On Wednesday we turned south and headed for Georgia. When we were planning our trip we figured that if we were driving all the way to Washington, we should not come straight back if we did not have to. I wanted a different experience on the way home than I had on the way up.

In South Carolina we pulled off to refuel and I found myself facing an older man as we both pumped gas, our breath pluming out to white frost in the night air.

“It certainly is cold!” he said, engaging me after we made eye contact.

“No kidding, especially for me. We don’t get it like this in Texas very often.”

“Well what are you doing all the way up here?” he asked. He sounded genuinely interested, so I told him we’d just come from Obama’s inauguration.

“Oh, wasn’t that wonderful?” he said. “I watched that on TV. It was something.”

We were both quiet for a second, and then he spoke to me again, quietly.

“You know, I didn’t vote for him.”

“Really?” I said. I wondered if maybe he had just been humoring me.

“I’m a Republican, and I didn’t vote for him. I want him to do well, though. He’s really trying, you know? So many of us need so much help. I’m just really hoping he does well.  I have high hopes for him.” This all out like a flood.  And then: “I think we all are together in wanting him to succeed.”

This was so poignant, like something you’d expect to see in Obama: The TV Movie. He looked me in the eye at first and again when I shook his hand, but when he talked about his hopes he had the faraway look of troubles.  After he had gone I wondered about him, and whether his troubles were shared or his alone to bear.

Was this post-partisanship we’d heard so much about a real state of being? I began to wonder if maybe people have set aside nationalism-as-party-identity because now our common problems weigh more than our ideological differences, if those differences ever weighed much at all.

I admit that my sample size was small, but I heard this again and again, from Democrat and Republican and the unaligned and the uninitiated, newly jumped into politics by a hard world and a dark future and a new-worn hope, despite it all: we want him to succeed. I heard this before and after Rush Limbaugh proclaimed to his audience of millions that he wants Obama to fail. The cruel irony for people that feel like Rush is that they have become the true version of everything they imagined Democrats and liberals to be over the last eight years.

I willingly admit and am proud of the fact that I criticized George Bush in every forum made available to me for the decisions he made that I disagreed with and thought were bad for the country. I can say with equal personal pride that not once did I hope for the man to fail. Criticizing a president’s bad decisions is a vital right and the burden of the true patriot. Hoping for a president to fail is bad and crazy, sadism writ large. It is a lazy terrorism, a passive-aggressive terrorism by wish.

***

Getting out into America taught me that I do not know my country as well as I thought I did. Each day I found myself surprised by something I had seen or heard. And I am glad for that fact, because it means that I still have plenty to learn not only about my country but also about the people that inhabit it. As surprised as I was to see waterfalls of ice springing forth from the hewn rock of Tennessee’s roadways, so too was I surprised to find that millions of freezing, inconvenienced people can be courteous and helpful and glad to see each other.

There is no such thing as a universal American truth. Each city springs up out of its own hard earth of struggle, and those places that have been well-formed stretch across time and carry history with them. Each city nurses a people within it, an ever-changing cast of characters that are both the rules and the exceptions about a particular place and time. Legends spread and sigh themselves into solid form and soon the story of a place is only overshadowed by the simple but sometimes obscure fact that it exists, that it endures.

I belong to a generation that has no voice. What’s worse is that I belong to a generation that seems to have no interest in finding one. A friend of mine told me about a conversation he had with his step-father, who was beaten by the Blue Meanies at Berkeley, about how our generation seems to care so much less about everything while our brothers and sisters are dying in far-off lands.
And Joe said “I don’t understand why no one does anything.”

And his step-father looked him in the face and said “Why don’t you, Joe?”

And Joe was embarrassed.

And I said, “Maybe now with the wheels coming off at the end of the easy ride more people will pay attention. American life shepherds you almost immediately from your first moment of clarity right into servitude.  I know that sounds all San Diego Sandinista of me, but it is true. Most kids are in debt and beholden to faceless forces and balling up their fists and staring at the ground before they even have a basic idea of who they are. “

Joe said, “Most of us don’t even start from zero, we start from negative.” Then he was quiet for a moment. “Well, here we are, right?”

“Yep,” I said. “Here we are.”

I was born in 1979 and so ostensibly belong to both Generation X and Generation Y. I suppose I claim membership in Generation Y, which is often decried as a generation that has been put-upon and acts like it. It seems that every major unfortunate thing that can happen to a generation, the complete set of tragedies and character-defining moments that normally confront an age throughout all of an age’s years, have happened to us in the last eight.

