Last night, my neighborhood felt like a war zone, with the cracking, popping, and banging of fireworks, occasional screams and shouts, and thickly accumulating smoke. The experience brought back memories—my own and my family’s:

Gettysburg, 1863: In the words of my great-grandfather, who was 16 at the time: “On the first day of the Gettysburg fight, our corps was 30 miles to the S.W. We marched all night & reached the field in the forenoon on the 2nd day’s fight….Our Division was ordered to the relief of Sickles Corps & it took the hill in fine shape…Our regiment lost heavily in this charge in killed and wounded. Among the killed was James Bailey [also about 16], who came from England with me & enlisted at the same time…We fell together, struck by splinters of the same shell. We lay where we fell—he dead, I wounded, until daylight of the next morning, when I was carried to a field hospital.” Great grandfather was wounded again, and taken captive twice, before the end of the Civil War.

Northern Israel, 1977: I arrived at Kibbutz Dafna, a communal farming settlement in the northern Galilee, very close to Israel’s border with Lebanon. I was 22, out to see the world, and I had just signed up at an office in Tel Aviv to be a volunteer kibbutz worker.

This was country where Jesus once walked and taught. But during the time I lived at Dafna, a multifactional civil war was raging in Lebanon, just to the north, and that country was descending into bloody chaos. Machine gun fire from the nearby hills of Lebanon was a constant background sound, supplemented on the worst days of fighting with frequent bomb explosions. When the fighting came too close to Israel, Israeli fighter jets shrieked low overhead—as fearsome as the Nazguls in the Lord of the Rings movies, but real and terrifying, even though I knew I was not their target.

This was also a time when the PLO had stepped up its incursions into northern Israel. Once, near the end of my night shift at Dafna’s boot factory, the guards caught a terrorist just inside Dafna’s high barbed-wire fence. It also wasn’t long after my arrival at Dafna that I learned that many of its residents were victims of yet another war: about eight or ten were survivors of the Holocaust, and some remained deeply disturbed by their experiences.

When I arrived, my head was full of romantic notions about the world, and I was as self-centered and naive as any young person. Initially, these manifestations of war fit so effortlessly into my idealistic mental picture of Israel, the brave nation fighting the world for its survival. At first they seemed like the glamorous backdrop to the screenplay of my own bit part in Israel’s history. Things were so black-and-white, and one-dimensional, and all-about-me then! But as I came to know the people around me and to share a little of their experiences, even I began to understand, little by little, about the fear and suffering inflicted on all the peoples of the Middle East by the deadly business of war.

Kuwait, 2006: My 22-year-old nephew K, who is a Navy hospital corpsman, spent most of last year at a field hospital in Kuwait, caring for wounded people evacuated from Iraq. One day, an old friend of K’s arrived as a patient. This young man had enlisted in the Marines at the same time that K enlisted in the Navy. He had been hit by a bullet during fighting in Anbar Province, and has been paralyzed by his injury.

It seems to me that if you have had so little experience with real war zones that you’re drawn to recreate them with fireworks, then you are lucky indeed.

July 4 has come around again, and still we Americans find ourselves--metaphorically speaking--wandering with troubled minds and hearts in a dark wood, looking for light and landmarks. What to do with respect to Iraq, the Middle East, and our ever-deteriorating relations with the rest of the world? No one sees any easy solutions.

It's the long view that gives me hope. I'm reflecting on two related experiences today:

In early 1981, I was a trainee in the Peace Corps training center at Thies, Senegal. There, I was getting a 10-week crash course in Pulaar, one of West Africa's most widely-spoken languages, along with an intensive brush-up on my French (the official language of Senegal). I was to be detailed to a Pulaar-speaking village along the Senegal River in the north of the country, where I would work as an aquaculture extension agent.

One Saturday, we trainees were taken on a field trip to Goree Island, just offshore of Dakar, Senegal's capital. Goree is a beautiful island, with sunny beaches, seaside cafes, and historic architecture, and it's a popular day outing for Dakar residents. But worldwide, it's best known for the Maison des Esclaves, the Slave House, from which captured West Africans were loaded onto slave ships for the dangerous, terrifying trip to the New World. A walk through this forbidding fortress brings you to the single doorway through which so many people were forced to pass.

