II - It Was America

It was America: a country, and an ideal. It was trees, rivers, lakes, mountains, valleys, canyons, deserts, forests, beaches. It was land -- vast, expansive land, and the majestic eagles soared above it all, waiting for a chance to swoop down and snatch some of their own.

It was the hamburger, the milkshake, the Charleston and the Lindy Hop. Route 66, Highway 9, the New Jersey Turnpike, and the great Alaska Highway. It was rock n' roll even before Elvis. It was the Harley Davidson, the Smith & Wesson, the novels of James Fenimore Cooper, and the Chesterfield cigarette. It was boys and girls standing on opposite sides of the gymnasium at a junior high dance, suppressing their basest urges for the greater good.

That's what America was back then, in the Second Antebellum Period. Of course, people didn't know to call it that at the time. To them, the country was always entangled in one minor war or another -- mild military excursions into various foreign territories to extract terrorists and other nogoodniks. Tiny wars, fought on principle and principle alone.

And then it happened. Fort Lauderdale, destroyed. In New Jersey, South Orange and West Orange obliterated, leaving only East Orange behind. A five-mile stretch of Omaha, Nebraska declared unfit for human habitation for one-hundred seventy years. One-hundred seventy. The oldest woman on earth was only one-hundred twenty-nine years old.

Now it was different. America was now the land of concrete, a massive expanse of rocky gristle, stirred up and poured neatly into square-shaped molds known as towns, villages and cities. It was the world's third-largest country, and its largest parking lot. The plants that were lucky enough to dig their roots down into the concrete, to push themselves up between its cracks - these were the most American plants. Purple mountains? Amber waves? Sure, they were still there if you were willing to ignore the rest of it. But destruction brought a desire for safety, for calmness and oneness, for convenience.

The new America was built, a society of concrete, asphalt, clay, and tar. Real Americans loved the smell of tar.