So he finds himself on the cusp of another July 4th and all its strange customs: Parades built on the back of cheap petroleum, night skies polluted by the small explosions of fireworks, kegs and coolers brimming with pallid domestic beers, grills stacked high with chickens who never set foot on the soft, brown earth during their short and brutish lives. And somewhere in there, perhaps, for some (and especially after a few PBRs), a swell of patriotism.   

Independence Day. Like so many of the noble tenets upon which this nation was built, it has become little more than a parody of itself. Independent from what? Certainly not from the oil that’s rapidly depleting from the ground beneath our feet (or, more to the point, from the ground beneath the feet of the Saudis, Canadians, Russians, and Iraqis), creating a metaphorical sinkhole into which we are all slipping. Certainly not from a government that seeks neither justification nor permission for its actions. Certainly not from an agriculture system that is fracturing under the mounting pressures of fuel prices, land availability, and the ethanol mandate. Certainly not from an economy that understands only consumption.   

He’s never really understood the whole secession thing. It’s always felt to him a bit like spitting into the wind: futile and messy. His 36 years have already been marked by excessive futility and exorbitant messiness. He can take only so much. But he understands the appeal. Who can take a clear-eyed look at the tragicomedy of modern America and NOT want to de-tether, to hunker down among friend and family, a cozy warren, a safe haven from which to ride out the coming storm?   

To a certain extent, that’s what he’s been doing, though his motivations were never any more complicated than the simple pleasures of watching his cows graze on a dew-wet morning, or slicing into a home-smoked ham, or gnawing on vine-ripe tomato on his way to the woods with the saw. The appeal of these things is so deep and elemental that it sometimes takes his breath away.   

Of course, it’s not true independence. He is still beholden to the larger economy, still needs the meager income he reaps from the sale of word and phrase. And because such sale depends on the fiscal health of the magazines that deign to publish his work, and because said fiscal health depends on the magazines’ ability to sell advertisements for prescription drugs and new automobiles, he feels an unnerving vulnerability. Beef and milk and tomatoes and bacon are well and good, but they don’t pay his mortgage. They don’t pay to put shoes on the boys.   

It occurs to him that the lesson of Independence Day is exactly its opposite: We are not independent; we are all dependent. We are, for now, intertwined and ensnared in the frayed web of the American Dream. To extricate ourselves will not be simple, but we must begin to snip and wiggle, to loosen the threads that keep us from realizing true freedom.   

Maybe secession is a good first step. But for now, his hopes rest on the small herd of cattle lolling in the shade of sugar maple. And on the tomato plants, still trapped in little pots under the heat of hothouse plastic.

‘The Greenneck’ lives and writes in the rusted-out shell of a one-ton Chevy pickup somewhere in Cabot.