November song

On November 11, 1918, at 11:00 a.m. the Allies and the Central Powers signed an Armistice that would eventually end what they hoped was the War to End All Wars.  Although World War II and the Korean War shattered that hope, we continued to celebrate Armistice Day when I was a little girl.  Veterans’ organizations sold red crepe paper poppies to raise funds for disabled soldiers.  Everyone in Rhinelander Wisconsin had one of those poppies stuck in a buttonhole.  At McCord Elementary School we stood solemnly by our desks at 11:00 a.m. and were silent for two whole minutes, an enormous amount of time for a child.  Even the Londo kids behaved. 

Many decades have passed faster than those two silent minutes seemed to. Armistice Day is Veterans’ Day now, and we celebrate it mainly with sales.  I haven’t seen a crepe paper poppy in years.  I don’t know whether kids will stand by their desks at 11:00 a.m. pondering war and sacrifice.  The bank is closed. Joyce Grammer won’t deliver my mail today. Otherwise it’s a pretty ordinary day.

Last year I stood in the ruins of a Roman fort at Hardknott Pass in the English Lake District.  It was a lonely outpost, commanding the remote Eskdale valley.  I wondered what it was like for the legions posted there.  I wondered what it was like for the farmers working their fields in the shadow of the fort.  I watched sheep browsing in the grass, scrambling over the walls, leaving their droppings where the Roman parade ground had been.  So much for empires, I thought.  

What lasts is what ordinary people do, day to day.  Look what we did on Election Day. After all the campaign hoopla we went to the polls in record numbers and voted. We did it with a measure of grace. We greeted our neighbors, even the ones we knew were unaccountably voting for The Other Guy. We waited in long lines or got through the whole process in ten minutes. Then we went about our business and waited for the results.

That’s the best thing of all. This historic election day was also a perfectly ordinary day.  Here’s what it was like in Torch Lake Township on November 4, 2008.

Doris Leech got up at dark-thirty in the morning and made her way to the new Torch Lake Township Community Services Building. This would be the last Election Day that the retiring Clerk would oversee, and she was determined that everything would go smoothly. She had a good crew of election officials and a pile of 445 absentee ballots to process. On the dot of 7:00 a.m. the polls opened and voters filed in.

At Sonny’s Torch Lake Market Chris Szejbach chalked the $3.99 special on the board: coffee, 2 eggs, toast. Russ Abbott opened the Eastport Market where the sign out front offered regular unleaded gasoline at $2.29 per gallon.

By 8:45 over 100 people had voted in person, and election officials were feeding absentee ballots into the scanner.  The breakfast regulars over at Sonny’s were on their third cup of coffee. Outgoing Supervisor Bob Spencer stopped at the back table to announce that the township’s free public wi-fi hotspot was up and running.  Babs Young said she was on her way over to Suttons Bay to pick up some of Larry Mawby’s Obama Champagne.

As the sun rose higher, the day warmed. The last autumn leaves glowed in bronzes and golds. Torch Lake and Grand Traverse Bay sparkled blue and clear.  Marc Anderson was working on the books at Dockworks. His secretary, Linda, is an election official at the polls over in Bellaire and had the day off. Marc said he had all his customers’ boats out of the lake and winterized and wanted to get them into storage by Friday. He figured he’d be pulling docks for another week.  He and his crew were going to vote in the evening. Out front, Joyce Grammer pulled up to deliver the mail.

Shortly after 5:00 Barbara Higgins was giving a customer a trim at Simply Hair, where the new handicap accessible ramp was nearly finished.  Farther south Jesse DenHerder was hard at work at Education Outdoors.  The travel version of the CAMP board game is ready for introduction at the 2009 Toy Fair. It’ll come in a wooden box that Jesse thinks customers will really like.

It was a warm evening and Sue Keena wore shorts as she finished the end-of-season chores at the Torch Bay Inn. She’d repainted the sign and brought in plants and garden art.  The last thing on her list was loading bath fixtures into her van to take to Good Samaritan.  (She and Tom have just redone all the bathrooms at the motel.) 

At 5:45 more than 400 people had voted in person and all the absentee votes had been processed. People brought their children along to watch them mark their historic ballots.  Poll workers took turns eating supper in the conference room.

When Doris Leech announced the official closing of the polls at 8:00 p.m. the tally of in-person and absentee votes stood at 938.  Of the 1,090 people registered in this small township, 86% had voted. Elva Cowell, who was the Township Clerk for twelve years before Doris Leech took over the job, and who has worked at the polls on every election since then, said the usual rate is more like 66%.

It took less than half an hour to print the vote tallies, certify the tapes, and seal the paper ballots in their bag. Torch Lake Township has voted Republican for a long time, and that did not change much in this election. Voters cast 547 ballots for John McCain, 374 for Barack Obama, and 10 for minor party candidates. It is possible to be part of a great drama in a very quiet way. On this Election Day in this very small township, the people spoke. Then they went home and made dinner and watched the returns. Then they went to sleep. It was blessedly like every other election, except that perhaps we cared more, thought more. We knew it was important to be there. And we decided once more to trust each other, to accept whatever choice we made together, one people of many minds, across a country great enough to hold us all in its embrace.