‍ ‍A Few Moments With Foxes

In the summer of 2011, I drove from Fayetteville, North Carolina up to Boston.  I had a job at Fort Bragg that was only a two-year, temporary assignment, and it was ending, so I wanted to use up some of my leave time and see some places I’d not seen before. I threw a bag in the back of my old, maroon Honda Civic and set off to the northeast.  I’d visited Boston when I was maybe five or six, but I hadn’t seen it since, didn’t remember it, and there were a lot of places in between I’d never been too.

            Among those places in between, I decided to see some famous churches – cathedrals, basilicas, and so forth – as well as a number of historic sites: Bunker Hill, the Old North Church, The USS Constitution, Lexington and Concord, and others.  I stopped and saw Gettysburg on July 3, the 146th anniversary of the battle.  The next day I drove through Scranton, Pennsylvania and stopped to see the Basilica of the National Shrine of St. Ann. Then I drove up and saw the National Shrine of the North American Martyrs in Auriesville, New York.

I avoided big cities and a lot of the time took to the blue highways, as William Least Heat-Moon had done in the late seventies.  I’d actually lived next door to him when he was an English instructor at the University of Missouri and my dad was a professor in the business school there. One of our cats got stuck in his garage once, though I was only a kid and didn't know him. I don't remember ever talking with him, though he might have been there when I went to get the cat.  We didn’t know him by his Native American name then.  He published Blue Highways and became famous a few years after we moved to Kansas. I only read it in middle age, though it had sat on my bookshelf (or in storage) for decades. I agree that you can better understand America—and yourself—by slowing down, leaving the well-traveled paths, and paying attention to ordinary places and people, although I had started doing that long before I read his book.  If I had some time, I’d take the backroads through small towns from university back to my hometown a couple hours away, or I’d go out for drives in the countryside around Lawrence, Kansas or other towns I lived in as an academic nomad.

Growing up out in the middle of nowhere, I had what John Steinbeck, in his Travels With Charlie, called “the urge to be someplace else” and the “virus of restlessness” that I’ve never been cured of, so  I’d frequently drive out, making my way as far as I could on a weekend afternoon, down the “road away from Here,” to see an old church, a battlefield or a natural site: the old, covered bridges in Parke County, Indiana,  a giant buffalo statue or the old cathedral in Jamestown, North Dakota, a Norwegian-style wooden, stave church across the Red River in Minnesota, The battleship USS North Carolina or the Basilica of St. Mary (designed in the Spanish Baroque style by the architect Rafael Guastavino) in Wilmington, North Carolina, the Mackinaw Bridge between Upper and Lower Michigan, a lake or national forest, and a hundred other places. Sometimes I’d stop and eat at a local restaurant or diner or get a room at a local motel, rather than just zip past on the Interstates, drive through McDonald’s, or stay at a big-chain hotel, though I must admit, I did that plenty of times over the years as well. 

The more time I spent in traffic on freeways or inching along roads in big cities, the more important slowing down and seeing the country became to me.  My dad used to joke that the difference between large cities and small towns was that in large cities you might be rushing everywhere, but when you get where you’re going, at least there is something to do there.  But I’ve found that as you rush to places, you leave yourself behind.  You get there and see what you set out to see or do what you came there to do, and you find that there’s still something missing, an emptiness that isn’t filled by just ending up somewhere.  I find slowing down and being more aware of the journey as well as the destination makes the entire encounter more meaningful.  Life isn’t a treasure hunt or scavenger hunt – no one is going to check the list of all the places you’ve been to, so do it because it enriches your life.  Realize, as Steinbeck said, that “we don’t take a trip; a trip takes us,” and we should, as he wrote, stop where people stop or gather and listen, look and feel.  Share where you’ve been with others, but share how you got there too, the journey along the way, not just the few moments at the summit or at the end of the road where you turned around to head back to some familiar place.

I don’t think I have truly found America or myself.  I certainly don’t think I do it as well as William Least Heat-Moon does, and probably never will. His Osage heritage may have given him a perspective on landscape and community, one that reminded me of what Barry Lopez wrote about learning from Indigenous peoples: to see the natural world not simply as scenery surrounding human life, but as part of a larger community to which human beings belong.  Too often I still tend to pick touristy spots and go there because someone somewhere told me I just had to go there, though I do find a few places off the beaten path that most people probably wouldn't stop to see. 

Churches are one such place, somewhat off the beaten path.  A colleague of mine a year before my Boston trip called my vacation plans to France “a pilgrimage” because I said I was going to see a number of Gothic cathedrals. In some sense he was right, though at the time I sort of resented his remarks, seeing them as a criticism of religion.  There is a spiritual part to my visiting churches.  But I also wanted to visit Gothic cathedrals because I had taught medieval history and Western Civilization for years and had long been fascinated by how medieval people could build such soaring structures. I was equally fascinated by the devotion embodied in those buildings. I also went to Mass and confession in several of them.  So, my colleague was not wrong, though it was perhaps a bit too narrow of a view.

Beyond their spiritual and historical aspects, churches are also a great place to slow down, especially if you show up in the middle of a weekday afternoon or in the evening, when there won’t be a crowd, even a small one, showing up for Mass or Vespers.  You can walk around and see the architecture and the artwork and sit quietly and take in the experience, just like driving down a backroad lets you take things in you’d never see on the Interstate.

I arrived at Auriesville during the golden hour and the basilica was already closed.  I believe, in fact, it had just closed–I missed it by that much!  I walked around it, looked at some of the statues on the grounds, took a few pictures, and peered through the windows by the doors to get a look inside, but there was a sense of disappointment in just missing getting in to see it.  But just as I was getting back into my car, I was rewarded, by God or Mother Nature, with an experience I hadn’t planned on, but was glad I was there to see.

Two young red foxes were playing in the parking lot, empty except for my car, in the gold-red sunlight.  I tried to take a couple of pictures—I tend to take too many pictures rather than simply sit there and take in the moment.  I’m not a good photographer, and my cameras aren’t very good, though I mainly blame myself rather than my equipment.  I did manage to take a couple, but eventually summoned enough good sense to put the camera down and just watch them rolling around and jumping.  I’d missed getting in to see the church but hadn’t really wasted my time turning off to see the site after all.

It wasn’t much as far as natural encounters go.  It wasn’t seeing caribou in a valley of the Western Brooks Range in the Arctic fog, snow geese alighting on Lake Tule, or whales breaching off Vancouver Island.  I haven’t done any of that anyway.  I’d swam with Galapagos sharks off Oahu and saw egrets and alligators in Everglades National Park, and those were great experiences, but I was no great traveler or naturalist. I’d seen red foxes before and since, so much so that I’ve probably not appreciated them as I should.  Sadly, they are run over with some frequency on the parkway running past my neighborhood in Northern Virginia.  But to sit there in the evening twilight, even if for just a few minutes, and watch them play outside the church in Auriesville made for a nice evening.  I went on to Boston and the historic sites there, which were memorable in their own way, but all these years later, I remember that few moments with foxes.