Day 4: The Village President

GEORGETOWN, DE —

March 28, 2024

Day 4:

I used to dig holes for septic tanks with Cindy, Jim, and their youngest daughter Beth McClain at the Appalachian Servant Event in Asheville, North Carolina. Today, in that same servant spirit, Cindy and Jim dug me out of one.

After two inches of rain broke free and crescendoed from southern Delaware’s cloud vault over the span of an entire day, I found myself marooned in the same campsite I started in, sitting in a tent that more closely resembled a polyamide raft than it did lightweight shelter.

Cindy reached out to me regarding the inhospitable weather, offering to offset its hostility by hosting and introducing me to her three grandchildren Gray, Audrey, and Eloisa, as she and her husband Jim only live 15 minutes from Redden State Forest.

I’ve quickly come to learn that the American Discovery Trail is as much about the people as it is the scenery, or perhaps they coalesce a la Emerson’s transparent eyeball, where the observer sees itself as one with its harmonized view of people, places, things.

This perspective of oneness is required to bring common lives together, as Jim’s dad did as a three-peat mayor in a small town in southwest Michigan—population of 2,500. That title was relabeled as “village president” sometime during his tenure, but labels don’t really matter in the subject of oneness.

Beside me, as Jim and Cindy recount how they fell in love, their grandson Gray plays a game on his iPad where he manages a city not too different in concept than his great-grandfather’s. Between their pauses on the narrative of their shared life, he slips me little gems of village president strategy. The NPC’s who automatically work for him in-game? He calls them “coworkers” and fittingly climbs down mine shafts with them to help dig holes and extract diamonds.

Cindy and Jim’s love story—its people, its places, its things—leads up to this very moment.

And it’s a diamond, all thanks to you, Gray.