Wandering through the fortress on my own, I encountered a friendly guard, and began to chat with him in French. It was he who explained the significance of the doorway to me. He wondered what I was doing in Senegal and I explained that I would be a Peace Corps Volunteer in the River Region. As it happens, he was from that region, and Pulaar was his native language. So I switched from French to my halting Pulaar. On that day, I was just 3 or 4 weeks into my study, and could say little without great effort and concentration. But the guard was patient, and every word I could say seemed important in that our conversation represented as complete a break from the past as one could imagine, and felt like a small act of atonement on behalf of my country. Some of my maternal ancestors were wealthy Southerners who may well have owned some of the people who passed through the doorway. But there at the horrible doorway I stood, their development-worker descendant, speaking a language that would have been spoken by many enslaved people, in equal-to-equal conversation with a citizen of the free and democratic nation of Senegal. For the people being shoved through that doorway long ago, such a conversation might have seemed impossible.

Now it's 2007, and in my passport is a new visa for Vietnam, where I'm headed next week for personal travel--my first trip to Southeast Asia. I was a child during the Vietnam War (which the Vietnamese call the American War, I have learned). The TV images from that era, of frightening battles, bomb blasts and napalm attacks, exhausted soldiers and terrified villagers, are embedded deep in my consciousness, along with the names of so many places where battles were fought and lives lost.

So it's been a great pleasure lately to read through my Lonely Planet guidebook and discover that so many of the places with those forbidding names are now well-known tourist centers and historic sites. The Vietnamese countryside that once seemed so forbidding and hostile is lushly beautiful and inviting in the guidebook photos. A colleague who recently traveled to Vietnam on business reports that the Vietnamese people she met were delighted to meet and work with Americans--she would love to go back and explore more of the country. I'm impatiently waiting for these last few days to pass before I can board my flight to Ho Chi Minh City.

Someday, I'd love to walk along the banks of the Euphrates, and visit ancient Babylon and modern Baghdad as a peaceful and ordinary tourist. Today, such a trip seems impossible in my lifetime. But 30 years ago, my upcoming trip to Vietnam would have seemed the unlikeliest of dreams. We can't know how our future will unfold. But looking into the past, I see some signs of hope.

Bite of Seattle is a summer food festival at which attendees sample dishes prepared by local chefs. Over the years, offshoot "Bite of" festivals have appeared in the Puget Sound area and elsewhere.

Yesterday seemed to be a multispecies Bite of St. Edwards State Park festival. Immediately adjacent to the park, in Bastyr University's medicinal herb garden, clouds of bees were working over the herbs that are now in bloom. Most fun to watch are the fat bumblebees pushing their way into foxglove flowers. These flowers are designed, I recently learned, so that the bee must push all the way to the top of the funnel-shaped flower to get to the nectar, receiving a liberal dusting of pollen on the way. Smart plant!

Not far along one of the trails through the adjacent woods, I stopped to admire a handsome, thorny stand of Devil's Club--easy to appreciate when you don't need to push your way through it, as I've sometimes had to do on backpacking expeditions. A big Douglas fir cone scale dropped in front of my toes from somewhere far above. A moment later, another, and then another. I looked around and noticed that the ground around me was littered with fresh cone scales--the sure sign of a feasting squirrel high overhead.

As for me, I wasn't going hungry, either. First course: some salmonberries and thimbleberries overlooked by other walkers. For an entree, along the lakeshore, I found Indian plum trees heavily laden with ripe fruits, and ate a handful. Then two first-of-the-season ripe trailing blackberries along the sunniest paths by the water.

Also near the lakeshore was ocean spray in full bloom. When I stopped to admire the clusters of tiny white flowers on one bush, I discovered a miniature feast in progress: the diners included dozens of small brown flies and many inchworms heartily chomping on the flower centers.

Everyone was eating enthusiastically, but some diners forgot their manners completely. First, around the next few bends of the trail, a junco was alternately singing and playing with his meal (a hapless insect, I think). Farther along, two red squirrels were having an outright food fight, yelling insults at each other at top volume and feinting attacks.

Another bend or two, and then a red currant bush offered me dessert, before the trail ended.