As far as we know, since the year 2000 my generation has had its Pearl Harbor, its Vietnam War, and its Great Depression. They are not precisely the same, of course, but the words our fathers and grandmothers used to tell us about the worst of times will be the words we use to describe the first eight years of this century. I recognize that things could get worse, and so this is a hope rather than a truth.

My generation has thus far been defined by what has happened to us rather than what we have done. It is not overstating things to say that the world is counting on and hoping for Barack Obama to fix an incredible array of problems. More or less, we all want him to save the world. Obama is older than us, but maybe my generation’s legacy can be one of having helped out in that endeavor. Maybe it will be that we simply took up the cause in the best interest of our country, and felt like we were a part of something larger than ourselves. We could certainly do worse.

In the weeks running up to Obama’s inauguration, every front page carried at least one or two stories a day about how many people would Be There on January 20. I had assumed that these stories might actually serve to drive that number down a bit as people thought of standing in the freezing cold for eleven hours with strangers and no food and decided, instead, to witness history from the august environs of the couch. I was wrong.

At 3:00PM the day before the inauguration, the line to buy a ticket at the Vienna Orange Line Metro station in Virginia was about three hours long. After having had to engage in Mad Max-style road combat to get a parking spot, the only immediately apparent choice was to wait in a line that extended out of the station and almost to the highway.

Then my wife engineered an incredible time-saving solution, since the huge line was for buying tickets and not boarding trains: she figured it would actually take less time to take her old Metro ticket, hop on a city-bound train, go one stop, buy another ticket at another station that would hopefully have a smaller line than this commuter-heavy outlier, and then come back for me. Because of her, our journey to the city only took an hour and a half to begin.

***

Not long after, I had my first view of the National Mall. Like most Americans I am familiar with the color and the shape of the buildings and monuments in our nation’s capital, but seeing them in person for the first time cemented something in place inside me that not even thirty years of living and reading and learning and studying could do. Seeing Washington and Lincoln’s representations sit in opposition across that expanse finally brought it home to me that these men were real.

That sounds funny and as if I might have thought they were make-believe before I saw these statues, but that is not my meaning. Before walking in Washington, DC, those men existed for me in a very abstract way. I knew well enough that they had lived, that they had fought wars and held office and made speeches, and that they had died.

Now, exhausted after driving across a seemingly endless expanse of a relatively small portion of a vast country, I stood in the middle of the Mall near the Washington Monument on a very cold night, with the Capitol on one side of me and the Lincoln Memorial on the other.  I understood that this was a city and a country built by men, not by legends. These were men who had doubts and failings and who suffered them and overcame them in mostly ordinary ways, and then through actions and ideas and speeches had carved a nation out of rock and earth, blood and bone and skin. Washington forged the United States and Lincoln saved them, and they were real men who had walked where I stood.

I wondered, as I stood there, if thinking about the history of the United States in means of such abstraction was a common affliction.

Two young girls walked by me while I was considering this. From their appearance and speech I placed them in high school. Both were bopping along until one stopped and did a double-take at the Lincoln Memorial.

“Oh my God! It’s that thing! That thing I was talking about! You know? For that guy?” she said to her companion, pointing across the Reflecting Pool.

“Cool,” her friend muttered. She was sending a text message.

They continued on their way, and my wife and I shared a laugh about it when they were gone.

****

The day of the inauguration was as much of a mess as you might think.  The train lines were long, the stations were packed, the delays were huge. Had my band of travelers not been open to improvisation, we would have never made it onto the Mall. As an example: the Metro started running at 4:00 AM, and this was not early enough to accommodate everyone that wanted to ride it.

On the train in, my friends and I were packed tightly with everyone else, cheek to cheek like a Greek chorus, situated at the back end of the tailing car.  An older African-American man was looking past my head and into the rest of the compartment with such intense concern that I was compelled to see if I could help.

“Is everything okay?” I asked.

“Oh yeah, I’m just… I’m looking for my wife.”

I turned and looked into the crowd. “Is she…”

“She’s on this train. I just can’t see her.”

I couldn’t help but laugh, and we became fast friends. I have been on my share of subways and when they are packed to capacity it is usually an aggressive environment. Despite the massive overcrowding and delays on the transit system, I am happy to report that I did not hear a cross word or a muttered epithet.

The transit system in DC is solid, right down to the train conductors. Ours would make periodic announcements, letting us know that other trains were stopped farther up the tracks and thus blocking our progress from the outskirts of the city. As the delays increased, the announcements became more dramatic.

“My friends, things are bad. The trains are all full to capacity and the stations are being closed in a rotation to facilitate getting people in and out. I swear to you, we’re all going to get where we’re going.”

