ve been marveling all week at how cut off we used to be. No mail, no phones, no radio, newspaper or tee vee news. I’m sure my parents must have given the neighbors a means of getting a hold of us in case the house burned or some other emergency, but nothing like that ever happened.
In an act of questionable judgement, the “beach book” I brought along on this trip is Rick Perlstein’s “Nixonland,” which covers the years 1965-1972 and the fracturing of American politics. Sixty-five through seventy-two were among the years my family spent our summer sojourn at Sparrow Lake. Every summer brought a raft of distressing news – the war in Vietnam, riots in the cities, the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention, the Pentagon Papers, Watergate. No wonder my folks were happy to get away from the news and spend a week thinking about something other than the nation we’d left to the south.
Times have changed – somewhat. There’s no phone in this cabin and no cell phone signal. There’s no Wi-Fi and while there’s a tee vee, it doesn’t work. There’s a teenaged girl, deep in the throes of Facebook withdrawal, sure that her social life will have forever left her behind if she can’t check in at least once a day.
So we find a little Wi-Fi now and then. I admit, I log on, too, if for no other reason than to delete unwanted messages, so I won’t have to plow through five or six hundred at once when I get back to town. I try not to get sucked into the news, but it’s hard.
Tuesday evening, the radio in the cabin was tuned to a little station on the New Hampshire line that plays “all the normal songs” (according to the teenaged girl). The CBS Radio News came on at six o’clock. Here was the line up: The leaked documents on the war in Afghanistan, the Afghan war generally, a potential new oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, an update on the BP oil spew, the new CEO at BP, Congressman Charlie Rangel decides he might want to cut a deal on ethics charges after all and the imminent debut of the Arizona immigration law.
I stepped back outside to tend the grill. The sun was starting to decline toward the Green Mountains in the west, the pond lapped softly against the dock. Since it was mid-week, there were few jet skis or speedboats on the water. The older folk in their pontoon boats, canopies rigged, cruised like the Pharaoh’s barges on the Nile.
In it’s odd way, “Nixonland” is a comforting book. It’s thesis is that the seeds of the divisive politics that so wrack our country today were sown back in the ‘60s with Nixon’s invention of the “Southern strategy” and self-pity of the so-called “silent majority.” (If they would only lapse back into silence.)
Somehow, we got through. Let’s hope we always do.
© Mark Floegel, 2010