I've been reeling from the Red Sox victory and the John Kerry defeat.

These emotional events have prevented me from keeping up with my regional notes on local wild places. While others continue their travels around the world, and while some launch new explorations, I find myself weary and in need of a warm old tavern and roadhouse inn. If I were sitting by a fire with the pleasant sounds of chowder being served, and waiting for the next post to arrive by coach, I'd be a darned site more pleased.

As it is, I have been sitting in front of the television for weeks, watching the Red Sox boys play for -- and win!! -- the World Series; and then watching them on television as through the misty rain the downtown parade celebrated their feat. I was pleased by that, for certain; but the coming election wore heavily on my mind.

This was a competition with much more at stake, and I expected no victory and no parade. Alas, as it turns out, I was right to beware. George Bush gives me no hope for America. He appears to have no understanding of history, big or small, and does not see the relationship between America's perilous wars and the home of the free and brave.

When this country was young, we trounced the original inhabitants. We brought wars which remained nameless, after we brought disease which decimated. We used our vigorous English Christian Bible to justify the wreckage. We looked at the Indians and saw them as the Devil's people. We, on the other hand, surely were the civilized and the righteous.

All along our frontiers, we met Indians in wild places, and there we pronounced them in need of Christian freedom from apparent want, freedom from heathenish ways. Sometimes they believed us, or saw advantage in joining the New English societies. Sometimes, they objected, and rose up in protest. King Philip's War (1675-76) was the most fatal war in American history but also produced our first national best-selling literature. The stories were about Indian captivity and getting to know the unchurched natives.

In violence against heathen, we sought a new national identity. In fact, only through such spilling of blood could the practice of our own freedoms be legitimate.

Is this what Shrub thinks we are doing in the Muslim world? Is he seeking some kind of ascendent Christian destiny? Is it America's job to bring freedom to Iraqi "heathen"? Is this nameless Gulf war George Bush's private search for personal and national regeneration through violence? Must we remind him of the costs of nation-building in a land not our own?

May I leave this civilized village of America and take the Old Post Road to a wilder, freer place?