for spacious skies

When the hail started coming down and visibility dropped to 15 feet inside the cloud around us, I began to suspect I had volunteered for the wrong driving shift.

We were somewhere along the Wyoming-Utah border, crawling up a mountain pass and only using about 10 miles of the 80 mile-an-hour speed limit the highway allotted. Staring ahead as our four-door sedan climbed into the Rockies, we watched the storm clouds rush into the shallow valley we were charging into. Maybe this was a mistake.

Our route took us from the east coast across the north of the country, down the west coast and back through the south.

"It would be wrong to leave home without seeing it first."

That was the thought that Dan and I used to talk ourselves into an east-to-west cross country roadtrip, shortly followed by another one back east. Dan had borrowed his grandmother's car in Boston to move everything he owned from New York back to Menlo Park. I can only imagine the sales pitch her gave her that made it palatable to chalk up a 6,000 mile round-trip on a new Lexus.

Dan took off from New York and I left from DC, meeting in Philadelphia with (relatively) few dark circles under our eyes. Our trip took us through Hershey, PA, to the Appalachians, to Pittsburgh and Cleveland in our first day. We optimistically estimated about 6 hours of driving each day (the real average would come out to about 9 or 10.)

The Badlands in South Dakota was an otherworldly scene that is really not given its due by this one rather underwhelming photo I took of it.

As we got to an overlook at The Badlands, a bus full of octogenarians unloaded to take streams of photos. I wonder how many of those photos and videos ultimately end up getting watched, and how many are stored away never to be seen again.

Driving across the country, a casual observer could be forgiven for thinking that America was robustly, overwhelmingly pro-Trump. The cities we stayed in - Chicago, San Francisco, Santa Fe - were solidly blue, but the wide open spaces in between showed mile after mile of unabashed Trump-Pence lawn signs, billboards, and bumper stickers. It made me think of the demographers who cataloged the sorting of Americans over time by belief and affiliation into like-minded enclaves; liberals to the cities, conservatives to the exurbs and beyond. Coming from San Francisco and New York, Dan and I reveled at the first few Trump signs we saw, before we realized that they would be the norm as we made our way through the flyover states we had neglected to visit for 27 years.

Dan and Rob grab food in the emptiest In-n-Out I've ever seen.

If there is any big takeaway from driving across the country, it was that we had underestimated its scale. Wide open spaces stretch for miles - from the Loneliest Road in America in Nevada to the flat, relentless horizons of north Texas.

I also underestimated how beautiful America is. And how much variety it holds within a day's drive. We left Rapid City, South Dakota in the low-70's and planned to stay the next night in Jackson Hole, only to find a blizzard had just settled in (which would divert us into our lovely Utah hailstorm.) The Pacific Coast Highway in California offered some of the sheerest and most immense cliffs I've ever seen, rushing straight down to meet the ocean as the road wound, sometimes precipitously, along them. The sunrise over the Grand Canyon first lit the peaks, and then slowly descended, sediment layer by layer, lighting each up one at a time.

Two photos of the rolling desert on America's Loneliest Highway in Nevada.

It's hard to think of America as one whole country when you drive across it. There is so much variety in the feel, the scenery, and the people that it makes one wonder how we stitched together enough social fabric to form a republic. We met ardent Trump fans in Oklahoma City and Oxford, Mississippi. We stayed in a 'conscious community' communal living hostel in Santa Fe, and in all-American family (the father a football coach, the mother a teacher) home on Airbnb in Rapid City, SD. We cheered for the Indians in Cleveland and then turned around and cheered harder for the Cubs in Wrigleyville. (Just kidding about cheering for Cleveland.) The host of Norma's, a Mexican restaurant in Tucumcari, New Mexico, asked if Rob, Dan, and I were going to be famous and on TV one day.

All the while we listened to and read books that, in hindsight, showed striking parallels to each other. Teddy Roosevelt's biography talked about a united, triumphant America that came together to assert itself in global affairs. The Unwinding and Fractured Republic discussed the drop in social capital and changing cultural norms that today threaten to tear apart the fabric of that cohesive bond.

I don't have any defining takeaways from driving across the country. It's hard to capture the zeitgeist of the moment adequately, though many better writers than I do try. We live at an interesting intersection in American history. It makes me wish I had taken more time to get out in the middle of the country, away from the coasts, to meet people different from me.

I'm reminded of an old Abe Lincoln quote, on encountering a man he disagreed with, "I don't like that man. I must get to know him better."

Nik / 11.7.16