I've Gone to Look for America

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The sky is dark. The highway hums beneath our tires. We’ve covered a lot of miles today, and the night is pressing us off the road, toward a Virginia rest stop where, years ago, a man was murdered in a bathroom. I want to see the door he pushed open, stand where he stood, feel how quickly ordinary moments can turn.

But more than anything right now, I want to stop. Stretch out in the back of Cheney’s car, let the wash of highway noise lull us for a few hours. It’s been another long day of catching strangers mid-journey, asking one personal question and then another.

We’re on the road, my oldest son and I, traveling nearly 2,000 miles on Interstate 95 from Miami to Maine, and pausing at virtually every rest stop. Our project is simple and vast at once: to ask fellow travelers where they’re headed, and where they think America is going too. I take notes. Cheney takes photos.

For me this trip is a therapy session with my country. I fear that there is a deep crack in our union, and I’m not sure I belong here anymore. Maybe the road can convince me otherwise. I also want time with a son I once knew so well, back when I looked down at the top of his head, but whom I’m learning all over again now that he’s grown to six-foot-four and seen what he’s seen, weathered what he has.

I’m six weeks past being laid off, in a season of layoffs. Cheney is a little over a year past a breakup that shook him loose from the life he thought he’d have and thrust him into another. It marked the end of a marriage he didn’t tell me about for 11 years, a secret that would recast all the holidays we celebrated, dinners we shared, and trips we took. Now we’re driving the coast of a country that has imprinted us with its violence—me in Afghanistan when a bomb tore open a morning during America’s forever war, him on the banks of the Rio Grande when the river swallowed breath. A nation itself now bruised and battered has scarred us with pain and sorrow.

The long ribbon of road insists that life goes on. The days gather, falling into one another, changing Cheney, changing me.

A peacock at the southern terminus of I-95 in Miami, Florida.

Beginnings and endings—let’s do both now, up front. No spoilers, just a map to provide a sense of direction amid the uncertainty to come.

Our journey began Memorial Day weekend 2025, at the I-95 on-ramp in Miami Beach, where the northbound and southbound lanes split, carving through a cityscape that’s a chaotic snarl of polished skyline and subtropical thicket. Two peacocks wandered in the brush bordering I-95 North, one of them calling out in loud, catlike screeches that competed with the drone of traffic. Along the southbound side, a small community of chickens foraged beneath an overpass. Feral birds, exhaust fumes, wild color: a surreal overture to the road ahead.

We ended 17 days later near Houlton, Maine, on a deserted bridge overlooking the border with Canada. Rain had just passed—puddles were alive with mosquitoes, and the sun hung low behind gauzy clouds. We took a couple of selfies to mark the moment. The clerk at a shop offering travelers duty-free goods told me that business had all but disappeared. I was the first customer he’d seen in three hours. As if to explain, he walked me to a display of chocolate bars, their wrappers stamped with Donald Trump’s face, stars and stripes curling beneath his grin. “People come in from Canada, and they turn the chocolate around so the face doesn’t show. Sometimes they drop the chocolate on the ground. On the ground!” the clerk said with dismay. “Aren’t we supposed to be grown-ups here?”

In between the peacocks and the chocolate were startling revelations and moments of grace. They came from a Cajun great-grandmother driving an 18-wheeler. A philosophical cop from Georgia. An unhoused community living in cars, inventing rest-stop resilience. Conversations arrived unexpected, unguarded. Some drifted open, while others cracked wide in an instant. There were bursts of candor at vending machines and outside bathrooms—intimacy in the unlikeliest of places, with the murmur of the interstate a constant soundtrack.

I-95 isn’t just asphalt. It was born of two ambitions: one public, one military. In 1956, when Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act, lawmakers envisioned a road connecting the country’s entire eastern edge that could also be a means of moving troops and supplies if the Cold War turned hot. Now, at its busiest, more than 300,000 vehicles crowd the interstate daily, including tens of thousands of commercial trucks, those hulking giants that thunder by, rattling mirrors and nerves.

Families ride I-95 with coolers wedged between the seats of their minivans. Truckers push through the night, carrying oranges and lumber and coffins. Greyhound buses, Teslas, and beat-up sedans weave at high speeds. I-95 is an artery of ambition, movement, and flight. A place where millions of people hurry toward love and loss, carrying their hope, their grief, their ordinary Tuesdays, all at 70 miles per hour.

This story unfolds like our experience of the road: not a straight shot but a series of quick confessions, bitter jokes, whispered memories. Strangers laying themselves bare, then moving on. No two encounters were alike; wherever they went, we followed.

