Tonight I am witness, to my surprise, to a waterski exhibition. We have stopped in Amsterdam, New York, on the Erie Canal, and apparently there is a very active waterski academy here. While entertaining, the jumpers and balletic skiers put up prodigious wakes, which rock us continually. Between that and the trains paralleling the Erie Canal every 30 minutes, it is an active place.
We have traversed northeast Canada, crossed Lake Ontario and are now transiting the Erie Canal on our way back to the Hudson River. Crossing Lake Ontario was a little spicy, especially after reading how it has claimed some 2,000 ships and 30,000 lives.
After seven months on the boat, we are a bit homesick, and the ability to keep tabs on our beloved Seeley-Swan area is comforting. Of course we have the Pathfinder, and I connect with our Condon Quick Response Unit through electronic vehicles. I watch church services online.
Of note, this last Sunday, a local pastor decried the lack of civility and general decency in the current political discourse. I won't mention Bruce's name (or did I just do that), but he declared, "A pox on both your houses." This remarkably non-partisan condemnation of the petty, indecorous, mean-spirited and generally malodorous bloviation by both major political parties tickled me fiercely.
A "pox" generally means a pustular disease, but also a profound, distaste, or aversion to an idea.
I keep hearing that the country is divided, polarized, irrevocably split, etc. I hear that but I don't see that.
From Key West to Quebec, we have seen kindness and consideration and helpful people. We have encountered people from Cameroon and Haiti and the Congo and everywhere else. When we dock the boat, people grab our lines and offer us rides and tell us their stories.
Kindness and consideration and self-abnegation don't get many clicks. Drama and conflict and strife do. I am afraid that our perception of this deeply divided, suspicious, polarized society is specious - we are clicking on the sensational, the dramatic, not the everyday decency that, for the most part, is present in our day to day lives.
If this trip has taught me anything, other than yelling at your spouse while docking yields generally poor results, is that one should look at what is in front of them rather than what is on the screen. Look at the river or the lake or the ocean, not just at the electronic image. Look at the people in your town and in your life rather than the craziness in Florida or California. Don't get suckered into the paranoia and hysteria of a juicy click.
I met a woman on the Erie Canal yesterday who recently had a mastectomy for breast cancer, also requiring radiation. In our discussion she learned I had done a lot of breast reconstruction, and she wished to show me her mastectomy scar, and inquired about reconstruction. It was an intense, intimate interaction - no blue, no red, no ideology - very personal. Perhaps if we discard the labels and the colors and the fear, we can see each other as the unique and flawed and wonderful beings we are.
For my part, I do not wish a pox declared upon me. I will endeavor to be less judgmental, less critical, and more forgiving of others. The idea of having pustules is not appealing.
Tomorrow we will finish our transit of the Erie Canal and proceed to the Hudson River. We have more canal locks and currents and weather ahead. There will be challenges and victories and failures. What we know is that there will be people to help us, who won't care where we came from, or what color we are, or who or what we've been, but that we are human, and need help, and that is all that matters.
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