Finding America

A winding, uneven path through the Portland Japanese Garden, a place imagined after the war to rebuild understanding through nature, and an afternoon that asked me to slow down.

Inside Mark Twain's Hartford house, a living history tour led by George Griffin, and the summers at Quarry Farm where much of the writing actually happened.

An 1857 auction broadside at Charleston's Old Slave Mart Museum, Ashley's Sack at the International African American Museum, and what each record preserves and withholds.

Four months into a life without a fixed address, an unlikely choice to move to Des Moines and give up a car, and what becomes visible when you experience a place on foot.

Twenty-five years after September 11, a red bandana laid across a name at the 9/11 Memorial, and the story of Welles Remy Crowther, who kept going back upstairs.

From the bleachers at the Panama Canal, a ship the size of a building disappears in stages, and a familiar story about who built it turns out to be radically incomplete.

Seventeen miles apart in the Black Hills, Mount Rushmore and the Crazy Horse Memorial: one monument finished, the other still being made.

A cold morning at the Hemingway Birthplace in Oak Park, after years of following his path through Havana, Key West, and Paris, and the sentence he wrote at thirteen.

A pilgrimage to Powell's City of Books, the world's largest independent bookstore, and a travel section full of journeys longer than mine.

An unplanned walk through Omaha's Old Market, and what one afternoon of wandering revealed about how Americans inherit the past.

A mission older than Texas itself, at Ysleta del Sur Pueblo outside El Paso, and a border that arrived long after the people it now divides.

A small island of brick in Charleston Harbor, and the place where years of political crisis crossed into organized violence.

Elfreth's Alley in Philadelphia, the oldest continuously inhabited residential street in America, and the people whose lives kept it standing.

Inside Holler House, a family tavern on Milwaukee's South Side where the bowling pins are still reset by hand.

America at 250. Standing Rock. Philadelphia. Arlington. And what four years on the road finally taught me about myself.

A bar on Main Street. A poker hand held by a dead man. And a pattern of ambition and erasure that hasn't changed in 150 years.

The Lorraine Motel. The National Civil Rights Museum. On being near something and still not hearing what it is saying.

A weekend at Talladega Superspeedway. On assumptions, tribal loyalty, and finding people instead of places.

Performance. Erasure. Dehumanization. Isolation. And how all four ran straight through the witness too.

A mural on Coombs Street in South Napa. On the distance between being counted and being seen.

Four years. Thirty communities. Bus 43. Where this all began.