On a day of conflicted thoughts about being American, conflicted feelings about freedom (whose? and at what cost?), my thoughts turn back to another highway experience, different from the kind I wrote about yesterday.

It was three or four years ago.  I was tuling along in my car–70?, maybe 75mph–on a patch of semi-full road.  A motorcycle cop passes me on the right, and cuts a diagonal swath across all four lanes.  All of us slow down, wondering which of us he’s caught.  But then he cuts his swath again the other way, slowing his own self down.  The cars ahead of him race on as he gets his speed, and consequently ours, down to something like 30.  We quickly realize he’s herding us, keeping the whole pack of us behind him with his slow, graceful turnings.  B–a–c–k, f–o–r–t–h, b–a–c–k, f–o–r–t–h.

And up ahead, on the now-empty stretch, I see chunks of furniture, splintered from a fall.  A second cop is working fast to get them off the lanes and onto the shoulder.  We’re only 20 or 30 yards off when he clears the last piece, and he and the cop on the bike salute each other as the cop on the bike speeds off toward the sun.

I cried.  Seriously.  It was that beautiful.  That perfectly orchestrated.  I’m sure I wasn’t the only one wanting to clap.  Catastrophic danger and silent, graceful protection overlapped on that stretch of burning asphalt, and other than those of us at the front of the pack, no one even knew.  I’m sure some were even peeved by the slowing speeds.  We didn’t ask for it, we didn’t even know we needed it, but help was there, at work.

I often think of that scene when the trajectory of things as big as history, as big as institutions, big as wars or countries or administrations therein–things I feel so small and helpless in the face of–look headed for (or seem smack in the middle of…) disaster.  I think of that scene and hope, deep in my most earnest places, that there are people and powers more seeing, more knowing, more capable than any of us alone can be, to help navigate the dangers that most of us can’t recognize.  I want to join in their work, too, and sing blessings along the way, more expansive than God Bless America, more generous than America, America, God Shed His Grace on Thee.  I want to help imagine and live into existence a world, rather than only a country, or subset within, that is land of the free–truly–and home of the brave.

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