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My Family’s Bicentennial Road Trip Taught Me What It Means To Be American

America’s story needs to be retold, or it will be drowned out by the noise of these postmodern times.

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What I remember most about our nation’s big bicentennial celebration in 1976 was the bears in Cherokee National Forest. We awoke one morning to three or four of them calmly ransacking our campsite, as my parents, my sisters, and I watched from inside the Volkswagen camper we were driving across the country that summer.

That was half a century ago, and maybe we weren’t as aware of wildlife best practices. Or maybe we just weren’t expecting bears. But as one pawed its way into our styrofoam cooler, we watched with a Disney-dulled fascination — and a misplaced confidence in what that VW Westfalia could withstand, should even a moderately sized black bear find it interesting.

The bears soon moved on to other campsites without incident, but my sisters and I spent much of the rest of the trip spinning increasingly gruesome stories about how the Bear Encounter could have turned out if the bears had known about the peanut butter crackers in the back seat. 

Yet with the bears came a revelation to my 12-year-old mind: America was still at least a little bit wild. And America being wild felt proper and good — not a tame lion.

That trip helped to form my view of the United States as something big, bold, and wonderful. My love for America can be traced back to the hot summer days we spent traversing her forests, fields, highways, and historical sites. Reagan hadn’t made his famous commercial yet, but it truly felt like morning in America.

But does that America still exist? I’m taking some time this summer to find out. In the classic, The Devil and Daniel Webster, we learned that if you go to Webster’s grave and call his name aloud, you’ll hear his deep voice ask, “Neighbor, how stands the union?”

Perhaps that’s what I’m asking today.

In the summer of 1976, just as now, we were a deeply divided nation. The fall of Saigon was still a fresh wound on the nation’s psyche, as was the Watergate scandal and its political fallout. Georgia Gov. Jimmy Carter was building up a massive lead in the presidential race (up 30 points after the Democratic National Convention in July). Inflation was a driving factor; the Ford administration was never able to........

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