Has the essence of America always been in the land itself? Anthony Chase pursues the idea of "radical patriotism" to New England— its source and his own homeland

There are more seaplanes than boats in the harbor. The buildings have the stiff false fronts that we associate with old westerns, and wooden sidewalks to keep pedestrians out of the snow. Shops that sold lumbering equipment a generation ago now sell scented candles and antiques. But so what? It's still calm for the ducks that preen by the steamship Ktaadn, docked at the main town pier.

There is a village green also, as there always used to be in New England towns, and a bandstand, which tonight is filling up with musicians and their battered gear.

Once the first few notes begin to shimmer on the evening air, cars begin to slide into the side streets, and human beings—the last missing ingredient—begin to settle onto blankets and folding chairs. Small kids rumble with their dogs. Old men sit and smoke. The most fragile and mysterious phenomenon occurs: popular culture, the common wealth.

The music travels in riffs and snatches. It is plaid-shirt, blue-jeans music, but up here the conventional labels country and rock have a literal power, just as if we were listening to bird or water or wind.

Trips are like the rivers they follow. It is often difficult to say precisely where they begin: obscure springs, rivulets that rise and vanish depending on the fluctuations of the rain, places where a forest bog just seems to seep. My journey to old New England in search of radical patriotism had French and Indian sources. An exhibition of "American Sublime" landscape paintings came to Philadelphia in 2002, and I saw Sanford Robinson Gifford's The Wilderness. It is a canvas more than four feet wide, of Mount Katahdin in northern Maine; an immense, almost Oriental treatment of water, northern hardwood forest, cliff, and sky, first exhibited in 1860. Liquid, solid, even the cloudy gas, all reside in a palette of golden blue serenity. When it was first displayed, Gifford added a lyrical title to his work: "Home of the red-brow'd hunter race," and the three human beings are all Native American. A single male crosses the great lake in a canoe, a woman and a child stand in the left foreground, watching and waiting, as the viewer does, by the open shade of their tepee. The scale of the human creatures is minuscule, and as a result, the grandeur and composure of the land exerts a magnified power.

At just about the same time, I came across an obscure European literary journal: "Cahiers de Géopoètique," in which a fragment of Henry David Thoreau's essay "Ktaadn" had been translated into French prose. "Enfin je penetrai dans les franges du nuage qui semblait perpétuellement dériver au dessus du sommet. . . ." ("At length I entered within the skirts of the cloud which seemed forever drifting over the summit. . . .") Something about the chance combination of painting and text was compelling, making my homeland seem wildly exotic. I grew up between the Hudson River and the coast of Maine, but my love for the terrain did not seem patriotic in the way the term is used these days. Like those people in the shadow of Katahdin, I was literally of the same system that generates the loon, the eagle, the bear, and the moose. I wanted to get to the radical source of my love for North America; beneath manipulative jargon, superficial slogans of "homeland," and bumper sticker flags, I wanted to travel home.