In every conversation, and the silences in between, I listened for the shape of an answer to my question: Are we breaking apart, or is there enough left to bind us?

“You’re going to appreciate this trip after she’s gone,” Dale says to Cheney, tipping his head toward me.

It takes a moment to register what he means, that he’s referring to my death so casually, after we’ve known each other 25 minutes.

“I appreciate it already,” Cheney responds with a smile.

Dale, 65, retired four years ago and moved from upstate New York to Lake Placid, Florida. We found him on a weathered bench under a sky collecting dusk at the Santee Welcome Center in South Carolina, midway between the Georgia and North Carolina state lines. Death is on his mind this evening, and not just mine. He’s thinking about the end times.

“I was raised a Fundamental Baptist,” Dale offers. “I call myself a recovering Baptist. But some of those things are hard to overcome.”

Especially now. Floods, plague, conflicts, corruption, the money changers in the temple—“you look around and it looks like all that stuff we studied in Sunday school,” Dale says. “When God has had enough with the sins of humanity…”

He breaks off his thought as his mini Aussiedoodle, Winnie, tugs hard on her leash, tumbling in wild arcs around our legs, ecstatic with the kind of life that doesn’t yet know limits.

Dale stresses that he’s not a prepper. But he has thought about what he might need to survive should the world fall apart, and he’s stockpiled a bit of it. He acknowledges that this is an exercise in futility. “When it comes right down to it, I don’t think anyone has all their bases covered,” he says. “So I focus on the things that bring me joy.”

Living in Florida was a longtime dream for Dale. “Since I was a teenager and made my first trip,” he says. A job, a bad end to a relationship, and a delay in getting his pension kept him anchored in New York longer than he wanted. When finally he was able to move, he purchased a house in foreclosure, sight unseen. “When I walked in, I was tickled,” he says. “The house was about in the condition I’d expected—nothing worse.” At last he felt like he was home. 

“I asked God for one year of peace and quiet to enjoy my retirement in the sunshine. And this month I’m starting year five,” Dale tells me, his voice catching with the knowledge that no one gets forever. “I feel more than blessed.”

But Winnie is disrupting that peace. So Dale is heading to the mapled city of Hornell in upstate New York this summer and saying goodbye to her there. A friend has offered to adopt her. “I think it’s a good idea,” Dale says, to himself as much as to me.

“I love her to pieces,” he adds. “But she’s too much for me. She’s a puppy. She needs more than I can give.”

Doubt flickers across his face, and I suck in my breath, feeling the sharp ache of his hesitation. At a time when he fears that the world might end, Dale is giving up something that brings him comfort as well as complication. Winnie, sweet chaos in motion. 

Dale is already practicing his goodbye. I can see it in his eyes and the way his hand lingers on Winnie’s head. I want to believe I’m not practicing my own goodbyes, but long road trips, with their constant departures, stir up profound feelings about mortality, about letting go.

A man on his Harley-Davidson in South Carolina.

I have been a news junkie all my life. As a college freshman, I rose early to sneak-read the copy of the New York Times left outside my dorm neighbor’s door, sitting cross-legged on the hallway floor. But as Trump’s second term began, I found that I couldn’t stomach much beyond the headlines.

Still, I knew that avoidance was corrosive. During my five years living and reporting in Moscow, mostly during the Gorbachev era, the Russians I knew had a rule: No discussing politics except very late at night, in cramped, smoky kitchens, after a few rounds of vodka. But that kind of reticence seemed only to deepen communal resignation and embolden political leaders.

So in Trump’s America I wanted to talk, even to people who might disagree with me. At the same time, I was scared—that I’d ask the wrong questions, trigger tripwires I couldn’t see. “It’s not going to be like that out there,” Cheney kept telling me.

I wanted him to be right, to trust him. But he’d kept silences of his own.

I’d learned of his marriage only after it was already coming undone. A friend of his, crashing at my house, let it slip, either unaware or forgetting that Cheney’s mom didn’t know. I called my daughter. “Is Cheney married?” I asked. “Oh, Mom, no,” she said, brushing off the idea. Turns out she didn’t know, either. Later that day, when she pressed him, the truth came out. The woman we’d known as Cheney’s longtime girlfriend was actually his wife.

I have a 48-hour rule: When anger strikes, I try to wait that long before speaking, hoping that time will cool my ego and allow curiosity to surface. This time, 48 hours barely made a dent. Two weeks passed before I could bring it up. By then, Cheney was braced for the discussion.

