The America Between the Monuments and the Bus Stops

At first, I didn't think of it as field research. It was about proximity. I moved to Dayton, Ohio to be close to my son during his freshman year. Then one city became another.

Portland. Miami. Des Moines. Tulsa. Milwaukee. Memphis. Charleston. El Paso. And more than thirty others across 28 states.

The weeks became months. The months became years. Four years of constant movement that stopped feeling like travel and started becoming immersion.

I rode city buses, walked neighborhoods block by block. I worked from libraries and coffee shops. Spent afternoons in breweries and evenings in minor league ballparks. I talked with police officers, nurses, veterans, teachers, students, retirees, immigrants, pastors, barbers, bartenders, Uber drivers, and people trying to make it through another week. Hundreds of conversations. Thousands of interactions. Some brief. Some unforgettable.

At some point I realized something uncomfortable: for most of my career, I had been developing strategies and writing messages to reach people I had never actually sat next to. Never shared a meal with. Never ridden a bus with in the rain. That realization changed everything about how I see this work.

And over time, I started noticing something else. The places that affected me most were rarely the cities themselves. It was the tension inside them.

The Tension Inside the Places

I drove across the Great Plains to Mount Rushmore and felt awe. Then I went to the Crazy Horse Memorial. Seventeen miles apart, the two monuments tell radically different versions of the American story. One completed, one still unfinished after more than seventy years. One world famous, the other carrying a quieter kind of gravity. If you stand there long enough, you begin to understand that America often speaks in competing narratives layered onto the same landscape.

I felt it again in Charleston. You can walk beneath church steeples and historic homes in South of Broad and feel surrounded by beauty. Then you walk into the Old Slave Mart Museum and encounter another version of the same city entirely. In Tulsa, I visited Route 66 and then walked through Greenwood, where Black Wall Street was burned to the ground by a white mob in 1921 and scrubbed from most American history books for decades. In Memphis, I walked Beale Street and then stood beneath the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, where Dr. Martin Luther King was killed.

Again and again, I found different versions of America living side by side in the same place. Not separate realities. Shared ones.

Lately, there's been renewed conversation about "seeing America" as the country approaches its 250th anniversary. I think we should. But after four years on the road, I've come to believe something simpler and harder: you cannot love a country honestly if you only choose the parts that make you comfortable. To love a place requires seeing the whole of it -- the beauty and the fracture, the mythology and the wound, the belonging and the loneliness.

Bus 43

Last week, I was riding Bus 43 from the Dayton International Airport into downtown to arrive for my son's graduation. It was raining. We stopped outside an Amazon facility and several workers climbed aboard. Within minutes, they were asleep. Not gradually. Immediately. Like sitting down had finally given their bodies permission to stop. Nobody was talking. Nobody was scrolling. They simply collapsed inward.

I didn't write anything. I just watched.

That image has stayed with me because it captured something I had been seeing across the country for a long time. We keep hearing that America is divided. But division is what it looks like from a distance. Up close, what I encountered more often was grief. Not dramatic grief. It's quieter than that. The kind that emerges slowly when institutions, communities, routines, and certainties no longer feel as stable as they once did. And underneath the grief, exhaustion: people carrying economic pressure, emotional fatigue, the endless noise, and the constant sense that life is accelerating faster than they can process it.

And yet, I kept finding something else. Generosity. Hope. Resilience. Loyalty. Pride. I found it in neighborhood festivals, parades, trivia nights, coffee shops and community meetings, line dance classes, book clubs that had been gathering for years, families trying to preserve traditions, friends still showing up for one another. What I found at street level was not simply anger. It was people trying to maintain connection in a country that increasingly pulls people apart.

What It Means

There is a Bus 43 in every neighborhood.

And somewhere, a team is developing messaging aimed at riders like them. The research is solid. The copy is good. The campaign will launch on time. But I kept wondering what happens when strategy encounters exhaustion. When messaging lands on people carrying far more than the audience profile ever captured.

Trust is rarely built through slogans. It's built through micro experiences, repeated interactions, small moments of consistency and presence. That applies to neighborhoods, relationships, communities, institutions, and leadership. Maybe even countries themselves.

Finding America is not an attempt to explain America. It's an invitation to look more closely at it: to slow down, to remain in places long enough for them to become real, to sit inside contradiction rather than immediately turning away from it.

Over the coming months, I'll share stories, photographs, observations, and reflections from four years of immersive travel. Not to tell you what to think. But to share what I saw.

I'm glad you're here.