This footbridge bridge crosses a stream at a city park in Emporia. It's an ideal place to pause and reflect on the change of seasons. (Max McCoy/Kansas Reflector)
There’s a footbridge in the city park where I sometimes walk that has for me become more than a bridge. It is old, to be sure, but nothing has happened on the bridge worthy of cultural note. It crosses a creek with steep banks beneath a canopy of trees, leading from a broad meadow-like field to a low hill and the softball fields beyond. While the bridge is not in a particularly beautiful spot, it represents for me all of the places in every wooded park that invites one to pause, for just a moment, and be still.
On a quiet afternoon with no wind I paused on the bridge and leaned my forearms on the rough stones. I was in the world and the world was in me. Just enough sunlight found its way through the leaves overhead that it undulated on the trickling water below like cold fire.
It was no longer summer, but it wasn’t quite autumn.
The park was quiet. The day before, there had been the hubbub from a wedding at the stone amphitheater just up the path, but all that was left was a rainbow swath of confetti on the grass. Now the only sound was the skittering of a squirrel in a nearby tree, a squirrel who clutched an acorn in one paw and regarded me with dark and wary eyes. A few days before, there had been a giant fairy ring of white mushrooms near the same spot, a ring that I studiously avoided stepping into.
Not that I’m superstitious, but why chance it?
The period between Labor Day and the autumnal equinox is a time of passage, a bridge from the haze of summer to the crispness of fall. Until the autumnal equinox, we still have a few precious days of summer left. When the equinox comes this year, at 7:44 a.m. Sunday , Sept. 22, the sun will be directly over the equator and both the northern and southern hemispheres will receive the same amount of light. It’s the tilt of the earth relative to the sun that creates the seasons, but at the equinoxes there is no tilt. The equinoxes, like the solstices, can vary as much as a day or so every year, because the earth’s orbit around the sun is about a quarter day longer than the calendar year, and we compensate with leap year so everything works out.
You can’t stand an egg on end on the equinox, at least not if you can’t do it on others days as well, even though that was a myth believed by some of my teachers in grade school. While the egg myth is wrong, there have been darker superstitions associated with the equinoxes, including those involving human sacrifices in Viking and Maya cultures. The marking of our passage around the sun has apparently always carried special significance, although now it has more to do with harvest, the start of football season, and the return of pumpkin spice. The equinox is the chiming of our cosmic clock that reminds us, in a way no earthly timepiece can, that light and dark are balanced now but that soon enough the days will become short.
But not yet.
I’ve always had an adversarial relationship with time, ever living in the past or waiting for the future, but this mild season out of seasons allows a truce. I can dwell in the present. There is still time for easy and contemplative walks.
On the bridge, I was in the moment.
My mind was not crowded with tasks yet undone or injustices to address in future columns. The quotidia of what to have for dinner or stream on television did not needle. I was in the world and the world was within me. Yet I was calmly aware, as if the water and the grass and the trees and squirrels were witnesses to transcendence, of harbingers that change was coming.
Change always does.
But at that moment on the bridge, I felt the coming change would be deeper than usual. I make no predictions about the nature of the change. I make no political forecasts here, offer no cultural insights, and have no suggestions for winning lottery numbers. Predicting change is a sure bet.
Of course the weather will change. After one moment of nearly perfectly balanced night and day two weeks hence, the days will begin to shorten. After one or two more full moons, the cold will come to stay. And then another event will come, as reliable as the seasons but as unpredictable as next week’s weather forecast.
Change will come, but will it bring good fortune or ill?
Ah, that is the thing that drove the Norseman to sacrifice to their gods and keeps us buying lottery tickets and placing political yards signs on our lawns.
“All voting is a sort of gaming, like chequers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it,” said Henry David Thoreau in “ Civil Disobedience ,” “a playing with right and wrong, with moral questions; and betting naturally accompanies it.”
Like leap years, presidential elections come also come around every four years. They coincide with leap years, in fact. This year, Tuesday, Nov. 5 — Remember, remember! — might be of special historical significance. Having puzzled in recent years over how much the Kansas I used to know has changed, I have turned to maps that show, county by county, the political tides that have swept the state.