The whole thing started as more whim than promise, he explained. Even he wasn’t sure that it would hold. Also, I hadn’t yet met her and was far away in Afghanistan, working at the U.S. Embassy during one of the most violent stretches of America’s twenty-year war. “If I’d told you,” he said, “it would only have added to your stress.”

“I’ve been back from Afghanistan for a while,” I said, and he laughed ruefully.

“Eventually, it seemed like too much time had passed,” he replied.

It all stung. Not just the secrecy but the assumption that I couldn’t handle the truth, that my life was too fragile to absorb it. He had decided on his own what was best for me. And not for the last time, probably. If I’m fortunate enough to grow old, there likely will come a day when Cheney and his siblings weigh my choices for me. The only consolation: When they were small, I decided for them. Maybe this is how the cosmic books stay balanced.

By the time I suggested the trip up I-95, Cheney and I had said what needed saying. Still, I longed for the kind of trust built not by declarations but by the quiet choreography of collaborating, sharing meals, spending time side-by-side for days on end. In ordinary acts, I hoped to restitch the thread of connection between mother and son.

The morning we set out, the road’s toll was already visible on Cheney. He’d been living largely out of his car for months, moving constantly in part to avoid the pain of staying still. To meet me, he drove 2,200 miles: from Colorado to Texas and on to an old storage unit in Georgia—he had places for his belongings, but not places he felt he belonged—then finally to Miami. Now small red welts freckled his skin, the work of insects so minuscule they’re called no-see-ums. The bugs had slipped through the netting strung across an open window of Cheney’s 2015 Subaru Outback the night before while he slept.

Cheney was feverish and scratched absently as we drove, his discomfort like a low drag on everything he said. We added many pharmacies to our itinerary, searching unsuccessfully for the perfect anti-itch cream. The bites were insistent, and they seemed to trouble my son beyond the physical irritation.

This is how harm so often arrives, not with sirens but with a whisper. The no-see-ums that bite through the night. The slow burn of heat that turns seasons hostile. The safety net that unravels slowly until there’s nothing left to catch you. A nation, like a body, can be marked before it recognizes the wound.

An American flag in New Jersey.

Mile by mile, I-95 leads us into the hurt.

At a Whataburger counter I meet Bill and Sienna, who have traveled the interstate around a dozen times over the past few months to join protests up and down the East Coast. Bill wears a T-shirt that reads, “Stop Pretending Your Racism Is Patriotism.” He’s spoiling for a fight. “I’m a big guy,” he says. “I love it when people ask me about this shirt when they don’t like it, because it’s a pretty good testament to their character.”

Others are fatalistic, certain that what’s happening is beyond their control. “Doesn’t matter what we think,” shrugs Don, who along with several friends just visited Monticello. “They’re going to do what they do.” That sentiment is echoed by Christy, 64, traveling with her pregnant 41-year-old daughter and her 11-year-old granddaughter. “Where are we headed? To a time when ten people run the country and the rest of us just live with it,” she says.

When I meet Joe, it’s late afternoon in Georgia. The air presses in, damp, alive with gnats. He and his wife are 12 hours into a 20-hour drive, and his face bears every one of those hours and more.

“I’m whooped,” he acknowledges, leaning against the side of his car as if staying upright is too much effort. A cigarette hangs from his fingers. His eyes stay fixed on the women’s restroom, where his wife has gone. This stop is for her. He wants the trip over.

They are headed from Saint Petersburg, Florida, to Newburgh, New York, the town Joe grew up in but doesn’t like. He needs to see his brother, who is in a nursing home. It might be their last visit. “He’s not doing well,” Joe says. He grimaces as if in pain, then wipes the expression away. Grief, it seems, is an extravagance he can’t afford, not with the miles waiting and the day mostly gone.

We change the subject. I ask how he’s feeling about America these days, and he says that the world has gotten meaner since the pandemic. “I don’t like what’s coming for my three grandkids.”

His words mirror my own worries about the flawed inheritance we’re leaving behind, unraveling like an heirloom quilt. “So what are you doing,” I ask, “to help them prepare?”

“Teaching them to shoot.”

He says this without drama or bravado. His voice is grim, resigned.

Joe carries a Glock nearly always. His wife is surprised that he left it at home for this trip. “My permit doesn’t hold in New York,” he explains.

I try to lighten the tone. I ask what he’s optimistic about.

“Reaching my destination,” he says. “Just that.” Then he draws a long breath from his cigarette and exhales, slow and deliberate, like a man letting go of more than smoke.

