Sunday's postcard, Of tide pools, trains, Joe Biden's announced departure, and a year that feels eerily familiar

July 21, 2024

Restless river otters at Joe Creek near Pacific Beach, WA

Shades of ‘68

1968 was a rough time, and I’ll never forget what that year felt like. If felt kind of like this year.

Eleven year olds can read newspapers, and if your mother has the Armed Forces Radio and Television Services’ radio broadcast on in the kitchen you can detect the cracks and bewilderment in voices from the radio, including the usually ebullient voice of Paul Harvey, the (then) widely syndicated, conservative narrator of the American century.

That year seemed to be the end of the American dream, as us baby-boomers were just getting to know it. In late January the Viet Cong, backed by the North Vietnamese army, astonished much of the world with the Tet offensive—by far the bloodiest phase of the Vietnam War. The U.S. was the world’s apex superpower; we weren’t supposed to lose wars, but Tet was a signal that we were likely to lose this one, and that the American people had been misled by the assurances that the quagmire was going our way.

In March, Lyndon Johnson announced he would not seek re-election. Four days later, Martin Luther King, Jr. was gunned down on a balcony at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. Two months after that Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.

By that summer, the year just looked and felt like an avalanche heading toward our once-happy, orderly village. The march of progress had turned to marches in the streets; the nation’s confidence was shattered, cities burned, and countless hearts were broken. Paul Harvey liked to start and finish his broadcasts with a joyful click to his voice. He was a conservative but one that would be repulsed by the likes of Alex Jones and Donald Trump. In 1968 you could hear the cracks in his optimism, filled in with riffs of bewilderment and genuine sadness.

In the midst of this mind-tumbling turmoil, the Connor family came north. It’s weird, this contrast between chaos and the struggle for some sort of order . The logistics of moving a family of eight a few thousands miles is non-negotiable. Regimentation is required, as are bandages, tissues for the tears, jars of mayonnaise, packs of lunch meats, and wads of cash for the food & drink, etc. My dad was such a devoted organizer that he bought into the AAA “trip ticks”—wire-bounded flip charts on which you could plot your course with colored markers.

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