A COMFORTABLE SEASON

By LANCE MORROW

Whatever Jimmy Carter says about the energy crisis, the summer of '77 does not look anything like the moral equivalent of war. Not for years, even decades, has the nation approached its vacation time in such a collectively peaceful disposition--a mood of relief, resignation, exuberant ease and a bit of hedonism. The season feels like something from the middle years of Eisenhower--or, since the '50s had the cold war and other bad weather, maybe the analogy should go farther back, to a vague, green period sometime in the '20s.

Americans are in the mood to relax; they may feel that they have earned it. Much of the nation spent the spring thawing out from the coldest American winter in two centuries. Now, with a new President and a cautious Administration just entering its sixth month, the U.S. seems in full moral convalescence from the years that gave it assassinations, urban riots, a lost war, an abdicated President, severe recession, inflation and an oil embargo.

Last week some loose ends were being tied up: H.R. Haldeman and John Mitchell became the last of the indicted Watergaters to go to prison. After a 320-day trial, the Black Panthers lost their civil suit against the Chicago police who raided their quarters several ages ago--it was 1969--and killed Mark Clark and Fred Hampton. As Stanford Sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset observes, "This is the first time in ten years that nothing disastrous is occurring." Americans may not believe that they are embarked on a new age, but at least they are savoring a historical pause.

Some of last year's Bicentennial spirit, a startling extravagance of good feeling after so much bad, has spilled over into the 201st birthday. Wellesley, Mass., an expensive suburb of Boston, had such an unexpectedly good time with itself last year that it decided to devote this entire summer to community dances, concerts and other parties. The town's weekly newspaper editorialized: "This is the summer to find out what a home town is all about." Last year's tall ships are scattered around the world now, but on the weekend of the Fourth, New York will have an armada of smaller vessels parading up the Hudson from the harbor.

Hundreds of towns have their boostering stunts. Tiny Pittsfield, Me., will hold the Central Maine Egg Festival, with 600 eggs being scrambled simultaneously in one frying pan 10 ft. in diameter. Jacksonville, Fla., just turned out to celebrate the end of pollution in the Saint Johns River, with stunt flyers, hot-air balloons, parachute jumping, the mayor waterskiing, and trucks dumping hundreds of fish into the cleaned-up waterway. In the Texas hill country, the tiny town of Luckenbach (pop. 6), now made famous by Waylon Jennings' country-and-western song about the simple life there, is holding Saturday night dances that attract as many as 2,000 outsiders.

More people are literally tending their own gardens. Vacant lots and small backyards are sprouting with tomatoes, radishes and zucchini--even in unlikely places like Boston and New York City, where local gangs like the Renegades of East Harlem and the Savage Homicides of Brooklyn are growing vegetables. Pressure cookers and Ball jars for putting up preserves are selling well; so are ice cream makers and, for fancier cooks, the electric food processors that can puree anything except tennis balls.

Vacations are growing more strenuous--occasions more for doing than for sightseeing. It takes an odd mixture of the Spartan and the hedonist to "relax" by boating, hiking, backpacking, climbing, jogging, bicycling, hang-gliding or white-water canoeing. As measured by spending, leisure-time activities have grown to be the chief U.S. industry. Americans are expected to spend more than $160 billion on such leisure and recreation in 1977, and by 1985 the total will probably climb to $300 billion.

Though many Americans are staying close to home, more of them than ever before will be traveling. Some 37 million families will be on U.S. roads this summer, up 4% over last year. Jimmy Carter's warnings about fuel conservation have, if anything, merely persuaded Americans that they had better take their trips now while there is still enough gas to go around. Says Marquette University Sociologist Wayne Youngquist: "There's a tremendous resistance to anything that threatens the use of the car. The reaction to Carter's proposed five-cents-a-gallon tax was almost violent. The car is America's magic carpet and gives people freedom and autonomy. It's their little box where they have control over their environment."

In glinting procession, often oblivious of the 55-m.p.h. limit, gas guzzlers and recreational vehicles are already rolling down the interstates. San Francisco is dense with tourists. Millions are expected in Florida before summer's end.

Foreign travel is more popular than ever, thanks mainly to the new low charter fares that offer round-trip flights to London for as little as $350. Passport applications are up 15%. Vacations this year cost 5% to 10% more than last year, but with the economy stronger, inflation at a compound annual rate of 7.4% and unemployment easing to 6.9%, Americans seem more comfortable about indulging themselves.