David, a maintenance worker at a Georgia rest stop.

By the numbers, I-95 is America’s deadliest highway. It claims hundreds of lives every year. The emotional impact of this loss is everywhere. Truckers describe wrecks they’ve passed; motorcyclists recall friends killed on the road.

At a rest stop in Seabrook, New Hampshire, Mary, 59, tells me about a long-ago family trip to Florida. She was a teenager then, one of five siblings. “There was a bad crash,” she says. “My dad, being who he was, pulled over to help.” The man’s leg was nearly severed. Her father held it in place until the ambulance arrived. Her sister cradled the man’s head. “It was in the local papers,” Mary says, then looks off toward the trees.

David, a maintenance worker, describes the evening of February 21, 2024, when a speeding 18-wheeler barreled into the rest stop where he works near Savannah, Georgia, slamming into multiple vehicles and igniting a fire that engulfed several rigs. Two truck drivers were killed. The flames lit the night sky.

There are other legacies of harm etched into the earth beneath the interstate, held by the asphalt. To build I-95, bulldozers carved through cities, leveling blocks, erasing whole neighborhoods. Often Black. Often poor. Families were scattered, churches toppled, maps redrawn in the name of progress. People watched the America they knew vanish beneath pavement.

The interstate reminds me and Cheney that, no matter where you are, this country’s violence is never far away. Not that we need reminding.

April 6, 2013. A suicide bomber struck members of my team in Zabul Province, southern Afghanistan. I was the director of communications and public diplomacy at the U.S. Embassy. I boarded the first helicopter out of Kabul to get to my people.

We’d lost Anne Smedinghoff, who was 25, my daughter’s age at the time. Four other people died, three soldiers and a translator. At least ten more were wounded. One of my staff lay in a coma; another was unable to walk.

Someone handed me Anne’s purse, punctured with shrapnel, her phone still inside. It felt impossibly heavy. I wanted to set it down. I wanted to never let it go.

February 24, 2024. Piedras Negras, Mexico. Cheney watched as a small group of people waded into the Rio Grande, trying to cross to Eagle Pass, Texas. Among them: a young couple, Rossana, 25, and Widman, 26.

Cheney photographed them as they entered the murky river. He watched them retreat from its force, regroup, and try again. On the U.S. shore, a Coast Guard officer shouted warnings through a loudspeaker, but it was too late. Cheney saw the current pull the couple apart. He saw their heads bobbing, their hands reaching. The water took them under.

Rossana’s body washed ashore in Mexico and was quickly returned to her family. Widman drifted toward the U.S. side; his body was not repatriated to Guatemala for four months. Cheney traveled there, to the town of Yepocapa, to stand with Widman’s family as they sealed his casket into a tomb.

These deaths did not happen to us directly. Grief belongs to those who lost their kin, to the friends left with nothing but memories. And yet. America’s violence—its wars, its borders, its history—folds itself into the stories of those who witness it, along with a stark question: What could we, should we, have done differently?

The bathroom where Bobby Lee Durham Sr. was murdered near Dale City, Virginia.

Cheney and I spend a night at a rest stop near Dale City, Virginia. Here, in December 1996 around 3 a.m., a man named Bobby Lee Durham Sr. pulled in driving a white Cadillac. A 51-year-old trucker from Dover, Pennsylvania, he was headed home from South Carolina, where he and his family had been handling things following his father’s death.

Durham helped his disabled sister to the restroom and crossed the breezeway to the men’s room. Two teenagers were waiting inside. They demanded his wallet. He handed it over. “Please don’t hurt me,” he said. They shot him anyway. The triggerman later wrote a crude rap song boasting of the killing: “Three to your head. Bang, bang, bang. He’s dead.”

I photograph the entrance to the restroom, trying to see it as Durham might have. A brick archway. A drinking fountain. A metal door glowing sickly yellow under artificial light. Haunting yet heartbreakingly ordinary. No sign that this would be the end.

The next morning, birdsong rises from the trees, but the rest stop feels uneasy. Most of the picnic tables are chained off, with signs that read, “Out of Service, Do Not Use.” Heavy slabs of concrete that once promised community are now stripped of function. They feel like a sign of our shrinking commons, a warning to the country’s travelers: What we share is now cordoned off. Proceed; do not gather.

Back near the bathroom where Durham died I meet Jobert, 55, a prosecutor visiting from the Philippines. He and his family—his wife, three children, and two aunts—are tracing their own version of the American road trip. They stopped in Texas to visit a friend, then made a pilgrimage to Disney World. Next up, they’re going to the nation’s capital. When he mentions his job, I tell him about the murder.