“Delays continue! But have faith. The stations are being closed and cleared and re-opened again and we will be on our way shortly. I promise we will make it through this.”

There was slight laughter from the passengers at this dispatch. After a few beats, the conductor keyed his mic on once more:

“Yes we can.”

We roared laughter and applauded. There are few substitutes for a good sense of humor or a man that takes joy in his job.

***

We made our way from the Foggy Bottom station towards the Mall, and the appearance of the Washington Monument in the distance showed us that we had no small amount of walking to do. As we set out I marveled at the amount of people making their way through the streets. It reminded me of Boston afternoons in the spring, when I would sit outside at a coffee shop on Boylston Street and watch people from all walks of life, all wearing Red Sox hats, making the trek on foot to Fenway Park.

There was no mystery as to our collective destination as we walked through the George Washington University campus with people in front of us and behind. Everyone was waving American flags or campaign signs. Many had availed themselves of the numerous merchandise opportunities and so if they were not wearing an Obama hat they were wearing an Obama something.

Once we got within the vicinity of the Mall, we turned off 23rd onto Virginia Avenue and crossed the street. Once there I wanted to turn around and see how far we had come, since it had been a sizable walk on a brisk morning and I am sappy by nature, so I wanted to try and remember every little detail.

When I turned around I was given an entirely different memory than I’d expected. A human sea swept up the hill and back into the city, advancing towards the park.  Not an inch of street was unoccupied by people for as far as the eye could see, and the feeling I had was one of being punched in the chest. It was not like seeing something impossible or supernatural, but rather like seeing something that is perfectly plausible but totally unexpected.

***

Not long after we picked out our spot among the throngs and camped, the Mall was closed. We stood with two million of our closest friends and swapped stories and observations. This family was from New Jersey and wouldn’t let their children miss it; these college kids had driven even longer than us, making the trek from California. I heard languages from many nations, from German as we walked the path around the Washington Monument to Farsi as we made our way into the crowd, and Russian, Greek, French, Italian, and Portuguese as we navigated to our spot.

It was incredible. The Washington Post had a headline that morning – “The World Meets in Washington for Obama” – and here it was, everyone there to participate in a history that stood before us in the fluid present. As the ceremony began there was a great deal of cheering and singing and chanting. When the crowd would applaud, it was the muted slap of mittens against mittens and gloves against gloves.  When the speakers began there was stony silence, save for during Obama’s address when people would shout out agreement or even encouragement.

During the speech there were tears. Some of them were mine.  Part of it, of course, must be contributed to so many firsts: it was my first inauguration, my first time to DC, and my first time on the Mall, all of which were augmented by the enormity of the event. However, it was also a time of not-firsts, of another iteration of travel with my best friends, of another chance to see Obama speak live, of another political event of which I will forever be able to call myself a part.

Mostly, though, I think it was the fact that conflicting beliefs inside me were coming to terms with one another. When I have worked in politics in the past I have been cynical about campaigns and elections, continually weighing things in terms of cost-benefits analysis. Words alone, after all, do not fix problems.

Words do have a magic, though, that is necessary to fix most divides between human beings. When I voted for Obama during the primary, I did it for the very uncharacteristic and possibly irrational reason that he made me feel good. Now, at his inauguration, Obama was making a speech about the difficulties faced by America and the pragmatic approach it would take to resolve them. His speech was sober, and rather than being struck and swept away by rhetoric I felt emotionally unseated by adversity and the opportunity borne of it.

As we headed home, the mood did not dissipate. Despite being exhausted, everyone on the train joked and laughed. Parents talked to their kids about what they had just seen and spoke to each other about possibilities for the future. The train carried us back to Virginia, and I fell asleep, deep like a river stone.

The night Barack Obama was elected, my wife and I decided to go to his inauguration.  I had a romantic notion that taking a road trip across the heartland from Texas to Washington, D.C. would be the best way to go. The idea of this trip became fixed in my mind as a necessary pilgrimage to my nation’s capital. I had never seen it.

As I write this, America exists in a fluid present at the crossroads of history and on the precipice of total disaster. Economically, domestically, and internationally we have plates brimming with misery.  As a counterbalance the American people elected the first African-American president.  Everyone that has not already decided to hate Barack Obama has placed all of the world’s troubles at his feet for him to bear on strength of what thus far is little more than potential.

I voted for Barack Obama – it would be dishonest for me to conceal that – but I don’t know that he can save my country, let alone the world.

