Rambling Wild

Though they share their main sentiments, it is my hope that this column will be better received than Jeep’s Bruce Springsteen Super Bowl commercial. Alice Schertle’s Little Blue Truck is a book that is on constant rotation in my kid’s library. In essence, the story follows an old, single cab, blue (please don’t read into the color) pickup truck as it goes about its morning, beeping hello to each animal it passes on the way.

After greeting a handful of barnyard animals in the country, Blue is rudely overtaken by a dump truck who laments his lack of time for politeness and pleasantries. Of course, the dump truck is going way too fast for conditions and gets his “big important wheels” stuck in a large puddle of mud. Though the dump truck is totally ignored by the surrounding animals, Blue does not hesitate to make its way into the puddle to help. Unfortunately, the little truck is lacking the off-road capabilities and traction that it would take to help the bigger rig. As a result, Blue gets stuck as well.

Were Blue instead of one the CJs from the aforementioned commercial, I’m sure it would have been a much shorter book. Thankfully everyone notices the little truck’s predicament immediately and rushes to help. The combined effort of our farm friends gets everybody unstuck and leaves us five pages for a tidy resolution.

There are a number of lessons in this text that my son and I can both benefit from, but one seems to be timelier than the others. There doesn’t need to be a large ceremonial burying of the hatchet every time we are wronged in life. In the resolution of conflicts big and small, this almost never happens. But we still find a way to deal and move on. The political climate in this country over the past decade has been irrefutably toxic, but whichever side is more correct kind of ceases to be important in the scheme of healing. There will be no apology coming from the other side of the aisle, so expect to mend the divide without that.

While we’re on the subject of mending, revisiting Robert Frost’s poem about self-imposed fences feels appropriate. For those of you who don’t remember your seventh grade composition class, “Mending Wall” is about two neighbors meeting in the spring at their property line to repair the fence between them. Each man picks up and replaces the stones that have fallen to his side of the wall. When the narrator suggests that the construct itself may not be necessary, citing, “my apple trees will never get across and eat the cones under his pines,” the neighbor retorts with the time-tested adage, “good fences make good neighbors.” Having recently moved into the suburbs myself, I can definitely appreciate the sentiment, but the subtext is probably worth exploring more deeply as it relates to politics.

This country will hopefully bring its discourse back to a place where it can mend the wall respectfully. And I hope it can do it in a way that thoughtfully explores the idea of what makes good neighbors. As the little boy I read Little Blue Truck to now gets older, I’d like to not have to tell him to not speak to people the way politicians speak to each other and the press. I’d like to teach him that he can’t fix all the wrongs of the past every time he wants to move forward. Anyways, if I come across any board books about how to fix healthcare or bring peace to the Middle East, I’ll let you know.

Ryan Wilkerson grew up in Iowa and now lives in Idaho with his wife and son. He can be reached at [email protected].