“Really? A murder?” Jobert grows quiet. “No one deserves that in any jurisdiction in the world,” he said, shifting into legalistic formality. “But I’ve been stopping at many rest areas, and I think they are normally safe. I’ve always looked up to America as a friend, a kind nation, a hopeful nation. I hope this trip will show me that it still is.”

His words linger. He’s looking for reassurance. So am I.

And it comes, in fits and starts.

I don’t have a script, but I start asking travelers what it means to be American. At the Ladysmith rest area in Virginia, Gary, a trucker and self‑described progressive from Mississippi, puts it this way: “We’re on the same page. Black, white, we all want the same thing. You want your kids to be taken care of. You don’t want to work until you drop dead.”

At the Biden Welcome Center in Delaware, Bob, 57, a Trump supporter with a dog leash in one hand and his mom’s voice coming through his earbuds, offers a version of the golden rule: “Don’t do to others what you wouldn’t want them to do to you.”

Joann, 55, originally from Liberia, tells me about recovering from an illness the doctors couldn’t explain. She woke up one day paralyzed: hands curled, feet twisted, limbs locked. For six months she lived in stillness. She vowed to become a caregiver if she got better. And she did. She’s a nurse now, taking care of all kinds of patients. “What I love about this country,” she tells me, “is its diversity. That’s what makes it powerful.”

Mark, with a graying ponytail, is adamant and assured. “We’re all red, white, and blue in the end. We want a democracy, not a king,” he says. The owner of a chain of spas and salons, he’s parked at a rest stop in Hardeeville, South Carolina. He and his girlfriend, along with their Australian kelpie, Termita, are one month into a slow drift north from Mexico, sometimes taking back roads or exploring bike trails in forgotten places. “I’m seeing fewer political signs than I expected,” Mark says. “Less of that roadside yelling.”

He’s been talking to strangers, too—asking questions, swapping stories. Proximity, he’s found, is a low-tech fix for a high-volume problem. “It’s the fringe radio shows, the influencers selling rage—they make it sound like we’re tearing each other apart,” he says. “But out here, when you actually talk to people? That’s not what I’m seeing.”

Ladd, 26, is a natural storyteller. He’s been a rest-stop supervisor for less than a year, but already he’s seen enough to fill a book. “Some insane things,” he says, grinning, shaking his head at the memories. A woman trying to bathe her Chihuahua in the bathroom sink. A mime who stopped in (“He didn’t have much to say,” Ladd deadpans). A wild boar that sent tattooed truckers into a scared huddle as it tore around the parking lot.

In Ladd’s telling, rest stops like his are more than breaks in a journey. They’re a kind of stage where the absurd and the ordinary collide. He calls them “the great equalizers.” A shiny new Mercedes slides into a parking space alongside a ’91 Corolla. Young and old, rich and broke, weary and restless all shuffle toward the same humming drink machines, the same toilets. For a moment, divisions fall away, and hierarchies flatten out.

Ladd tells me he sees people you might not expect to interact talking and laughing together all the time. “I’ve seen truckers flying the Confederate flag on their vehicles. They hover around the vending machines, and they’ll strike up conversations with Black truckers, or we have Mexican truckers as well that come in,” Ladd says.

Harmony isn’t always a given, he acknowledges. His biggest headache? Two of his employees fall into such bitter theological debates—both are Christians, but from different denominations—that he has to keep them on separate shifts.

A morning view from the car in Virginia.

Cheney cues up a road-trip playlist he found on Spotify. Johnny Cash belts, “I’ve been everywhere, man.” It feels like we have, too. We keep stopping, keep talking—we meet some 250 people in all. The encounters collect in my mind like a stack of Polaroids, each a flash from the road, beckoning me to return to it later.

“My whole life has been driving,” Mary Ann tells me. She used to operate “forklifts that could lift a truck to the top of a two-story building.” Fifteen years ago, she started driving a rig professionally. Now she calls trucking her “retirement.”

After a year driving solo, she decided she needed a partner, for company and for safety—someone to stand beside her when she pulled into lonely stops in the dark. She started asking around and found Archie, a veteran trucker who had 24 years on the road. “I met her in the parking lot,” Archie says, leaning against the side of their truck. “I said we could give it a try.”

