A Home Away from Home

Whenever we lay eyes on a landmark, our experience is twofold. We remember that we are far from home, and at the same time, we know that we are right where we should be. Both the pilgrim character of our people, our country’s vast distances, and our long frontier experience have together put the traveler, the immigrant, and the settler in a special relationship with our great American landmarks. In my own travels across this great country to research The American Book of Fables, I realized that we have two kinds of landmarks in America: those made, as the Declaration of Independence put it, by “Nature and Nature’s God” and those made by “mankind.”