Flashback and Fourth on the Fifth

Even in our divided and anxiety ridden United States, we'll always have our 4th of July to celebrate what we remember as freedom, independence, brotherhood and unity

Who doesn't love the concept?

So we break out burgers, hot dogs and beers and gather with some of our like minded and blow off firewrorks while trying to remain sober enough not to blow ourselves up as part of the package. The older we get, the easier it becomes to stay in bounds.

Before global warming, the 4th felt like the kickoff of summer. Downhere in Caroline, we've been baking in the 90's for a month now and already we're looking for the end of summer.

Lynn and I decided to keep everything on the low and have yet another unmemorable fourth; a good time but not widely distinguishable from dozens of other 4ths. Lynn made cupcakes and our burgers were meatless. We almost succeeded except for the mass shooting in Chicago which will always add a bloody punctuation mark to the recall of 2022.

After 50 plus 4ths as an adult, they all sorta blend together ,some of them more gluttonous and/or inebriated than others but in general more similar than different.

Except for one

1974 on the road with Deke and Crown. Deke's my brother Crown's our buddy. You might have heard of them.

We left Rochester in late June aboard my brand new Dodge Club Cab. The Club Cab was revolutionary at the time because it has a space behind the front seat for two additional seats. Throw a cap on the back and you've got a modern Conestoga fit to sleep three. We'd been on the road for about a week, making it up as we went along....getting into the hang of highway life and loving every second. We intended to go coast to coast and touch toe in the Pacific. I needed to be at Montana State for graduate school in mid August but until then we were crusing and playing our 8 tracks with no particluar place to go other than whatever caught our attention as we we passing through looking for the next campsite. We knew where we were going when we got there. Sometimes, it wasn't clear what state we were in or what time it was nor what day it was, we were having fun and adventures everywhere we stopped.

At one point, we were headed for the foothills of the Rockies, we might have been in Wyoming and it might have been Colorado. It might have been the 2nd, 3rd or 4th day of July. We were pretty sure it was July. 

We decided to stop in the next town and pick up some vittles (beer and hot dogs) for tht evening's campfire. We found a nice town....turned out to be Fort Collins, Colorado. We parked at the edge of town. We noticed a few people who had some purpose to their stride. We followed them. We noticed other trickles of people coming from various side streets...something was obviously happening here. We asked somebody in our stream "what's going on". 

"It's 4th of July."

Our trickle of people had grown into a current and then a torrent and we were swept into Hughes Stadium. We were among the last of the 40,00 people who had gathered at the stadium that night for the famous Fort Collins firewrorks display. Nobody asked us for money. Suddenly we were just there. The Fort Collins Symphonic Orchestra started playing our various national anthems followod by thunderous recordings of rock music as the night exploded into surreal fire until the unexpected show which seemd to go on for hours concluded with a blast of Rocky Mountain Way.

It sure as hell seemed a lot better than the way we got.

It appeared as if the whole thing had been arranged as a surprise party for us. Three strangers in town headed off as always to look for America and walking right into this exuberance, this embrace, this' "How ya doin boys....welcome home". Home being America coat to coast sea to sea and most of all right there where we were right then and there.

If you added up our three ages then it would be a year less than the years I'm carrying right now. The future was all there right in front of us to grab and make of it what we would. We weren't sure of much but we knew at that moment what it meant to be free, young and American.

Even today with my road adventures far behind me and having seen near all that I'm gonna see, I flash back to that day in that town and for a few minutes, I'm that guy again going where the wind blows and believing in America seemingly undivided and glowing with good will.