They’ve been partners for 14 years now, sharing an 18-wheeler that’s become their home, trading the driver’s seat back and forth across thousands of long nights. Mary Ann invites me up into the cab, where the seat smells faintly of diesel and sun-warmed vinyl. On her phone, she shows me photos of her five grandchildren and one great-grandchild, all of whom live in her hometown of Sulphur, Louisiana. She only sees them once or twice a year. “But they know I’m out here working,” she says, her voice firm with pride. “I want them to know hard work matters.”

Archie’s load is heavier. The life he chose strained his relationships with his eight children. He says that he doesn’t want them coming to his funeral. “They weren’t there for me when I was alive. Why should they be in death?” His words carry the ghosts of things already buried—the hope of reconciliation, the promise of remembrance.

Mary Ann tells me that she has a problem with drivers who don’t speak English well, and it jars me. Then she talks about sharing dinners with those same drivers over camp stoves, the air alive with spices she can’t name, hands of different colors passing bowls back and forth. Suspicion at the threshold, welcome once the table is set: This is Mary Ann’s America.

For others we meet, America is faith and uncertainty interlaced, inextricable.

Taha, 21, has just finished praying with his brother when we meet him at a Pennsylvania rest stop. He says that personal freedom is what defines being American. “The thing I’m worried about the most,” he adds, “is misinformation.”

Ayesha, 43, a calligrapher and mixed-media artist, is traveling with her husband and three children from Tampa to Washington, D.C., for a flight to Lahore, Pakistan, to visit her parents. She wonders if she should leave the U.S. for good. Her husband believes the country still offers them the best chance for stability. “He is seventy-thirty sure we should stay,” Ayesha says. “I’m fifty-fifty.”

Yuri, 52, a trucker from Tashkent, Uzbekistan, left the former Soviet Union a decade ago to get his daughter a better education. He isn’t certain that the school system lived up to his hopes, but he does feel sure that U.S. democracy will survive. “As long as you have elections every four years, don’t worry,” he says.

At a rest stop in Georgia I meet Jesús, 31. He came from Mexico, his wife from Colombia, and he now works in the restaurant industry. He wants to apply for U.S. citizenship, but he’s also considering returning to Mexico with his wife and eight-month-old daughter.

Jesús chooses his words with care. “We will be with family. It’s OK,” he says. His smile widens when he speaks of his daughter. “She’s an American citizen. She has good opportunities.”

Hope, fragile yet determined, rides in the back seat of his car.

Grief and humor, weariness and wonder—the balance between them propels us forward. In South Carolina, Cheney and I interrupt the motion: We rent kayaks, paddle out into a bay, and are rewarded with dolphins. So many of them, and so close. They swim beneath us like shadows, quick and playful.

We pull up alongside a fisherman tossing fish guts over the side of his boat. The dolphins gather like guests at a dinner party. We drift into their celebration and strike up a conversation with the man. His biggest fear? The rising tide. Not the fact of it, but how few people seem to notice.

I meet Betsy in Delaware on a sweltering afternoon, the kind where the heat makes the asphalt shimmer. She stands by her Tesla as it charges. With her are two young asylum-seeking brothers from Venezuela. They linger in the shade of a thin tree nearby.

“It’s scary when you can’t let an 18-year-old go play soccer because ICE is all over the neighborhood,” Betsy says, nodding toward the young men. Her voice is as sharp as a snapped twig. “The terror that puts people under—it’s beyond anything I’ve experienced.”

Betsy is an ordained priest and retired psychiatric nurse who once helped run a shelter. She tells me that her late husband, Ralph, would hate today’s America. They took a long road trip through the country in 2010, a few years after Ralph was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.

Betsy planned the trip with care. She tracked down Ralph’s college roommate, his med-school buddy, distant cousins, friends she’d only heard about, former neighbors who’d moved away. Ten weeks. Ten thousand miles. Each stop a chance to connect. “We stayed with someone we knew every single night,” she says. 

Remembering wasn’t the point really. Presence was. Giving Ralph one last taste of everything that made him who he was before the disease took hold. He loved cold beer and ice cream, and many of their hosts greeted them with one or the other. Sometimes both.

They were still a year or two away from Ralph getting lost one door down from their home of thirty years, but forgetting was already a creeping shadow. When they were listening to an audiobook Ralph loved, he didn’t want the driving to end. He knew that by the next morning the plot would have slipped his mind. Once Betsy drove four hours past their destination just so the story could reach its conclusion.

“He didn’t always know what state we were in,” she tells me. “But he loved every minute.”

