OPENING SALVO// Daughter of the American Revolution

We Are All Founders

What do we want the next 250 years of our country to be?

by Heather Shayne Blakeslee

EXCERPT //

I recently had the chance to walk the path at Pendle Hill at night. In the dark, my eyes adjusted and tuned in to the soft needles and bark at my feet on a wide path that circles the Quaker retreat center near Wallingford, PA. I could see the tops of the trees swaying against the sky, and hear the bullfrogs in the pond, no stranger to humans reorienting themselves to a simpler way of looking at the world. 

I hadn’t been alone in the woods in the dark for a while, and I tried to imagine what America’s original forests would have felt like to Native Americans who lived here, and to the colonial settlers who came here to make a new life, both of them pre-modern humans who had to survive on their own, coming into contact as combatants, allies, and as families—intermarriage was not unheard of, and was sometimes a way of solidifying allegiances. (I would like to think, as a romantic, that a few of them were love matches.)  


I was only partially successful in my bid to feel history; it’s 2024, and even at the retreat center I could still hear the hum of the highways, as I can nearly always from my home in the Queen Village neighborhood of South Philadelphia; modernity is hard to escape. So is history—we’re all part of this strange American experiment with all its flaws and opportunities. //

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