Governed, Careful, and Diet Stoned

Notes from America, Part 1: What's changed

We’ve changed, America and I. Below are some of the differences I noted in a six-state swing through the motherland last month. See the next letter for a few things that remained the same.

Bent’s Old Fort is (mostly) closed. This adobe castle on the high plains of eastern Colorado, in operation from from 1833 to 1849, is the platonic ideal of an Old West trading post (it’s in Lonesome Dove, y’all.) The National Park Service rebuilt the structure in 1976 for the bicentenial and ran it as a living history site for decades, with park employees in period costumes cheerfully explaining the polyglot culture of the American frontier. The rebuild was already showing its age, but a huge snowfall last December caused enough damage that the Park Service worried it might collapse. There’s a fence around the fort now, and scaffolding throughout. A ranger shows up each day at 11 to give a limited guided tour of the downstairs rooms—you can still stand in the old kitchen, on the original flagstone hearth—but the whole place has haunted, melancholy air. Peacocks wandered the old livestock corral. The fort’s live-in cat slept on the dining room table. The ranger who gave our tour was plainly bummed out. Three to five years, he guessed a rebuild might take, should the funding ever materialize. He turned away, and stared out at the endless sage. Of course, he said, we are…governed. We said no more. The dusty corral was littered with peacock feathers. You want some? the ranger asked my kids. Take ‘em all.

The funding rapture. Federal money once taken for granted is now a loose Jenga block in every industry my people work in. Universities, obviously. Clinics that rely on revenue from Medicaid patients. Small publishers that rely on NEA grants. Mortgage bankers wondering what’s coming for HUD, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac. In public schools, everything. We took the kids for the free summer lunch at my brother-in-law’s school. The next couple tables were full of kids in the summer day camp, fed and cared for and spared the screens while their parents worked. Next year, who knows.

My nephews are huge. Expected and totally normal, but no less a revelation. Their pre-teen faces have these big jawbones now. Their eyes are half haunted by their fathers and half secret storms of early adolescence. I struggled to speak to them outside standard uncle-ish grunts. I could watch their beautiful faces for hours.

Self-driving Ubers. My sister just took her first, a short hop across downtown Austin. Pretty cool, she said. My 13-year-old nephew points out they’re way safer than human drivers. We old folks pushed back, as old folks do. My nephew’s never driven. What’s learning feel like when you start out knowing the robots do it better?

Plastic glasses in restaurants. Pint glasses, cocktails, even those big margarita goblets. Who cried out for this? They’re unreal in your hand, too light, with no loving clink against my wedding ring. Beer in a plastic cup tastes foul, much less call-brand whiskey. But the cheaper simulation always wins.

“Beer is dying. It’s all alcoholic seltzers now.” Tastes better in plastic glasses, I guess.

THC drinks. I drank one in “pineapple passion fruit” flavor. It tasted like diet Theraflu. I got diet stoned.

Alcoholic coffee creamers in single-serving jars by the register. “The message of many things in America is “‘Like this or die,’” wrote George W. S. Trow in 1981. A simplification for 2025: The message of many things in America is ‘Take drugs.’

The PassItOn signs are getting desperate. The earnest billboard campaign for basic human values has been around for years, but now the values are getting even more basic. This one in O’Hare was like, at least we have a country! I saw one in Omaha for love, as in the romantic kind, like hey, maybe you should try this one weird trick?

This abandoned Chevy Suburban at a beloved Colorado trailhead. That’s police tape. I don’t know what’s going on here. The driver’s window was smashed out from the inside. The passenger seat was full of dusty power tools. In the hutch between the seats was a notepad with the name and phone number of a Colorado Springs realtor written in fat black marker.

The fear. People I love have altered their daily routines to avoid locations that could be targeted by ICE raids. I will not detail this further online. ‘Careful’ was the euphemism we used in China. America now fills me with care.

The very public Zoom call. We’re mad phone addicts—yes, more than Kiwis. Americans laptop in public because it makes us look busy, which is the very reason Kiwis don’t. But the young woman setting up shop on Saturday morning at Bruegger’s Bagels in suburban Minneapolis with headphones, mic, laptop, and a laptop stand has lost all distinction between home and restaurant, work and play, alone and together. She got free refills, though. We all did.

The wobbling gravity of return. Last year I sat in a circle of baby aspen trees and knew, sure as I was born, that I would come back to America. This year I sat among the same aspens and did not feel so certain. Trump and all, sure, but I’m talking more mysterious gut-instinct stuff. Sometimes you know something without being quite sure what you’re knowing. The wobble did not come with any greater certainty about New Zealand. It’s a loosening, this feeling. Not a tightening. Not yet.

The kicker here is that William Bent himself was the first person to close down Bent’s Fort. In the summer of 1849 the Cheyenne, his local Native American trading partners and allies, were suffering a terrible cholera epidemic. The rival Apaches were circling, reports David Lavender in his swashbuckling 1952 history of the fort. Maybe Bent just got restless. On August 21—my birthday—he ordered his family and staff to clear the place out. Bent lead the burdened pack train to a campsite five miles east down the Arkansas River. Then he rode back to the fort alone, and blew it up:

He rolled kegs of powder into the main rooms. Making a torch, he moved from apartment to apartment, setting fire to the wooden roofs and to the piles of junk accumulated through years of living. As greasy smoke spiraled into the sunset light, he reined out through the gaping gates and eastward along the river.

Behind him, the death boom of the prairie’s greatest feudal empire split the sky. //