I love my country but I also readily admit to pessimism concerning its condition. I wonder if my countrymen feel the same way.  That is the most accurate explanation I can produce, and I hope it sufficiently illustrates the origin of my need to drive across the United States in a bitter winter, and to ask people how they feel about America, and to be one of millions on the National Mall on an Inauguration Day during what will be, for good or ill, a turning point in history.

***

“The way I see it, the inefficient people? They’re gonna all be eliminated.”

Trevor turned from me to hug a girl on her way out of the bar and then turned back to me and smiled too widely.  “…and that’s Darwinian, and it’s not cool, and it’s not fun.  But it will happen.”

In Nashville I went to a bar called The Villager. I needed a drink and wanted to take an anecdotal poll from the bartender about the aggregate mood of his clientele. I did not expect to meet Trevor, but he was sitting next to the only empty seat at the bar. He asked me my name as I sat down and ordered a beer.

Trevor was 24 years old. When I mentioned that I was on my way to the inauguration, his eyes lit up.

“I support him so much,” said Trevor.  “My father and I both work in the hospitality industry, and he’s convinced that everything is falling apart and that we can’t recover.”

“What do you think?”

“I take the Millennial look at it – we are very smart and we have computers, so we can take care of business, right?”

His generational self-awareness was an odd dichotomy: a young man, well-read and cognizant of current events, aware of what is expected of people his age and content to deliver no more than that with notes of a detached, disaffected regret.

Trevor told me about the work he does in finance and how, ever since he started eight months ago, all he’s done is cut worker hours and salaries. He tells me he dislikes this because these workers have bills and mortgages to pay.

Trevor explained that he came from advantage, that his parents provided him with an education and a job.  He criticized George Bush, talked with steely indifference about the price of doing business, and got misty-eyed as he told me about the Obama mural he’d spray painted on his apartment wall.
Towards the end of the night, some truth came out. “Despite all my parents did for me, I’ve run up some debt,” he said. “I understood the system so I went ahead and did it and I’ll probably never pay it off.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “You keep telling me that you have a great job and you make plenty of money.”

“Oh, I do,” he said. “I have a great job, and for the first six months or so, I paid all my bills and I was miserable. Now I don’t pay them, and my iPhone blows up all day with 800 numbers, creditors trying to collect. I could pay them all, but I don’t.”

A beat, and then: “Because I hate them.”

This was not ‘hate’ the way a child might say he hates something during a tantrum. Trevor’s eyes were flat and flinty when he stopped staring off into space and looked at me again, before he repeated it:

“I hate them. I understand how it works and I understand what they do, and I hate them.”

This was the truth. Maybe Trevor went on like this with everyone that would listen after he’d had a few drinks, or maybe I was the first to hear it. Either way, it was real.

On my way out the door after last call, Steve the bartender asked if I’d gotten a good answer to my question.  I told him I had, but that I was still interested in his take.

“Hopeful but apprehensive. I think that’s the most we can do.”

Once I got back to the hotel, I shook out of my smoky clothes and climbed into bed. I lay awake for a long time and thought about Trevor.  It was not that I felt sorry for him – and I got the impression that he would tell me not to – but I felt sad all the same.

There are many signs as you enter Tennessee from the west, imploring you to try Memphis barbecue or to visit Graceland. Unlike Arkansas, where most of the billboards are either blank or an advertisement selling the billboard itself, Tennessee has plenty to sell you and plenty of things to do and see in metro areas.

Tennessee could use one of those signs at the state line to warn drivers that the highways are not lit and that modern infrastructure does not extend into the hills and valleys, but this is not the case.  Instead you discover this the wrong way, at 8:00 PM on a winter night when the sun has been down for hours.

My bad luck was expansive – I made this drive during a new moon and the hills and trees choked out any hope of ambient light. I thought my Ford Focus would be sufficient to carry us 4,000 miles in a week. Now the headlamps seemed weak, projecting an impotent 20 or 30 feet in front of us and then being swallowed up by the relentless dark.  I thought as we drove that if I were a settler or a trucker or had grown up with woodscraft this sort of contingency would have occurred to me. But I was not, and I did not, and it did not.

It was Saturday so other travellers were scarce. Occasionally a car would be behind us for a while before turning off or we would see headlights in front of us, sometimes on the same plane as us and sometimes elevated and seeming to hang in the sky from the highway divided by trees and height, dappled and sparkling as their glow passed through thousands of branches. Usually, though, we were alone in the middle of nowhere.

With no cars in front of us and none trailing behind, we existed in a sea of black, surrounded by nothing but what gleamed and reflected in the scant glow of the dashboard lights or the radio. I felt weightless, as if we were adrift in deep water that only reflected night, or as if the car were not moving at all and instead the earth spun under our wheels. It was like driving in space, and some how the cloying absence of light even muted the sounds of road.