That somewhat self-indulgent note is the spirit of the season. The public themes that intrude themselves have none of the hard, brutal edge so evident when draft resisters were burning flags and Middle Americans slapped LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT stickers on their bumpers. Some observers have disconsolately described the decade as the "fragmented '70s." That may mean only that the period, unlike the '60s, lacks a single theme or story--no continuing drama for Americans like Viet Nam. Journalists addicted to a diet of disaster find the present moment disconcerting. One Washington journalist was even moved to complain: "There hasn't been a decent story out of the White House in two weeks." The time is very much like Jimmy Carter--hard to figure out.

The culture is rather like a radio receiving many disparate signals simultaneously. U.N. Ambassador Andrew Young's utterances detonate like cherry bombs. Anita Bryant, the Pasionaria of heterosex, arouses furies in her campaign against homosexuals. The air is full of serious issues that few people except those directly affected take all that seriously: human rights, Laetrile, Idi Amin.

As in the '50s, at least some professors are exercised about public apathy. Says Dr. Jim Ranchino, a political scientist at Arkansas' Ouachita Baptist University: "Our society has gone wild. Nobody has convinced the American people that we have any serious problems. There is no direction, no planning. People are living like tomorrow is going to be just like today. But it is not going to be."

There are plenty of problems to worry about, if people were disposed to concentrate on them. Everyone knows that the U.S. cannot go on consuming 30% of the world's energy resources. Racism remains one of the most insistent and complicated American problems. Poverty continues to infect American lives, though not quite as painfully as it did when the Johnson White House mobilized a war against it. But the poor have no publicity now. Still, Chicago has already had an ugly riot this year--an explosion in the Puerto Rican neighborhood around Humboldt Park. Detroit still has two rats for every human resident. Even so, the "long hot summers" of the '60s seem very far away.

In the West and the South, the drought still parches farmland, dries up the rivers and lakes. Denver has now joined the growing number of cities that have mandatory water rationing. In eastern Oregon, the state has opened its creeks and rivers to unlimited fishing, on the theory that most of the trout will be killed by drought before the end of the summer anyway.

Americans list other complaints--spiraling property taxes and housing costs, government interference in their lives and businesses, deteriorating schools, inflated health-care costs, filthy air and rivers. Farmers in the Midwest fear that the year will give them fat harvests and lean profits.

One reason that Americans do not seem to focus on such problems as before may be that they have come to understand just how complicated some issues can be, how difficult to solve. Says Harvard Historian Frank Freidel: "More Americans are better educated now than ever before and more knowledgeable about national issues. They see many more facets of a problem." That can of course be a disabling kind of sophistication. So can the fact that Americans have been schooled since the early '60s to a certain cynicism about in formation from their leaders. Says California Pollster Mervin Field: "In the past 15 years the public has learned to live with the idea that accepted authority figures really can't be believed. The public would not be traumatized if Carter failed.

After all, Johnson failed. Nixon failed. The age-old protective armor has gotten thicker."

Pollster George Gallup III argues that the U.S. "may be in an early stage of a profound religious revival." Whether that suggests optimism or pessimism is difficult to say. The undercurrent of anxiety is always there. But this summer more people seem to be deliberately choosing to let their underlying anxieties pass for a while.

Hammock sales are up. Many families-- perhaps in a psychological spin-off from Alex Haley's Roots-- are planning family reunions this summer. Washington's Smithsonian Institution just completed a moving symposium on "Kin and Community," in which people like Rosalynn Carter, Hubert Humphrey and Margaret Mead proclaimed the joys of old-fashioned families and neighborhoods. It is not a bad idea, of course, to remember Bruno Bettelheim's caution that the most serious problem of today's family is "the discrepancy between present reality and expectations of what it ought to be." Still, evident now is a mellowed sense of family, or at least a desire to believe that political and sexual upheavals have not canceled the old home virtues and pleasures. Also evident is a parallel sense of localism-- stronger than at any other time in the last quarter-century. Whether all this portends an unwholesome turning inward, however, is not yet clear.

In the New World, the time before the June solstice was once a fearful ordeal. Pre-Columbian Peruvians lived in dread that the sun would continue its slow journey northward, never to return. Once the solstice passed, they relaxed. With the 1977 solstice behind them, Americans seem, like the Peruvians, to have forgotten their fears of apocalypse, at least for the moment, and settled in for some of the sweet, drowsy joys that summer has to give. --Lance Morrow

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