My own husband died of early-onset Alzheimer’s. Even as the disease tightened its grip, pieces of him—essential ones—remained. I prefer to remember those parts: his stubborn sense of justice, his friendliness. Also, his joy riding horses near the pyramids, and his laugh in the snow.

Betsy and I exchange contact information. She’s 81 now, and she carries the memory of her journey across the country with Ralph like a lantern. It reminds her that there are many ways to show up, to hold on, to keep going.

A woman with her pet ferret in Maryland.

Memory has always pulled at me: what we carry forward, what fades, what we revise without meaning to. The things we remember become in some way immortal—but only as long as we keep returning to them. As a child, I tried to memorize moments. Not just milestones but flickers: coyotes calling in the desert, the cool edge of a desk, a friend’s whispered secret. Remember this, I told myself.

As a nation we’re reshaping, and in doing so allowing ourselves to forget—our common stories, our hard-won lessons, our fragile bonds of trust. On I-95, the smallest exchanges start to feel like a way back, landmarks amid the rage and outrage that signal common ground. I’m a child again, willing my mind to map a path I can follow whenever I get lost.

Remember this.

John and Maryanne in Kennebunk, Maine, showing off their Kawasaki bike with a Hannigan sidecar. They traveled I-95 together for their honeymoon 34 years ago. For them the highway is a vow kept.

Mike Valentino, 70, wiry, racing from Key West to Ticonderoga, New York. “To see my lover,” he booms, then adds more softly, “who is ill.”

Another Mike, whose wife died of cancer this year. When she first got sick and told him she was ready to leave Michigan to chase warmth, he said, “Whatever you want.” So they moved to Miami. Now it feels cold there without her.

A woman on her way south, giving her tomato plants fresh air in Virginia. “They cost $9 for three in New York and $20 for two in Florida,” she explains. “So I’m carrying them as passengers.”

A man from Appalachia pointing out a mound of fire ants to his wide-eyed daughter.

A Ukrainian-American woman cradling her pet ferret, lamenting the children she lost custody of.

A young woman in a crop top describing a friendship gone sour.

Remember this.

John and Maryanne show off their motorcycle and sidecar in Maine.

Here is what I will remember of Michael: Dawn, a Smokey Bear statue, the rest stop glowing under first light. I wander toward a man sitting alone on a bench. He gestures for me to join him.

“Where are you headed?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” he says, and I laugh.

“I’m trying to cross off all of the lower 48,” he adds after a moment.

Michael is a police officer with 28 years on the force, serving in the town where he was born, 30 minutes south of Atlanta. The job comes with trauma. “I’ve tried therapy, medication. None of it works. Being on the bike is literally the only time I feel free. Out here alone, riding in the wind, it’s just you and your thoughts. And it’s amazing.”

Still, he knows he’s gambling with his life. “Every time you get on a bike, someone will try to kill you,” he says, grinning in a way that doesn’t dismiss risk but makes room for it. “Not on purpose. They simply don’t see you.”

Any miscalculation on his part can also be dangerous. Michael knows this in his bones. In January, he laid down his bike when someone he was following too closely slammed on their brakes. He suffered a few broken ribs. “Hurt worse than I ever thought that would hurt,” he says.

But he treated the accident as part of the bargain. “If I get run over, I get run over,” he says. “It’s probably better than some of the other ways I could’ve left this earth.”

We talk about his hometown, where violence seems to be getting worse. “Used to be one murder a year was a big deal. Now there are several.” But he doesn’t buy the idea that the country is in inexorable decline, coming apart at the seams. “I think the bulk of people in America can sit down and share a meal or talk about anything,” he said. “There’s more we have in common than we do different.”

Here is what I will remember of Michael: his faith in community, and his belief that freedom, even with risk, is worth the ride.

A road sign in the Bronx.

“When we were planning this trip, I didn’t expect to feel this way,” Cheney tells me one afternoon. He’s logged more than 25,000 miles on the road since the end of his marriage. Now I-95 seems to be asking him, almost kindly: How much farther can you really go before you need to stop?

Since moving into his car, I’ve learned that it runs on more than gas. It runs on order, a collection of rules my son has honed in the time he’s been on the move. He pulled out the back seats to install a sleeping platform and storage, and everything has its place: stove, camera gear, water, paper towels. If I stash a sweater where his tennis shoes go, I’ll hear the quick snap of his correction.

He isn’t being fussy. He’s protecting ballast, the modest mooring he’s been able to create after losing so much.

In time he trusts me to know where to store the plates and drape damp towels. And somewhere between interstate exits, between chasing the first blush of morning and the soft spill of dusk with his camera, Cheney has also realized that he wants something more grounded than an organized car. The idea of settling down again is no longer something to resist.

