‘merica

Oh public road. I say I am not afraid to leave you, and yet I love you. You express me better than I can express myself.

— Walt Whitman

When I was much younger, three friends and I got up one morning at 5am, packed the car, grabbed the camera and pillows, and set off on a three-week road trip in a thousands-mile-long oval across the United States. We drove, walked, and talked our way through places like Jackson Hole, Topeka, The Poconos, Morgantown, Scottsdale, St. Louis, Salt Lake City, and Reno. We flew past pancake-flat countryside, red, rolling desert hills, jagged snow-capped mountains, and vast concrete cityscapes.

I had a lot I wanted to say about that trip. It did so much for me, to me. I wanted to talk about the blistering, oppressive heat blowing across the Bonneville Flats. About the abandoned, eerily silent rest stop in eastern Nebraska. The dewy, thick-as-mud air I couldn’t escape from in West Virginia on our third-from-the-last morning of the trip. Watching cowboys herd cattle on horseback in New Mexico. Sticky molasses sunsets in Missouri. Tornadic storms in Wyoming, and again in Eastern Colorado. A Cadillac graveyard in Amarillo. Big horned sheep on the road outside of Denver, and three-hour traffic in Chicago. Fireworks over Des Moines, bright yellow sunflowers in southern Utah, and dynamic and massive explosions as Americans celebrated Independence Day. Sleeping under the stars at a rest stop near the Grand Canyon. Reading and writing and sketching through most of Ohio and Indiana, and standing in the middle of a long, empty desert road — yelling, waiting for my echo to come back — somewhere in Montana. Watching the clouds rotate from the windows of our cheap motel rooms. Long, slow breakfasts before the rest of the world was alive. Obscure, distant radio stations fighting the static in the middle of nowhere. Sailing on gas fumes until the next station seventeen miles ahead. Hail downpours and blinding sun and driving wind and still, dark nights. People and no people. Exhausted and alive. Driving nineteen hours straight through the night on the Loneliest Road in America. Jumping up and down on the side of the road at 2:17am somewhere in the guts of Nevada, trying to keep ourselves awake for the return trip home.

But in wanting to somehow say it more perfectly, I never said it at all. And so what you have here in front of you is all that’s left of it now, years later.

For several weeks, we searched for adventure and absorbed all God's glory in, on, and around the more than 4500 miles of country we covered between Ohio and Nevada. We breached thirteen states, eight or nine mountain ranges, and twelve major highways. We discussed politics, sports, terrorism, and life in general at countless diners, gas stations, rest areas, and dive bars. We made friends with a motorcycle gang in Indianapolis, crashed a wedding reception in Albuquerque, and spent an afternoon on an Arizona reservation belonging to the Pascua Yaqui tribe.

By the time we arrived back at my house, we were exhausted and exhilarated. We unpacked the car, grabbed some cold drinks from the refrigerator, and plopped on the sofa. After a ten-minute silence, the very first comment was, “So, when are we going again?"