I grew up in Cherokee County, one of three counties in extreme southeast Kansas that historically leaned Democratic. The history of immigration and organized labor had a lot to do with that trend. Both of my grandfathers were miners, and on the shelf behind me is a brass carbide lamp , the type they wore on their helmets when they descended the shafts. I cast my first vote for president at Washington Elementary School in Baxter Springs, in the auditorium where a few years before I had sat in a music class and having asked to play the guitar was handed a trumpet instead. A guitar wasn’t a marching band instrument. I gave up the trumpet pretty quick.
Those blue counties in the southeast Kansas where I’d grown up were engulfed, by the early 2000s, in a sea of red. Only a few blue islands were left in Kansas, in urban areas and college towns. This wasn’t just a political change, but a fundamental shift in the way many people thought about themselves. The ideas I carried with me when I voted for Jimmy Carter at my old elementary school might eventually seem as antique to some as the carbide lamps my grandfathers used. But the funny thing about the old lamp behind me is that it still works — and doesn’t require batteries and won’t poison you with carbon monoxide. Cavers and hunters still sometimes use carbide lamps, but special care is required because they produce acetylene, an explosive gas.
This is not to say that my grandfathers’ politics are my own. For one thing, I didn’t even know them. Both died before I was born. For another, according to family lore, at least one was a member of the Ku Klux Klan, as were many thousands of men at the time. But bad company does not excuse bad behavior, and I find this family association with a hate group repugnant and shameful. If there is redemption to be found, it lies in correcting the mistakes of the past. It requires finding a bridge from where we are to where we want to be.
I sometimes think about my grandfathers when I pause on that stone bridge during my walks around the park because it was contemporary with them. I reckon the bridge was built some 90 years ago, a vestige, like the amphitheater, of the Works Progress Administration, the New Deal project that employed millions across the country.
There are other bridges in American history rightly celebrated as being of special cultural significance, such as the Burnside Bridge , which was witness to unimaginable slaughter during the 1862 Battle of Antietam, or the Edmund Pettus Bridge (named for a former Confederate general and Ku Klux Klan leader) at Selma, Alabama. During the Civil Rights Movement, activists were beaten by police on the Pettus Bridge.
These bridges figure large in the narrative of who we were as Americans and who we became. They are metaphors for the courage of those who sought to transcend the moment and create a path, despite fierce and murderous opposition, to a better and more equitable future. We have not achieved equality yet for all Americans, but we are on the path, and the bridges before us are both great and small.
My bridge is a small one, no more than a stone and concrete footpath across a tiny creek, and pausing on it I can be suspended for a moment between the dead past and the living future. On it I can choose to go back the way I came, plodding back through damp grass with wilting confetti, or I can continue on and climb that small hill. The thing is, even if I choose to go back, change still awaits. You can’t go back in time any more than you can wish yourself to the moon.
So I continue.
Someday soon I’ll have the courage to cross a bigger bridge, to measure a more formidable span as my own, to accept a challenge that requires more than a few steps. But for now — for today, in this grace period between the end of summer and the beginning of fall — I choose to stop, be in the moment, feel the thrum of change in the air, and to be unafraid.
The time for action will come soon enough.
We are at a political equinox in the course of our democracy, a time when forces are nearly equally aligned. We are not at balance, but in chaotic turmoil, and the days that follow Nov. 5 must surely become shorter for one side than the other.
Thoreau published “Civil Disobedience” in 1849, after spending a night in jail after refusing to pay his taxes in protest of the Mexican-American war, which he and other New Englanders saw as a way to expand slavery into the southwest.
“Under a government which imprisons any unjustly,” Thoreau said, “the true place for a just man is also a prison.”
Thoreau’s disobedience to government was nonviolent and came from a deeply held conviction that slavery was the great injustice that must be ended. Government was necessary but “is a sort of wooden gun to the people themselves,” he said, “and, if ever they should use it in earnest as a real one against each other, it will surely split.”
Split it did, a decade after Thoreau wrote that. In many ways, we are still fighting the great divide created by the American Civil War, still fighting one another over equality and states’ rights. Thoreau would be disappointed but not surprised, I think, if he knew of our current political equinox.
In a few short weeks, after the leaves have turned, we will come to a moment that offers a bridge across our current political divide. Whether we choose to cross to the light of the far hill or turn to the shadows behind us will be our choice alone. We will have no gods to blame or stars to thank.
But now — right now, in this moment — is the time to pause, take a breath, and prepare for the crossing.
Max McCoy is an award-winning author and journalist. Through its opinion section, the Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here .
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