I study him as he drives. I admire that he’s meeting his sorrows, moving through them, and staying open to what comes. Our pursuits aren’t so different. His search is for home, mine for country. Both of us are circling versions of the same question, trying to find our place in a world restless with change.

One night we find ourselves in a neighborhood improvised from asphalt and exhaustion. About 30 people live in their cars next to a rest area. Most are in their fifties, sixties, and seventies. Together they’ve turned an in-between place into something enduring.

Among them: Brian, once an HVAC installer, sidelined by a fall from a roof. Joe, who works as a pizza maker at a local restaurant. Mary Beth, unhoused now for more than two years, who unwinds at night with an episode of The Andy Griffith Show on her phone. “When you lose your home, you lose a lot of things,” she says. “But one of the first things you lose is neighbors.” Here she’s found them again, the fabric our country depends on.

The residents tape holiday decorations to their dashboards, give one another birthday cards. They gather to watch the sunset through the large windows of the rest-area café, sometimes lingering to gossip. They call out good night before climbing into their cars to sleep.

Maryanne and her husband, Ángel, give us the lay of the land. “Liz lives in that green car. Brian is in that brown car. Tina and her sons live in this one,” Maryanne says. “They’re like family for us now. We’ve made this like a home. You know, we live in our car, but life is not bad.”

Together forty years, with four kids to show for it, Maryanne and Ángel were evicted last year. They tell us their love story: They worked at the same grocery store, he in produce, she in the meat and fish department. “He wrote me love letters in Spanish,” Maryanne says. She’d taken only a little bit of Spanish in school. “I had to spend hours trying to figure out what he wrote.”

Ángel, now in his seventies, is recovering from a leg operation and visits the hospital frequently to have his bandages changed. “I’m in pain,” he admits, wincing.

They’ve lost so much, but not each other.

This place. It’s remarkable. And infuriating. People who’ve built lives, worked, raised children, paid taxes, now exposed to every hard edge. That night Cheney and I enter briefly into their community, sleeping in the parking lot. Rain taps on the car roof while I lie awake, listening, thinking about loss. How to guard against it, and how to lean on others when it happens.

As dawn breaks, the women at the rest area gather. Men stretch. Coffee steams in Styrofoam cups. As Cheney and I pull away, I watch the makeshift neighborhood shrink in the rearview mirror, half in shadow, half in light.

The author on the porch of the house in Maine where she lived the summer before her senior year of college.

When we reach Maine, I know that I’ve found what I was looking for with Cheney: a bond reforged. In a thousand fleeting gestures, we’ve recovered our rhythm and ease. My relationship with my country remains complicated, but the America I’ve met on the road is also far more recognizable, resilient, and generous than the noise of now would have us think. Online, we’re a nation of factions. In parking lots and at picnic tables, we’re a nation of encounters. Strangers have offered small gifts freely and with care: a joke that cracks the heat, a baseball cap, a paper cup of fresh orange juice, a story about a stray cat hitching a ride across state lines atop an engine before emerging at a rest stop with a startled meow. 

Before ending our trip, Cheney and I step into what feels like a loop of time, detouring to a rambling three-story house where I lived with his father the summer before my senior year in college. We wander around the house, now gutted for renovation, and climb to the second-floor porch overlooking Kenduskeag Stream. I remember sitting there on warm evenings with the man I would marry, imagining the future.

Later we hike the Beehive Loop trail in Acadia National Park, clinging to iron rungs drilled into a cliff face. Sometimes Cheney extends a hand back to help me up. The scramble demands trust—in the metal, the rock, each other—and a willingness to keep moving, even when the next hold is out of sight.

The lesson of the cliff follows me back to the highway. Do I belong in America? The truest answer is: for now. Because belonging is a practice, a choice remade again and again, even as trust frays and the horizon blurs. It means offering what we can, and receiving what comes. Public life doesn’t pause; it unfolds continuously, sometimes violently, and it spills into private life, upsetting our balance. But we can turn our grief into guardrails and keep groping our way forward, one handhold at a time.

Maybe this is what hope looks like today: stopping, listening, recognizing one another. Treating presence itself as a radical act. Deciding, day after day, to remain, to take part.

At the northern terminus of I-95, Cheney and I turn around in his car, heading back toward my home in Brooklyn. Storm clouds gather overhead, the edges rimmed in gold. The highway stretches on with no guarantees, still becoming.

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