Out my hotel window looms the purple mountain majesty of Pikes Peak in Colorado Springs, dominating the horizon. I imagine Katharine Lee Bates standing atop, alone, gazing down on the fruitful plains below, the culmination of her train trip in the summer of 1893, which included a stop at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago (“thine alabaster cities gleam”). She marveled at waves of amber grain passing through Kansas and spacious skies over the Great Plains.
Standing atop Zebulon Pike’s Peak (elevation 14,115 feet) that summer, emotion poured forth in the words we now know as “America the Beautiful” (music by a church organist named Samuel Ward).
Her song begins with an exclamation she could not suppress: “Oh beautiful …” and ends urging her country, blessed with an embarrassment of beauty, to “crown” that goodness with “brotherhood, from sea to shining sea.”
I don’t know if Bates, a 33-year-old educator at Wellesley College, came here specifically seeking America the Beautiful. “Seek and ye shall find,” we’re told, but often we seek even when we don’t yet know what we’re looking for. Was Bates surprised when she found America the Beautiful? I am on this sunny morning looking out my window.
We drove over 700 miles in Colorado, including Trail Ridge Road at 12,000 feet (without guard rails), seeking primarily brotherhood (and sisterhood) but finding so much more: sculptured red-rock formations in Garden of the Gods, golden aspen leaves vibrating like soundless chimes in the breeze, reconnecting with friends and, in my case, the past, feeling hopeful after visiting an immigrant’s family (and their three amazing kids), hiking near Steamboat Springs by a lake where the relentless hiss of traffic cannot be heard (then soaking in open-air hot springs), and above all, this: mountains and open sky.
Entering Rocky Mountain National Park caught me by surprise, unlocking pent-up tears after so many years. I needed this refuge from the settled world and sorely missed its pine-perfumed vistas more than I could say. We spied a bull moose staring across a tree-rimmed meadow and an elk herd on a distant slope, viewed through borrowed binoculars. Wilderness protected, preserved and shared. Woody Guthrie’s your land and my land. America’s best idea. We all need beauty that overwhelms us to the verge of tears and reaffirms our belief in this country’s breathtaking goodness.
Sadly, I thought of you, Mr. President, wondering what, if anything, could bring you to tears, wondering whether you have ever ventured into a natural sanctuary like this one. Have you ever been moved to poetic words of praise by this country’s majestic beauty?
If you stood on Pikes Peak, alone, looking out, would you see America the Beautiful or America the Profitable, visions of extracting oil or precious metals from sacred terrain? Could you envision brotherhood — not to mention sisterhood — from sea to shining sea? I tried to imagine you doing so, but came up empty.
Which is why I’m sending this postcard from Pikes Peak to you, the epitome of America the Ugly. You’re a Star-Spangled Banner kind of guy. Rockets’ red glare, bombs bursting in air, all about power and might, combat and conquering, and the flag alone, surviving bombardment. But you really have no clue what that flag stands for.
What it stands for is not the inalienable right to pursue profit. We need an America-the-Beautiful president, not a flag-worshipper.
The national anthem has its place: “Oh say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave o’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?” But if we grafted that line onto “America the Beautiful,” we might forge a more powerful anthem: “Is beauty still sought and seen in the land of the free and the home of the brave?” Gazing at Pikes Peak, my answer is decidedly yes.
The closest you have ever come to nature, unfortunately, is a meticulously cured golf course. In your insular oval-office prison cell you are beauty-blind, which is probably why you keep trying to “improve” the White House, the Reflecting Pool, etc. and succeed only in wrecking them. And why your only interest in national parks is to drill, baby, drill.
Everything you touch turns ugly. We need a president who is genuinely moved by America’s spacious skies, fruited plains, and majestic mountains. Katharine Lee Bates recognized her place amid all this splendor: She felt small in a big way.
You feel big but in a small way. You are the smallest president we’ve ever had. It’s long past time for you to leave. And when you finally do, I recommend visiting Colorado.
The only one way you will find America the Beautiful is to lose yourself in it.
So I suggest you get lost.