America was supposed to be about content of character, not birthright

Today on its 244th birthday the United States is humiliated, alone, and literally dying. But I was heartened by 4th of July well wishes from two of my fellow Americans. One is Russian. The other is Irish. Both are now also American—yes, both are celebrating their first Independence Day as American citizens. I was grateful for their reminders of hope in dark times.

They’ve also inspired me to share nearly the entirety of Chapter Five of Field Blends below. It is a chapter in which the core characters find themselves out in Virginia’s wine country debating the essence of what it means to be American. Wine serves as both a backdrop in the nature of the countryside there, and as a metaphor. I hope you enjoy, and—if you do—that you’ll read the rest (Amazon, Apple). This theme is not unique to the fifth chapter. I’ll begin with a quick excerpt…

Chapter Five

We plucked Ava from the train a bit after ten. She had caught an earlier train. Peter and I hugged her. I lingered a moment, happy to see my friend before we shuffled back into the car we had rented just that morning. Erik drove the six of us. Emma had decided to not come.

“She’s ill,” Simon explained.

“Ill in a grocery bag in Chris’s elevator last night,” Erik snickered.

Constitution Avenue runs from the Capitol along the Mall until it crosses the Potomac River into Virginia. It’s pleasant for a time, but later there is suburban wasteland lined with the next real estate developer’s take on unoriginal dining and tawdry conveniences. A burrito joint. A hair salon. An office park. A Lexus dealership.

“I knew someone who died there.” Ava pointed to a hospice facility.

We each labored to produce an unintelligible acknowledgement of loss for someone nobody else had known. It was the sensitive thing to do.

Suddenly it became very rural. We drove off into the Virginia countryside. There are few cities from which such thriving wine-making is as accessible as Virginia is from Washington. Urbanity melts so quickly into rolling hills, quiet roundabouts, villages cropped in by forests, and within an hour the pastoral beauty of horse country. Stone walls and split rail fences hemmed in the road as if they were keeping automobiles out as much they were keeping horses in. It’s one of those stretches of highway with a vineyard around each bend, up each hill, down in each little valley and hollow.

At some point Ava and I began discussing which wineries to visit.

We came up a hill onto a flat stretch of road where a mass of cars and horses were gathered around a large complex of stables. I wished I had learned to ride. Green branches bent over the road like a tunnel as we disappeared back into the valley below. John S. Mosby Highway it was called. I wondered who John S. Mosby had been.

My phone knew that he had been a Confederate cavalry commander in the Civil War. The countryside through which we were now driving had been called Mosby’s Confederacy. He had apparently managed to befriend Ulysses Grant prior to the latter’s ascension to the presidency, played a part in an amnesty bill for former Confederates, and served as the American consul to Hong Kong, after which he lived another thirty-one years.

A Confederate who found common cause with his former enemy. Another road named for a former traitor. Could one be a former traitor? A segregation academy—one of the private schools set up in the mid-twentieth century so that white parents could avoid sending their children to school with black children—was named in his honor forty-three years after he died. It closed a decade later.

I was depressed and bored of the topic, so I stopped reading.

We drove through Middleburg. Charming, idyllic, like everything else here. We passed the Red Fox Inn and Tavern. At the corner, one would turn for the Foxcroft School where well-to-do families sent their teenaged girls. I found myself wondering how Ava and Peter felt about educating their children. Ava had grown up in a New England boarding school. I grew up in West Virginia, a place that so seldom saw any of its kids go away to college that the local mechanic had felt compelled to give me a free tune-up before leaving.

Hunters Head Tavern passed by on our right.

“I’d have loved to go there.” Erik really loved Hunters Head Tavern. The sleepy village of Upperville, the brick path and stately stone arch covered with ivy, the whole scene here in the heart of wine country fit his penchant for old, interesting things. It was the type of place through whose door you might slip to a time long past in an authentic English pub, a true tavern house built around 1750, laced top to bottom with rustic sophistication. Old plank floors, fireplaces, exposed beams, farmhouse tables, and wooden chairs of which no two ever seemed to be alike conveyed a homey sense of somewhere far away. It was like stepping out of a fox hunt. Actually I had once heard some fellows there discussing fox hunts.

