There is a red, white, and blue line painted down the middle of Hope Street, and it does not ever go away. Through the winter it fades under salt and plows. Come back in June and it is fresh again, repainted for another summer. Follow it far enough and it leads to the Bristol Fourth of July — the oldest continuous Fourth of July celebration in the country.
The stripe is a special part that people remember. It runs the length of the parade route, down Hope Street and onto High, three colors laid on gray-black asphalt — ordinary as a crosswalk, and somehow not. This town paints its main street once a year, on purpose, and then lets the weather take most of it away before the next June comes around. The gesture itself is small. The keeping of it is a practice of convention and devotion.
Bristol rewards a visit on an ordinary day, too. Colonial houses line the streets, clapboard and shuttered, set close to the sidewalk the way the oldest towns are. The harbor sits at the bottom of the hill. In June the trees arch over the road and the painted line runs beneath them, quiet, weeks ahead of the crowds.
A tradition kept long enough stops being something a town does and becomes something it is.
What makes the line worth photographing is not the patriotism. It is the repetition. A tradition held this long stops being an event and turns into a habit a place can’t quite imagine dropping — something done because it has always been done, and because stopping would be the stranger choice. The stripe gets repainted because last year it was painted, and the year before, and back and back to a summer when no one now living was alive to see it.
It is a loud holiday, and Bristol does the loud parts well — the parade runs for hours, bands and fire trucks and the whole town on the curb. But the line is the restrained part. One gesture, repeated. No banner needed to explain it. You either know what it means, or you follow it and find out.
If you want to go, the parade steps off at half past ten on the morning of the Fourth, from the corner of Chestnut and Hope, and runs two and a half miles to High Street. Come early — the town fills fast. Or come on a plain July morning before or after any of it, when the paint is new and the street is yours, and walk the line from one end to the other.
The coast keeps what it decides. Bristol decided a very long time ago.
