I walked over it from Omaha into Iowa on Saturday night with many others and felt halfway choked up with how perfectly beautiful it was. It was warm but not uncomfortably hot, few mosquitoes out even over the river woods even though it's been wet and just a gorgeous orange glow to the twilight. Like I said it was perfect; White kids mixing with Latino families from south O or wherever and college baseball fans and the big haired tattooed folk from Council Bluffs. It was such a blissful 'I contain multitudes' feeling for me. I was struck at how intensely I love my country and its people who are the country. In one sense understanding how some could be perversely eager to express this love through killing and dying since after all one cannot have sex with a nation or otherwise 'prove' their love for it through any other dramatic gesture; yet at the other hand being even more reassured that no, the nation is not holy abstraction of power glory or grandeur or any flag meant to represent that. The nation is only the sum of the small fleshy and transient us, and that we are worthy of love not because our identity or culture will outlive ourselves but precisely because nothing about us will.
On the Iowa side a hobo with a very elaborate camp taking up about forty square feet of river bottom complimented my hat.
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