Hillsides rolled into one another through cow-filled valleys and over crests of open fields lined with roadside trees providing shade to passing cars. Stately Trinity Episcopal Church appeared as we slowed through town. Light-grey stones, dark-grey roof, a quiet courtyard surrounded by more trees.

There were exquisite restaurants in the countryside. As with wine, the best restaurants are those that take full advantage of the terrain. The string of towns and villages—Middleburg, Upperville, Paris—dotted the highway through Loudoun and Fauquier Counties, serving a compelling terroir.

***

We stopped at the Ashby Inn in Paris, an unincorporated village that seemed plucked directly from the English countryside. An old church rose up on the quiet little street next to the inn. Birds chirped. The setting was positively idyllic, the type of place you stop for lunch between wineries, and then realize hours later that you’ve sat in the garden until your next destination has closed.

A path led us to a covered terrace as we wandered up through the garden. Ours was a beautiful day, so we took brunch outside, sitting under vines meticulously maintained in the ceiling above the terrace. We angled for a table near the steps so that we could stare out into the garden and the unobstructed view of the hills beyond. Inside was a bright, light-soaked dining room, rustic tavern, and cozy library. I thought that we all should return to sit and drink in them when winter came.

The Bloody Mary bar tempted Peter away from the wine the rest of us had come seeking. The generous cheese plate and our crepes kept us happy. Stuart, the sommelier, had crafted an excellent wine list from the best of Virginia and a wide net cast to other regions around the world. He was spectacularly knowledgeable as he guided each of us to pairings we craved, clearly happy to banter with us.

I had been lost in my thoughts for some time and would have been lost for more time still, sitting out in the garden with my wineglass, had Ash not interrupted my silence.

“I think I’d like to move.”

We all stared at her. I asked her if she thought she might like to move out here.

“No, I want to get out of here. Take a little money to a place where I don’t need much.”

It was a ridiculous statement. Ash never did anything with a little money.

“What is it you do for work, Ashley?” Simon didn’t know better than to not ask.

“She wanders about town.”

“Pardon?”

She told Peter to go to hell. He promised that he didn’t mean it how it sounded.

“I have many friends.”

That was mostly untrue.

“And I always find something useful to do with my time.”

That was most certainly untrue.

I didn’t much know what she did with her time, but I did know that she got her money from her father, who had been dead for twenty years.

Ashley Maria Luciano had not been born Ashley Maria Luciano. Her father had been Colombian, and had not exactly come to America on the up-and-up. He was evidently brilliant, working his way through school flying crop dusters and those airplanes that pull advertisements aloft above crowded beaches. Then he got involved with the crowd who built the early internet. After that he flew for love rather than money. He didn’t need the money. He died in an aviation mishap in the late nineties when Ash was six.

Her mother, a second-generation Lithuanian from Chicago, remarried an American fellow named Luciano. She changed her daughter’s name in desperate grief and longing for a happy family.

Ash sat at the table, visibly annoyed.

She asked Simon, “What do you think of Americans?”

Ava shifted uncomfortably in her chair. Marital harmony asked only that her pragmatic sensibilities not get too mixed up with Pete’s stubborn brand of America-first conservatism when in polite company. Ash had only asked the question to get back at Peter for his petulant little dig earlier.

“You have beautiful wine country.” Simon sipped awkwardly from his glass, unable to wipe the smirk from his face.

“No, but what do you think of the people?” Ash pressed.

“Have you really got many flat-earthers? You know, people who insist the earth is flat?”

“I’ve never met a flat-earther,” Peter blathered from the lip of his Bloody Mary glass.

Ash laughed.

“It was funny to me, Chris, when Emma told me that you were Swedish. When I hear that someone is Swedish, then I talk to them in Swedish.”

Now it was my turn to feel uncomfortable. I was terrifically embarrassed by how poor my Swedish was.

“Jag är trött på min dålig Svenska,” I sheepishly choked out.

Ava exhaled in quiet relief that we were moving on from the flat earth discussion. Her husband didn’t believe in the nonsense, but he was particularly sensitive to the notion that haughty liberals and Europeans might associate him with all manner of American fringe.

