This Land

Introduction

If I’m in Illinois, the rental is from Texas; if I’m in Texas, it is Wyoming; if I’m in Wyoming, Florida. The license plate alone marks me as someone not from here, wherever here is. And yet here I am.

In a small sedan considered mid-size only in Avis-speak, I adjust the mirrors and the driver’s seat to fit my lanky, question-mark frame. I make musical scat of the syndicated radio provocateurs before choosing a local station on the inferior AM bandwidth, where every sound seems to pass through the filter of an indefinable past. Depending on mood and place, I might absorb the aching wails of Hank Williams, the fire-next-time portents of some storefront preacher, or the folksy reassurance of an avuncular DJ who once was God in times of weather-related school closings.

With any luck I might find a program called Tradio, or Swap Shop, through which callers engage in a sort of on-air eBay. Once, while driving through West Virginia, I heard a woman announce that she was looking to sell a house, 16 acres, a bowling ball, and a sequin dress slit up the side.

Seat; check. Mirrors; check. Radio; check. The steering wheel carries the trace of drivers before me, their commingled scent on the wheel and now on my palms, faintly, until I reach the hotel. Have I booked a hotel? This is a serious matter. I have slept on the floors of airports; in condemnation-worthy motels with scorched electrical outlets; in a bed-and-breakfast whose proprietor offered the use of her absent husband’s bathrobe, hanging there on a treadmill; in an unsupervised, nearly deserted Old West hotel haunted by Molly, a maid who ended it all with poison and alcohol a century ago.

I usually wind up in the soothing sameness of a Hampton Inn or Holiday Inn Express, places I recommend for their pliant pillows and welcome absence of any personal touch. They are also often within walking distance of a roadside chain restaurant, where I can consider the angles of the story before me while drinking table wine and eating freshly nuked salmon.

And now I am driving away from the city, along an interstate that leads to a secondary road that leads to a tertiary road that might very well be unpaved, my lunch some truck-stop trail mix washed down with a Coke. In more than a decade, I have been pulled over only twice: once on a remote road along the Mexican border, by a deputy sheriff who didn’t recognize the car and wanted reassurance that I wasn’t smuggling undocumented immigrants; and once in Kansas, because I was speeding while singing backup for the Moody Blues on “Nights in White Satin.” I accepted the ticket I so richly deserved—for singing, if not for speeding—and dutifully signaled as I pulled away.

Where I was headed then is so different from where I am headed now, no matter the dulling uniformity of the rental cars and hotels and chain restaurants. I am driving and driving to some American somewhere, confident only in the revelations that await.

The idea was mad, farcical, quixotic, so I agreed to do it.

For the last three years I had been happily roaming Gotham while writing a twice-weekly column for The New York Times called “About New York.” But a temporary assignment to cover the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 had given me a glimpse of the larger American story. I chronicled the Gulf Coast communities immersed in mucky black waters; the roads scarred by the hulls of ships storm-muscled onto land; the telltale markings on shotgun-house doors, indicating date of search and number of bodies found. (I had seen these somber symbols before, on Lower Manhattan brick and steel.)

A defining moment came when The Times photographer Nicole Bengiveno and I spotted a dead body on a downtown New Orleans street, its feet jutting from a wet blue tarp surrounded by traffic cones. We watched as six National Guardsmen strode up to the corpse. Two blessed themselves, one took a snapshot, and all walked away.

Shaken by what we had seen, Nicole and I drove on to record other dystopian moments under the hot September sun. With the body still there when we returned in the evening, I reported the situation to a Louisiana state trooper. He explained that he was the one who had placed those traffic cones around the body—to keep some news truck from running over it.

The next morning, the corpse still lay on the pavement, where it would remain through another hot day and into the dusk of another curfew. How could a corpse be left to decompose, like carrion, on a downtown street in a major American city? Would this dead black son of New Orleans have been left there for days if he had been white? Hunched over my laptop in the rental car, I wrote what I saw, and felt.

This was the moment that sparked the idea of a wandering national column. Mad, farcical, quixotic: Let’s do it.

Over a few drinks, a couple of national editors and I struck upon the name of this proposed column: “This Land.” I’d been raised on the words and music of Woody Guthrie—mostly through the muse of Pete Seeger, a secular saint in my boyhood home—and was perhaps a bit too proud that I knew the lesser-known lyrics to Guthrie’s subversive masterwork, “This Land Is Your Land.” You know, about the other side of that No Trespassing sign saying nothing—that side that “was made for you and me.”

So began more than a decade on the other side of that sign. Spurred by curiosity and, occasionally, the news, I have crisscrossed the country in a mostly whimsical endeavor that started toward the end of the presidency of Bush the Younger, spanned the entirety of Obama’s eight-year presidency, and has dipped now into the startling era of Trump. The many dozens of columns I’ve written, some of which are included in this collection, have explored American moments small and profound, fleeting and enduring: columns about a county fair bake-off in Marquette, Michigan, and a bullet fired through the living room window of a black mayor in Greenwood, Louisiana; about the larger meaning of a knocked-down telephone booth in Prairie Grove, Arkansas, and the economic struggles of a dairy farmer in Ferndale, California; about a gathering of a group of retired burlesque queens in Baraboo, Wisconsin, and the execution by electric chair of a man in Nashville, Tennessee—a death I witnessed. Filed from every one of the 50 states, these stand-alone dispatches also fit together, jigsaw-like, into an epic larger than their individual selves.

But when combined, what were they telling me?

What was The Story?

