In the city park where I sometimes walk, there is a footbridge that is more to me than just a bridge. It is old, of course, but nothing of note culturally has happened on it. It crosses a steep-banked stream beneath a canopy of trees, leading from a large pasture-like field to a low hill and a softball field beyond. It is not in a particularly beautiful location, but to me it symbolizes that place in any wooded park where you can stop and be quiet, even if just for a moment.
On a still, windless afternoon, I stopped on the bridge and leaned my forearms on the rough stone. I was in the world and the world was in me. The sunlight filtered through the leaves above me and rippled like cold flames on the trickling water below.
It was no longer summer, but it wasn’t autumn yet either.
The park was quiet; the day before there had been a noisy wedding in the stone amphitheater just up the path, but now there was only rainbow confetti falling on the grass. The only sound was the footsteps of a squirrel perched in a nearby tree. It clutched an acorn in one paw and watched me with dark, wary eyes. A few days earlier, near the same spot, there had been a giant fairy ring of white mushrooms, but I had been careful not to step into it.
I’m not superstitious, but why take the risk?
The period between Labor Day and the Autumnal Equinox is a transitional period that bridges the haze of summer to the freshness of autumn. There are still precious summer days left until the Autumnal Equinox. This year, the Autumnal Equinox will occur at 7:44 AM on Sunday, September 22, when the Sun is directly above the Equator and both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres receive the same amount of light. Seasons are determined by the Earth’s tilt to the Sun, but there is no tilt at the Autumnal Equinox. The Spring and Autumnal Equinoxes, like the Summer Solstice, can vary by about one day each year. This is because the Earth’s orbit around the Sun is about a quarter of a day longer than the calendar year. So, by having a leap year to compensate, everything works out.
You can’t stand an egg on the spring equinox, at least not on any other day, but this is a myth that some teachers believed when I was in grade school. While the egg myth is false, the spring equinox has darker superstitions associated with it, such as human sacrifice in Viking and Mayan cultures. Apparently the day we orbit the sun has always had special significance, but now it’s associated with the harvest, the start of football season, and the return of pumpkin spice. The spring equinox is the chiming of a cosmic clock that reminds us, in a way that no terrestrial clock can, that light and dark are now in balance, but that soon the days will get shorter.
But not yet.
I have always been at odds with time, living in the past or waiting for the future, but this unseasonable calm brings a truce. I can remain in the present. There is still time for carefree, pensive walks.
I had that moment on the bridge.
My mind wasn’t full of unfinished business or injustices to be covered in future columns. I wasn’t preoccupied with mundane things like what to have for dinner or what to watch on TV. I was in the world and the world was in me. And yet, like water and grass and trees and squirrels, witnesses to transcendence, I quietly sensed the harbingers of change.
Change is always happening.
But in that moment on the bridge, I had a feeling that the changes coming would be more profound than usual. I make no predictions about the nature of the changes. I’m not making political predictions here, offering cultural insights, or even proposing winning lottery numbers. Predicting change is a sure bet.
Of course, the weather will change. In two weeks, the days will begin to shorten after a near-perfect balance between night and day. A full moon or two away, and the cold will take hold. And then comes another event that is as certain as the seasons, yet as unpredictable as next week’s weather forecast.
Change will happen, but will it bring good fortune or bad fortune?
Ah, it’s what drives Norwegians to make sacrifices to the gods, and it’s what keeps us buying lottery tickets and putting political signs on our lawns.
“All voting is a kind of game, like checkers or backgammon, of moral import,” Henry David Thoreau wrote in Civil Disobedience. “A game of right and wrong, of moral questions, with gambling necessarily incidental thereto.”
Like leap years, presidential elections occur every four years. In fact, they overlap with leap years. This Tuesday, November 5, may hold special historical significance. Don’t forget. Don’t forget. In the last few years, I’ve been pondering how much the Kansas I knew has changed, so I turned to a map showing the political currents that have swept the state, county by county.
I grew up in Cherokee County, one of three counties in the southeastern corner of Kansas that have historically leaned Democratic, largely due to immigration and union history. Both of my grandfathers were coal miners, and on the shelf behind me is a carbide brass lamp, the kind miners wore on their hard hats when descending the mine shafts. The first time I voted for president, I was in the auditorium at Washington Elementary School in Baxter Springs, a hall where, years ago, I asked to play guitar in music class and was given a trumpet. Guitar was not a marching band instrument, and I soon gave up the trumpet.