“Well, I think that’s a fundamental question of this moment,” Erik interjected.

“What is?”

“What Simon just said.” Erik paused. “See, we are almost exclusively unique among countries in that to be American is not about blood and soil. Now that might be changing.”

Simon asked Erik to tell him more.

“Well, most other countries are defined by the born qualities of those who find themselves there. ‘I speak French, my ancestors have lived in France for a thousand years, my waiters are rude to everyone, therefore I am French.’”

“But not here?” Simon asked.

“Our waiters are friendlier.” I tried to lighten the mood.

“And poorly paid,” Simon added.

Erik was undeterred.

“No. Historically speaking, when someone chose to come to America, to become an American, they were swearing off that blood and soil stuff and instead dedicating themselves to an idea.”

“And that idea was?” Ash looked at him skeptically, likely thinking of the Spanish, Colombian, and American passports that she carried in her bag like religious objects, a tribute to a man long dead who she barely remembered. She was all emotion, unable to recognize that her father was in fact the human embodiment of the point Erik was making.

“And speaking Swedish to Chris?”

“Chris isn’t Swedish. He’s American.” Erik shot me a look as if to say I’m sorry.

I bristled.

“We don’t think of it the same way here.” Ava came to my defense. She knew how important this was to me.

I stared half drunk at my wineglass swirling mindlessly in my hand upon the table.

I had plans to visit Sweden soon. My family came from Grundsund where about 700 people live on the coast of the Skagerrak, the strait that connects the North Sea to the Baltic. There I had cousins descended from my great-grandfather whose son had once immigrated to the United States.

My head swam in the Swedish traditions and practices that had been passed through my family over many years. I served meatballs at Christmas. I grew up on plättar—Swedish pancakes—at breakfast. My mother had decorated her Christmas tree with Swedish flags. We drank akvavit and sang “Helan Går,” despite the fact that only a couple of us actually knew the real words and what they meant. Most were just Americans swinging glasses and singing gibberish.

How odd to Simon the notion that I should think of myself as being Swedish. He was as Swedish as I was American. In the typical American telling, we often equated nationality with citizenship, not with ethnicity. Because most of us descend from people who came from somewhere else, and because many of our families have not, in the grand scheme, been here long, the distinctly American concept of ethnicity is one of a fellow like me—somewhat Swedish, a bit English and Native American, and the remaining fractions an indeterminate blend of God-only-knew-what. The more blended we get, the more American we become, whilst the ethnic heritage that characterizes the individual or the family is often the one spoken the loudest. The one whose stories get told. Whose songs get sung. Whose food gets cooked. Whose drinks get poured.

I contemplated my wine again. Like so many of its people, American wine came from somewhere else, too. France’s pinot noir grew splendidly in Oregon, whilst Germany’s riesling had made it big in Upstate New York. Vidal blanc, a French hybrid created in the 1930s, grew well in Massachusetts. Chambourcin was the child of unknown French and American parents. Several years ago, the Spanish winemaker at Virginia’s Potomac Point Vineyard and Winery created Vino Camino, a blend of Virginia’s excellent cabernet franc and monastrell imported from Spain. I had once tried a lovely bottle of tempranillo—Spain’s noble grape—produced in Texas.

Just as Americans tended to equate nationality with citizenship rather than ethnicity, so too did we know our wines by their grape, what they are—tempranillo or pinot noir—rather than the European way of naming wine by place, where they’re from: Rioja or Burgundy.

The American people had been imported and blended from the good stuff of other places, tempered and given unique character by their new surroundings, the terrain and climate of human experience. Whatever greatness one ascribed to America, the thing that made America great didn’t happen in spite of its fractional origins. It happened because of them. America had grown up and grown rich because those who came before lived in a nation where they could pass on the richness of their cultures, such that today I could raise a glass and sing Swedish drinking songs with my Swedish-Egyptian-Jamaican-English-German-Mexican-Irish-Portuguese-Jewish-Catholic-Protestant-and-whatever-else family.

America was supposed to be about content of character, not birthright.

I downed the glass of wine, and we departed.