MacMaster

Recently this question was posed to me. As the nation celebrates its 250th birthday, what does it mean to be an American?

Reflecting on this, it’s hard to distill an answer down to a single aphorism. In a nation of 342 million people, there may be as many answers as there are Americans. For my part, I defer to the wisdom of United States Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart in 1964 when describing his threshold test for obscenity: “I know when I see it.”

Picture more than fifty years ago a youngish farm father with his boys picking stones in the early summer sun. They’re working a field newly under cultivation, picking up stones hardball-sized or bigger and rolling them onto an all-purpose hay wagon hooked to an old Ford 9N. At the guidance of their father, they roll the heavier stones further in to distribute their weight along the ash stringers underlying the rack, careful not to overload the ash planks on the edge with too much unsupported weight. They need the homemade wagon for far too many essential tasks to take a chance on damaging it by insufficient focus on the task at hand. The crew moves slowly up and down this 40-acre parcel, a quarter mile by a quarter mile, reclaiming narrow strips of stony ground in what the dad calls “lands.” It’s slow methodical work, punctuated by more than a comma but less than a period when the stones are picked clean in one land and the dad climbs up on the 9N and the sturdy utility tractor leads the whole process toward the next land where new stones await. It’s quiet work. Dust kicks up from the dry loamy soil lightly coating all nearby surfaces. Looking out across the field at what’s been done, it feels like progress. The crown of a majestic elm shading a nearby ditch waves in a moderate breeze.

Suddenly from the blue sky above comes a familiar yet still remarkable sound–the thunderous roar of a B-52 bomber from Wurtsmith Air Force Base arcing low overhead. You hear the sound first before locating the massive plane overhead but once encountered neither can be ignored. The family picking stones stops and gazes skyward. You can’t take your eyes off it. The father fully straightens, left hand on his hip and right hand almost in a salute shading his eyes against the sun, watching with admiration as the crew begins its curving descent to Wurtsmith AFB just beyond the horizon. Not long after, a trio of fighter jets screams overhead in tight formation like something out of Star Wars, a series not created yet, leaving tight parallel contrails in their wake followed in short order by a tremendous shockwave sonic boom. One small stone picker in the field looks up with wonder. The fighter squadron and its astounding speed and capacity look like nothing more than an ironclad version of a guaranteed future.

Things change over fifty years, however. The elms are no longer with us, alas. All the ash died too. The youngish father leading his crew picking stones passed some time ago. His sons are fathers and grandfathers now. The land stayed in the family but nobody in the youngest generation has chosen to become farmers. Farming the Sun, as a neighboring farmer described solar arrays, has become a highly divisive crop for local landowners seeking a way to keep land in the family. Even Wurtsmith, once the symbol of strength and fighting technology, has gone by the wayside, replaced by Kalitta Air, the region’s largest employer. I suppose the stones are still with us, impervious to change and the indignities of time, piled off to the side somewhere and long forgotten.

I was reflecting on this last Saturday when I went down for an Entrepreneur Festival at Oscoda campus at the old Wurtsmith base headquarters building on Skeel Avenue. The generous brainchild of Oscoda campus director Dr. Marv Pichla, the festival filled six classrooms with talented local young people who had created lovely crafts they were displaying to the public. Talking to them, I felt the pulse of something quintessentially American–youthful, uncomplicated, optimistic, aspirational. Two young men in particular caught my eye. They looked like brothers, about the age we were during our stonepicking days, and they’d fashioned outdoor works of art around coaster-sized squares of hard maple and circles of smallish cedar. What looked like their Dad stood proudly behind them as the older brother bashfully but straightforwardly described their process–from finding the right kind of wood with the right kind of grain, their preparation of the piece, and painting the wildlife design in the middle. It was high-quality work, painstakingly crafted with care and precision.

“I love it,” I told them. “Beautiful work.”

“Thank you,” the older brother replied hopefully. “We have more.”

Later on, after a radio interview that zeroed in on the essential role of ACC in the Iosco County region, I crossed paths with an energetic young dairy farmer from Frankenmuth. Husky and bright, without whining he quickly and succinctly explained the challenges of running a 120-cow diary operation on valuable land with high property taxes and his fear of not being able to hand off the land to his children as a legacy for all their hard work together. He noted accurately that families don’t move in and out of farming. Once the operation ceases, the next generation leases the land to neighboring farmers, and the generation after that is generally inclined to sell the land and cash out.

“Then that’s it,” he said. He didn’t want that to happen to his family or his family’s farm.

Looking for a business model that could work, he and his wife and kids decided to vertically integrate–to use their dairy to produce high quality, high value ice cream they would market and sell themselves. He said he figured this was their best chance to make a go of it long term. He said he had some small samples in a freezer in the back of his pickup. He hopped up effortlessly onto the bed, about as high as the hay wagon we once piled stones on, reached in a cooler and handed me a cup of homemade vanilla ice cream. Looking up at him and his earnest determination to keep things moving for his family one potential customer at a time, I was moved and told him so. I thanked him for the ice cream and wished him luck.

Later on, headed north on F-41 past the former Wurtsmith AFB, waiting for the ice cream to melt enough to sample, I reflected on who I just encountered. I knew when I saw it. It was an American.

In closing I want to wish Happy Birthday to the USA and thank all the dreamers and strivers over the many decades whose blood, vision, hard work, and sacrifice allowed us to sustain this endeavor. We’re stewards of this time and place. Let’s keep picking stones on behalf of our loved ones and for the good of the Republic. It’s worth it. The ice cream, by the way, was fantastic.