2025 Readings 36

 I'm embarrassed to admit that I followed Sarah Kendzior for years on Twitter but had never read one of her books. My great friend, and office-mate, Erik dropped off a copy of The Last American Road Trip the other day, along with one of his masterfully forged autographs (or maybe it was simply nice of Kendzior to write me a personal note). I blew through The Last American Road Trip in a couple days and have gone right into The View from Flyover Country, her first book. The former is her latest book and it reflects upon a series of family trips that she and her husband took their two kids on, while there was still an America to see. From this framework she's able to include a fair bit of criticism of what's happening to America, but what really comes through is her love of the country and her sadness at what is happening to it. Beyond everything else, she's also a very powerful writer. The book, as with all her books, is highly recommended. Let me just include a short section, dealing with her response to hearing that Roe v Wade had been overturned:

   "Missouri is a trigger state, which means that ban on abortion prohibited by Roe's 1973 passage would become law once federal protections were struck down. At some point, I know, I would become a second-class citizen. One morning, I would wake up and legal protections I had known my entire life would be gone. One day, everything would be the same except my husband and son would have more right than me and my daughter, and I would have to explain to my children why. I have never had an abortion and have no intention of getting gone, but that is true of many women who end up getting abortions. The perverse pain of the Roe reversal was how it made me feel like a failure, above all, as a mother: the very identity the state prescribed. I could not protect my daughter from the government. Our bodies were state property now.

   When the day came - June 24, 2022 - I knocked on the door of my husband's makeshift pandemic home office, said 'they overturned Roe,' and left before he could respond. I got in my car and drove to Creve Coeur Lake, an offshoot of the Missouri River where I go kayaking in the summer. Creve Coeur is French for 'broken heart' but I didn't know that because no one knows how to pronounce or interpret Missouri French. 'Creev Core,' we say, we unsophisticated rubes whom the Supreme Court had made cattle - cattle that so many different forces wanted to corral.

   I kayaked until my hands blistered and bled, and while I was out on the water the attorney general of Missouri signed away my bodily autonomy. I don't know the exact moment it happened, whether it was when I saw a duck shielding her ducklings and started to cry, or when I passed an elderly woman drifting under a highway bridge, her face streaked with tears, and she put on sunglasses so they would not show, or when the clouds darkened the lake with the threat of rain and I thought, Bring it. You cannot do anything worse to me today. Show me some action. Give ma a battle I can fight. And then the clouds parted, and in the light of the sun I saw the blood on my palms like a stigma, like stigmata. I knew God did not want this and that state officials did not care about god because they had decided to replace him with themselves."