Inauguration Countdown, Day Seven: Europe Version

I was in France when the tide started turning.

Sunday, August 28, 2005: My 27th birthday. Katrina became a category 5 hurricane at ten a.m., and aimed itself at the Gulf Coast. I was packed, sitting on my suitcases in Tallahassee, waiting to see how far east the airport shutdowns would stretch. Should we try to drive to Pensacola, where I was due to meet my friend and get on a plane for a year in Europe?

If we left too early, and Pensacola’s airport was shut down, we might not make it back to Tallahassee in time for a replacement flight. But if we stayed in Tallahassee and waited too long to see, we’d miss the Pensacola flight if that airport stayed open.

I knew Katrina wouldn’t hit my family’s home in Tallahassee. Too far away, too far inland. But Pensacola, my hometown? Ravaged as it had been by Hurricane Ivan the previous fall, another storm was the last thing it needed. Plus, it was the home of the friend I was going to meet, and of his family. I remembered too well the trauma of watching Ivan unfold, stranded in Virginia with no way to get home and help my friends. The thought of that happening again—this time with me in Europe—broke my heart. Pensacola, Tallahassee, New Orleans: all cities I loved, all cities I had to leave in danger when I got on that plane.

They closed the Pensacola airport at noon. Our flight left from Tallahassee in the small hours of Monday the 29th, as New Orleans was being beaten to death. In Paris, we watched on our computers in a Montmartre hotel as the carnage progressed; we saw the flooding, and the burning, and I cried. We walked to the Tour Eiffel, and I marveled that such delicate strength could exist in the same life as such ugly brutality.

There was sniping. There were floating bodies. We heard the President of France, Jacques Chirac, had written a letter to Bush, offering assistance with this grandest of fuck-ups. We visited Notre Dame for the first time, and I wrote in the prayer book there: Priez pour les résidants de la Nouvelle-Orléans, de Biloxi et de Mobile, les Etats-Unis, svp. I saw the rose windows through tears.

A train took me to Aix-En-Provence. I passed the fourth anniversary of 9-11 in the kitchen of my Provençal host mother, watching the memorial on French television news. As they honored the anniversary with far more respect and dignity than I was used to from the American media, I burst into tears of shame. My host mother hugged me awkwardly and muttered, “Ne sois pas triste. Tous nos gouvernements sont terribles.”

I kept up with American news as best as I could, with shitty wireless internet and sites like AmericaBlog and Rude Pundit. In Giverny that November, I neglected my painting, celebrating the downfall of Scooter Libby and looking forward to Fitzmas with other liberal blogheads. And in Scotland the following January, I voiced my tiny protest against Justice Alito by posting the story of my abortion—one of the most personal things I’ve ever done over the internet.

I lived in Europe from late August 2005, to early May 2006. During that time, I received only the tiniest amount of personal hostility for being an American. Nevertheless, I had a constant feeling of oppressive embarrassment, of trigger-happy defensiveness. There was continual low-grade mockery of Bush, especially in the British media, which I suppose was to be expected…but it still grated on me. I knew people couldn’t tell just by looking at me, but I resented feeling the desire to blend in.

When I’d left the United States in ’05, I was sick to death of it. I was escaping it. But by the time I’d decided that November to return to Florida the following summer and pursue writing, I’d embraced my Americanness and become perversely proud of it. I wanted to take it back, that feeling of patriotism, that had been hijacked and twisted so violently by the Right. It was my country too. I decided to be proud of America, of what we had been and could be.

It was a difficult stance to take. It required a lot of soul-searching and courage. Who was I, in relation to this evil empire? What part of it was my fault? What did I have the right to ask of it, and what respect did I have the right to expect of others?

I came to some conclusions, as I painted and wrote and healed. I was an American, in the old-fashioned, original sense of the word. I was an American, in spite of our unpopularity in the world, and in spite of my own damn government.

I vowed to return, and take my fucking country back.

I left a nation that had just voted Bush a second term. I returned to a nation that was about to vote the Congress blue—and I participated. I saw a year of American history from outside the United States, while simultaneously feeling as though I had to act as an emissary and a defendant of my country. It changed me.

That year, bounded by Katrina and Pelosi, apparently changed us all.

I leave for Europe again before long. It may be too early to say, but I expect to arrive on a wave of goodwill—not in flight from a storm. Look what we’ve done, for better and worse. Look who’s about to be running the show. I expect American pride will come a lot more easily now than it did in 2005. I expect it to take a lot less courage.

I’ll never make a big deal about where I come from. Once again, I’ll probably be mistaken for European anyway—until I open my mouth. The difference this time will be internal. No more defiance, caught between the contempt the world had for Americans, and the hatred the Bush administration had for Americans like me. No more feeling like a woman without a country. This time, I will walk through the world as the citizen of a nation that belongs to me again, and that I am glad to belong to.

The quiet pride inside me will flow smoother than silk, winding around my memories of the victorious fight of the past two years.

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