My Fourth of July was as unabashedly American as it can get.

It started at the Medora Musical, to which I took my 12-year-old daughter and her cousin on Monday night. There is something magical about sitting in that perfectly embedded Badlands amphitheater as the evening temperature begins to drop, wondering if you are going to need a jacket, watching the broken country south of Medora turn roseate. And then the show!

When the Burning Hills Singers slowed the hectic stage business to sing "Home to North Dakota," every North Dakotan, and particularly those home for the holidays from somewhere far away, felt a little pulse of emotion, of longing and nostalgia and loss. A woman a few seats down from me sat in solemn pride with a tear making its way slowly down her cheek.

Then we drove to Montana to America's first national park, Yellowstone (1872).

If there were only one state, it would have to be Montana. California, Texas and Colorado each have some claim to being singly representative of what America means to itself and the world, but Montana trumps them all as the heart and essence of America. The Yellowstone River Valley is a breathtaking reminder of what the Missouri River corridor might have been.

My mother has a tiny cabin, about the size of the Unabomber's hideout, near Cooke City, not far from the northeast portal of Yellowstone National Park. It's possible in that one-room cabin to whap a close relative with a spatula and honestly proclaim one's innocence.

Unlike the palatial designer log homes all around it, Mother's wee hut is precisely what a wilderness cabin should be. Thoreau could not have found it lavish, except for the Direct TV satellite dish, which scars the whole experience and which I would like to unabomb.

We fried eggs and bacon for breakfast. Naturally, they tasted better among the mountain pines than they would have in some marble-countered kitchen. Black bears lumber through the property with some regularity. Mother and her terrified lapdog cowered in the house one evening while a grizzly bear peered through the window and tested the screen door.

S'mores and German potato salad. Sparklers and a hammock. I taught my 9-year-old nephew to catch with a baseball mitt. We made bars for the picnic in Cooke City, a fundraiser for the volunteer fire department.

What's the most American place in America? Old Faithful is certainly near the top of everyone's list. Even so, I had to drag my kin kicking and screaming to the world's most famous geyser on the Fourth of July.

It was, they rightly argued, a long drive on the most congested day of the year to a place that will be overwhelmed by the press of humanity.

They pointed out that the very faithfulness of the geyser (every 97 minutes) was such that we could visit it any other time of the year.

But I reminded them that it was the nation's birthday, that I intended to be as corny and patriotic as Clark Griswold in "National Lampoon's Vacation," and that we were going to Old Faithful whether they liked it or not. An over-zealous patriarch and reluctant auto hostages - hard to get any closer to the heart of an American vacation than that.

And there she blew at 4:25 p.m. There were 5,000 people watching, many of them foreigners. I gasp out loud every time and take dozens of useless photos of one of the most photographed places on Earth.

Meanwhile, we saw elk, antelope, bison by the hundreds, a black bear, a coyote, deer, a pelican and - far down in a magnificent valley - a microscopic grizzly bear. How did we know? Because of 30 cars perched precariously on the steep shoulder of the road and a dozen spotting scopes triangulating precisely the same distant speck.

Later, as we lay on my Grandma Rhoda's quilt waiting for the Silver Gate fireworks show, I gave over gastronomic self-indulgence to ponder the Fourth of July.

So what's really admirable about the United States on our 231st birthday?

We are profoundly blessed in our national Constitution. Even though Thomas Jefferson hoped that we would tear up the Constitution of the United States every 19 years, it is now the oldest and most venerated social compact in the world.

More admirable still, after a period of doubtful adherence to the Constitution and serious erosion of the Bill of Rights, we the people have begun to reassert ourselves. The Constitution is a self-righting ship, as long - said Jefferson - as the people remain vigilant.

The fruited plains and the purple mountains' majesty will take your breath away if you let them. My favorite patriotic song is "America the Beautiful," composed by Katherine Lee Bates in the shadow of Pike's Peak in 1893. America: "God shed his grace on thee."

Our population is now more than 300 million and that seems like a lot of people, but the thing that strikes you the minute you fly over the American West or drive anywhere west of the Mississippi River is how vast and empty the rugged arid lands of America still are. Every pessimist, everyone disillusioned with America, should be encouraged to spend a week driving the American West. It is impossible not to cheer up at Ekalaka or Moab.

We have the national park system, which may be the greatest thing America ever invented. The names alone fill you with transcendental reverence: Arches, Crater Lake, Yosemite, Glacier, Death Valley, Grand Teton, Big Bend, the Grand Canyon.

We have Indians. We are so fortunate to have indigenous people still living in America. Though they have made many accommodations to survive amongst the dominant white culture and to accept some of the benefits of industrial culture, American Indians continue to an astonishing degree to retain their traditional ways.

Just for a minute try to imagine North Dakota life without Indians in it: Mandan, Hidatsa, Lakota, Dakota, Ojibwe, Assiniboine, Arikara, Cree. Think of what powwows, drum groups, prayers at public gatherings, flute music, oral traditions, Sakakawea, the legendary resistance of Red Cloud, Sitting Bull and, above all, Crazy Horse, and the automatic Indian skepticism about "development" have brought to our national consciousness. Even a single tepee on a plains vista deepens our cultural experience and reminds us of what is unique about America.

Fields of wheat, flax, sunflowers, corn, soybeans and alfalfa. There is something about growing more than our share of the world's food that entitles us to the deepest pride. God forbid that North Dakota ever veer from its primal status as breadbasket of the world.

And, finally, there is the document that lit what Jefferson called the "little flame" of liberty on the Fourth of July 1776. Outstanding wordsmith that he was, Jefferson said his intention was "to place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent." Mission accomplished, Mr. Jefferson.

Jefferson wrote what I call the 36 most important words in the English language. Has there ever been a sentence better than this: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness"?

The unfinished purpose of these words is for us to find a way to live up to the promise of America.

The western writer Wallace Stegner envisioned a "society to match the scenery." Theodore Roosevelt said, in Dickinson, on the Fourth of July 1886, that the magnificence of the American landscape challenged us to develop an equal magnificence in the American character, and that if we failed to do this, we would have squandered the greatest advantage any people ever had.

We've got a lot of work to do.

Where to start? Visit the national parks, preferably in off-season.

(Clay Jenkinson is the Theodore Roosevelt scholar-in-residence at Dickinson State University. He lives in Bismarck. Contact Clay Jenkinson at Jeffysage@;aol.com.)