The blue counties in southeastern Kansas where I grew up were engulfed in a sea of red by the early 2000s. Only a few blue islands remained in Kansas cities and college towns. This was not just a political change, but a fundamental shift in the self-perception of many people. The ideas I held when I voted for Jimmy Carter in my old grade school may seem as old-fashioned as the carbide lamps our grandfathers used. But the funny thing about that old lamp behind me is that it still works, doesn’t require batteries, and doesn’t give you carbon monoxide poisoning. Cavers and hunters still use carbide lamps, but they give off acetylene, an explosive gas, so extra care must be taken.
This is not to say that my grandfathers’ political views were similar to my own. For one, I did not know them; both of them died before I was born. Also, according to family lore, at least one of them was a member of the Ku Klux Klan, which at the time numbered thousands of men. But bad company does not excuse bad behavior. I find family association with hate groups abhorrent and shameful. If there is any redemption, it is righting the wrongs of the past. It requires finding a bridge from where we are to where we want to be.
When I’m walking through the park, I sometimes stop at that stone bridge and think of my grandfathers, because it was contemporary with them. The bridge, like the amphitheater, was built about 90 years ago as a relic of the Works Progress Administration, a New Deal program that created millions of jobs across the country.
There are other bridges in American history that are celebrated for their special cultural significance, such as Burnside Bridge, the site of an unimaginable massacre at the Battle of Antietam in 1862, and Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama (named after the former Confederate general and leader of the Ku Klux Klan). During the Civil Rights Movement, activists were beaten by police on Pettus Bridge.
These bridges play a big role in the story of who we once were and who we have become. These bridges are metaphors for the courage of those who, despite fierce and brutal opposition, rose above that moment and sought to pave the way to a better, more equitable future. We have not yet achieved equality for all Americans, but we are on that path. The bridges before us are big and small.
My bridge is a small one, just a stone and concrete walkway across a stream. I can stop on it, suspended for a moment between a dead past and a living future. I can choose to trudge back the way I came, over damp grass with wilted confetti, or I can carry on and climb that little hill. The problem is, even if I choose to go back, there will still be changes. You can’t go back to the past any more than you can wish to go to the moon.
So I carry on.
In the near future, I will cross bigger bridges, measure bigger bridges as my own, and be brave enough to take on more than a few steps. But for now, in this grace period between the end of summer and the beginning of fall, I choose to pause, enjoy the moment, feel the pulse of change in the air, and not be afraid.
The time to act will come soon.
We are at a political plateau in our democratic process, a time when the forces are roughly evenly matched. We are not in balance, we are in chaotic turmoil, and the days after November 5th are sure to be shorter for one side than the other.
Thoreau published Civil Disobedience in 1849 after spending a night in jail for refusing to pay taxes in protest of the Mexican-American War, which he and other New Englanders saw as a means to expand slavery into the Southwest.
“Under a government that imprisons men unjustly,” Thoreau said, “the prison is the place where the righteous man can truly be.”
Thoreau’s disobedience to government was nonviolent and grew out of a deep belief that slavery was a great injustice that must end. Government is necessary, but “to the people themselves it is a kind of wooden gun,” he said, “and if the people were to use it as a real gun against one another in earnest, government would surely be divided.”
Ten years after Thoreau wrote this, America is divided. In many ways, we are still wrestling with the great divisions created by the Civil War, and we are still fighting each other over equality and states’ rights. I think Thoreau would be disappointed, but not surprised, to find out where the political balance stands today.
In just a few weeks, after the leaves change color, there will come a moment when our current political divides will be bridged. Whether we cross to the light on the hills in the distance or to the shadows behind us will be our own choice. There will be no God to blame, no stars to thank.
But now, this very moment, is the time to stop, take a breath, and prepare to cross.
Max McCoy is an award-winning author and journalist. The Kansas Reflector amplifies the voices of people affected by public policy and those excluded from public discourse through its opinion columns. Learn more, including how to submit your own commentary, here.