In my travels, I am rarely alone and thank God for that, since I find myself to be miserable company. Sometimes I am with Todd Heisler, a revered Times photographer who covers wars and parades with the same intense dedication of purpose, or Kassie Bracken, an exceptional Times videographer with a flair for visual storytelling. Often the person beside me is Nicole Bengiveno, whose empathy is evident with every click of her camera, and who deserves national commendation for having put up with my road-weary crankiness. But the first photographer to work with me on “This Land” was Ángel Franco, of Harlem and the Bronx, whose mild learning issue as a child was misdiagnosed as intellectual disability. Having never forgotten the stigma, he has used his photography ever since to dignify the lives of the misunderstood, the disenfranchised, the underestimated.

For our inaugural column, in January 2007, Franco and I went to Logan, a small West Virginia city grappling with a fatal mine disaster and the decline of King Coal. At first we did nothing more than walk the quiet streets, noticing: the coal train snaking and squealing through the city’s core; the ashen dust settling on buildings along the tracks; the shop-window display featuring a Jesus Christ figurine carved from anthracite. Just—noticing.

In trying to file a column a week in those first years, our adventures would often begin Monday morning at Newark International Airport and end on Friday, or Saturday, even Sunday, with frantic efforts to figure out where to go next. Louisiana? Montana? Maine? Helping to ease the madness of this misbegotten venture was our colleague Cate Doty, who often handled everything from story ideas and travel logistics to dinner recommendations.

Kalispell, Montana. Lake Mead, Nevada. Ainsworth, Nebraska. Newport, Indiana. Pascagoula, Mississippi. Greensburg, Kansas. Hollywood, Maryland. Sylva, North Carolina. The datelines blur into one.

We went to a retirement home in Jacksonville, Florida, to visit the coroner in The Wizard of Oz. To Havana, Illinois, to report on the Asian carp infesting the Illinois River. To Kalaupapa, Hawaii, to meet the last residents of a colony to which those with Hansen’s disease (also known as leprosy) were once relegated. To Bethel, Alaska, to explore the cat-and-mouse games of bootleggers. To Bill, Wyoming—population 5, maybe—to stay in a new hotel catering to railway workers. To Cottage Grove, Wisconsin, to meet the pastor who baptized Jeffrey Dahmer in a prison whirlpool. To Denver, to cover the annual convention of the Sovereign Grand Lodge of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, where I felt oddly at home.

I often had no idea what the next column would be. One Saturday morning, while scanning online newspapers for ideas, I noticed a community news item about a farewell breakfast in a V.F.W. hall in Mohave Valley, Arizona, for a high school graduate named Resha Kane. After the meal, she was to be taken by motorcycle escort to Las Vegas, to catch a flight to Fort Hood, where she would begin her Army career in exchange for college tuition.

I called Franco, who, of course, got it immediately. We flew out the next day, and were present for the send-off of Ms. Kane, who looked much younger than her 18 years. Franco’s memorable photograph of this small young woman in fatigues, gazing up at her father while saying goodbye—the fear of her unknown, of ours, expressed in her eyes—hangs in the newsroom.

Here was a part of The Story, no? Touched by geopolitical forces far removed from this remote corner of southwest Arizona, an 18-year-old girl-woman was leaving family and home to give her service and perhaps her life to her country. To represent and defend the Odd Fellows and their wives, those railroad workers in Wyoming, that prison pastor in Wisconsin, the coroner of Munchkinland. Franco. Me.

Given our fractured and fractious times, you could argue that this country has no center; that what exists instead is an ever-widening chasm between the reds and blues, the haves and have-nots, the rural and urban, us and them. At times it seems as though the United States of America is less one country than a collection of distinctly different countries, connected more by geographic happenstance than by a shared embrace of ideals.

In the days and weeks after the 2016 election, the pundits who inhabit cable television spoke often of no longer recognizing their own country. Some of them could not imagine who out there, beyond the hushed confines of a television studio in Manhattan or Washington or Atlanta, would ever dream of electing yet another professional politician, particularly one with the surname of Clinton? Others could not abide the notion of voting for a real-estate developer and reality-television star who trafficked in race-tinged conspiracy theories, misogyny, and the celebration of the Trump brand.

But as I traveled the country for a decade, from 2007 to 2017, politics rarely entered my mind. With no campaign events to attend, no polling data to interpret, I lingered and listened, following the advice of Tom Heslin, a good friend and my editor long ago at the Providence Journal, who told me once:

Slow it down.

The men and women I encountered were not numbers to be tallied in yet another political survey; they were individuals, trying to get through another day in America. By slowing it down, I witnessed their wills being tested by crime, by fates, by natural disaster. I watched them struggle and tumble, laugh and cry, pause to take a breath or whisper a prayer. To echo Faulkner, I saw them endure. And that is what, I think, this volume of columns and stories conveys: the American endurance that transcends politics, and is ever-present no matter the presidential era.

If a tornado tears through our city, we clean up. If a new highway bypasses our town, we erect a roadside monument to declare our defiant continuance. If society mistakenly relegates us to sheltered workshops and group homes, we learn to drive. If the Mississippi threatens once again to overflow its banks, we work side-by-side to erect a sandbag wall. And if racists burn down our church, we rebuild.

For me, it all goes back to that first visit for that first column—to Logan, West Virginia.

After Franco and I had taken our maiden walk down the streets of this distressed coal town—after we had dodged the coal train and reflected before that anthracite Jesus—we went in search of a late lunch or early dinner. We slid into a booth in a narrow, downtown diner and studied what was left of the daily specials.

The waitress, smiling through her late-day weariness, pulled out her pad, poised her pen in anticipation, and asked the eternal question:

“Are we ready yet, children?”