Diana is ever the faithful navigator and understands that I am a nervous driver, born without a sense of direction. She chose things for us to listen to on my iPod that would distract me from my cloistered paranoia and probably also served to keep the bats and creatures in both our imaginations at bay. Where the GPS system showed only a blue strip of highway extending forever forward and back with nothing on either side for miles and miles, Diana made the radio play songs we knew and could sing, and those songs filled up the darkness with comfort.

It seems like a silly thing for a modern grown-ass man to be afraid of the dark, but the utter isolation made me feel more and more lonely until I was frightened. I can change a tire but if something more severe had happened we could have been in serious trouble, or at the very least marooned in a tree-choked valley for hours until daylight. I had a satellite navigation system and a BlackBerry with a strong signal. I had the internet, if I needed it. But the GPS will not give you turn-by-turn directions to “Get Me Out Of Here” and Google cannot instantly rescue you from being stranded in the middle of nowhere. Our technology does nothing to make being helpless and far away from help any less likely, it only increases the probability of and decreases the waiting time for rescue.

The irony is that my ancestors come from those lands – one of my old editors calls me half-savage – and that even though I can not properly use a compass or make fire from two sticks, I seem to know things about nature I should not. Like how moss grows on the shady side of the tree and not the north. In that innate knowledge maybe I also inherited a healthy dose of Indian wisdom, the kind that sometimes reads like paranoia but to me always seems like pragmatism. An old Sioux proverb, endlessly misappropriated by and wrongfully contributed to writers and social critics: Call on the Great Spirit, but row away from the rocks.

Several days later, having made it out of the land of  Smoky Mountains and Dolly Partons with no incident and only frayed nerves as injuries, we returned to my mother’s house on Sleepy Hollow Lane in Weatherford to collect our dogs and rest before heading home. I related our experience in the Tennessee Valley and she told me about chasing her own headlights on Hungry Mother Mountain when she and my father had taken a trip to Tazewell, Virginia to see my Aunt Opal, thinking it looked like a shortcut on the map.

“And it was,” she said ruefully, “but while it was only ten miles from Wytheville to Tazewell on the map, they don’t show you the 40 miles of winding roads up and down the mountain with no guardrail.”

After the conversation had moved on for a bit, my mother returned to it, apropos of nothing.

“Do you remember going to Virginia when you and your brother were kids?” she asked.

I told her I did.

She said “On that same stretch of road where you felt like you were all alone, your father and I had the same experience on that trip until we weren’t alone at all. We were in that big black Suburban we had – do you remember it?” (I did) ” – and we were driving on a Sunday night and it was very dark, just like you guys were. But we passed a big black van at about midnight and it jumped the median behind us and chased us for 40 miles.”

My mother had started to relate this story as she went the motions of lightning a cigarette.  I have watched her do this thousands of times, and as her last word hung frozen in the air, her head kept nodding like it always has when she pauses in the middle of a tale to fire up. I waited, feeling the hairs on my skin prick up.

“We drove and drove and they didn’t leave us alone, honking the horn and flashing the lights and trying to come up beside us and run us off the road. That van was the only other car we saw until your dad tried to lose them. That’s why we ended up staying in Bucksnort at three in the morning. I had your father’s gun out in case they wrecked us and we didn’t sleep that night. We just kept looking at the door of the motel.”

“What the hell?” I said. “Why didn’t anyone tell us about this before we left?”

“What good would it do?” she said. “You have to drive that road sometime. I didn’t want to tell you before you left, but I thought about it when you said you were scared driving through there.”

So maybe my fear was not nameless after all. Maybe some part of me remembered my mother looking terrified when we pulled into the TRAVELER’S INN off of Interstate 40 in Bucksnort, Tennessee. I always remembered it as her preferring not to slum it in dirty motels. I thought sanitation was why we did not sleep under the covers and instead laid blankets and pillows on top of the made beds. Diana and I did not encounter a black van with a big V-8 block, ballbusting up the road behind to put us in the ditch, but 15 years previous I had, even though I did not properly know it.

The worst part about that fear you get when you are isolated and wandering somewhere unfamiliar in America is not being alone, and it is not being lost. The worst part is knowing that evil exists. Real wickedness is out there, the kind that sometimes – not often, but definitely sometimes – results in a family beginning the day on a happy adventure and ending the day in a shallow grave, lost forever in a forgotten wood where moss grows in the shade.

This Is My Milwaukee