America, Are You Still Out There?

By Walter Kirn

The more the rest of America worries about terrorism and war, the more my Montana neighbors and I worry about the rest of America. It doesn't make sense to worry about ourselves. Anything can happen, to be sure, but it's hard to imagine a strike on little Livingston (pop. 6,800). As for formulating evacuation plans, we headed for the hills the day we moved here, and we've already assembled our survival kits. Duct tape? There's a roll in every pickup. Drinking water? Dip a bucket in the creek. Extra food? It's grazing all around us. While others make do with canned carrots, we'll have sirloin.

This sense of safety frees my neighbors to look outward, over the mountains and even across the oceans, where the dangers are more pressing, the odds less favorable. Like people concerned about an ailing family member in a distant city, they seem a little wistful, and maybe a little helpless too. The days pass slowly way out West, so folks have a lot of time to watch the news--and little power to affect it.

Nemesio Aguilar, 19, who helps run his family's Mexican restaurant while preparing to go to art school in Seattle, has several friends in the armed forces--some already stationed near Iraq--as do most of the teenagers in town. "I hope they're going to be all right," he says, "but there's a chance they won't be back, I know. In a town this size, that would have a big effect." Nemesio fills bowls with nacho chips, then describes a phone call to the restaurant that he answered the night before. "It was a sergeant in the Marines who'd been recruiting at the high school and wanted to talk to my little brother," he said. "I covered the phone with my hand and said to Ben, 'Tell him you don't want to go.' I guess I panicked."

At the counter at Pinky's, a downtown lunch spot, Mark Murphy, a heating technician, expresses anxiety about his relatives back in Jersey City, N.J., but he can't muster much concern about himself. Like a lot of Montanans, whose state ranks near the bottom in per capita income and near the top for residents with multiple jobs, he's preoccupied with the poor economy. "People here are just worried about feeding themselves and having a job," he says. This comment draws nods from diners on nearby stools. It has been a long winter--they are always out here--and the white powder of most concern to locals is snow, not anthrax spores. "Not being able to pay my heating bills is my imminent threat," says Brian Williams, who waits the lunch shift. "I work three jobs and don't travel," he explains, "so I don't expect terrorism to affect me much. I'm in my own survival mode."

Down the street at Ron's barbershop, where she cuts hair, Melissa Meyer has been polling customers about their feelings on Iraq. Eighty percent of them, she says, are for going to war and cleaning up a mess they suspect will only grow messier if it gets swept under the rug. Her father Bob Meyer, a retired corporate executive and a gun owner whose politics are conservative, says he can't understand the liberals and the pacifists. "They want to disarm me," he says, "but they don't want to disarm Saddam Hussein."

It's not ourselves we feel sorry for. We'll be fine, and deep inside we even feel a little guilty about our confidence. It sets us apart from the country at large just now; it even stirs a certain loneliness. We remember Sept. 11, and how cut off we felt with no white jet trails in the vast blue sky, no UPS trucks on the long dirt roads and only our satellite dishes and computers connecting us to whoever was still out there.

America, are you still out there? That's the vague, selfish fear we're reluctant to admit out of respect for others' more piercing ones: someday, without warning, we'll hear a silence deeper than the silence we're accustomed to, and we'll know something awful has happened, beyond our reach. --By Walter Kirn