I am writing to you today from Nebraska. It’s the sixth day of our trip across America as we make our way to see our grandsons who live near Santa Cruz, California. They were out of their home for about two weeks as the raging fires came within a mile or two of their home, but now all is well, and we are eager to see them. In the age of COVID and inconsistent public policy, as much as we want to see our family, we are afraid of traveling on airplanes, eating in restaurants, or staying in hotels. The solution to our dilemma was to buy an RV and plan a trip across America. It is a trip that I have always wanted to make. I was eager to get my own sense of the vast size and diverse nature of our nation.
When I was a child my family took long car trips in the summer. Most of them were just from Oklahoma or Texas to see family in the Carolinas, but we did have some terrific trips to other places. When I was thirteen, while we were living in Texas, my father was invited to conduct a “revival” at a Baptist church in Los Angeles. We drove out quickly through New Mexico and Arizona, but took our time coming home through Nevada where we visited Las Vegas briefly and then spent more time at the Hoover Dam and the Grand Canyon. From there we went to Colorado and spent a week fishing on the upper Rio Grande near Creede, Colorado. It was a terrific trip. Some of our jaunts to the Carolinas had “extensions” up the East Coast to camp in the Blue Ridge Mountains or visit Washington and New York. Wherever we went, we visited National Parks, and when we went East I made sure we stopped at every Civil War battlefield we passed.
In 1956 we went North to Chicago for my parents to attend a convention. On that trip I made sure that I saw my first major league baseball game. Chicago played Cleveland. I don’t remember which team won, but I do remember that I saw Early Wynn, Nellie Fox, Sherm Lawler, Louis Aparecio, Minnie Minoso, “Jungle” Jim Rivera and Rocky Colavito play. They were all great and four of them are in the Hall of Fame. If you are a baseball fan and know your stuff, click on Chicago and Cleveland to see their 1956 rosters. There were many other great players, like Bob Feller, who did not pitch that day, but were on the field or in the park. I knew them all as an avid collector of baseball cards, and a faithful watcher of Dizzy Dean and Pee Wee Reese on TV’s “Game of the Week.”
When I was sixteen, I took my last big family trip. It was one huge trip that hit St. Louis, Detroit, Ottawa, Montreal, and Quebec after which we returned by way of New England, New York, Washington, the Carolinas, and New Orleans. We pulled a popup camper which we used about half of the time. I did not know at the time that my Dad was interviewing for an administrative position in South Carolina as part of that trip. Shortly after returning to Texas, my parents announced that we were moving to South Carolina. I was devastated, because it meant that I would need to leave my friends and change high schools as I entered the eleventh grade.
I never traveled with my family after that big swing through the Midwest, Canada, the East Coast, and the Gulf States. My Dad no longer had the luxury of more than a month for summer vacation, and I was busy with summer jobs. I had paper routes, was a camp counsellor, worked construction, and eventually spent my summers working as a hospital orderly, but I have always wanted to get back on the road again. I love the experience of having a sense of ultimate destination, but not knowing as the day begins exactly where it will end. Traveling by car or van can be a huge heuristic exercise, and nothing gives me more satisfaction than working through problems to a solution. There is adventure on the road, and many things to learn.
My wife has never been interested in the adventures of the road. She much prefers airline travel and hotels, but this year circumstances have favored me. The desire to see her grandsons has trumped her dislike of highway travel and its associated uncertainties. What she really disliked more than the idea of driving across the country was my desire to pull an Airstream trailer. Our compromise was a “class C” RV.
We decided to plot a route West that avoided cities as much as possible. So far we have skirted several cities like Albany, Cleveland, and Lincoln, but have entered none. We have given wide berth to Chicago, St. Louis, and Omaha. We are now in the middle of Nebraska and the most densely populated area we have entered along the way has been West Lafayette, Indiana, the home of Purdue University, where we socialized with friends on their patio before spending the night in their driveway. Our decision to avoid cities as much as possible has meant that we are traveling in what feels like a foreign country. It is an America that denizens of the coasts never see. We are getting a close look at “flyover America.” I am seeing an America that I did not notice on my travels as a child, and that many of us disregard as we think about the politics of the moment and the future of America, and America’s healthcare problems.
I really don’t like Interstate highways because they are crowded with the huge trucks that have replaced the railroads as the core of our distribution of goods and the transport of products of the land to market. One thing that I have noticed along the Interstates are new rural and small town hospitals. I should not be surprised because I am on the board of the Guthrie Clinic, and when we replaced our Hill Burton era pile of bricks in downtown Corning, New York, we built the new Lean designed hospital out on Interstate 86. The hospitals are out there with the Walmarts and the Dollar General Stores. Most of them look like large Hampton Inns. I wonder about how far people travel to get their care, and what the financial experience of the hospital will be when a tsunami of bad debt follows the negation of the ACA.
I am delighted when there is an opportunity to get off the Interstate, and drive through the quieter countryside and the small towns. From the beginning of Interstate 88, just outside of Albany, New York to Wagon Train State Recreation Area near Lincoln, Nebraska, where we camped last night and where most of this post was written, we have passed through miles and miles of cornfields, and small towns. Many of the towns have empty storefronts, and none of them look especially prosperous despite the huge grain elevators and the amazingly large pieces of agricultural equipment that you can see through a cloud of dust that whorl around them as they cut down the yellowed corn stalks that fill the fields. Many of these operations do not look like “family farms.” They have an industrial feel.
There is a hypnotizing monotony to the farmland, and soon the small towns begin to look the same. Somewhere in Southwestern New York we began to be impressed with the political signs that we were seeing along the road. Some were billboards with ominous messages like “Vote For Trump. He Will Protect Your Family.” Most were just lawn signs like the one pictured in today’s header. We decided to invent a game. We count the signs for Biden and Trump that we see along the road. Most of our driving has been on Interstate highways where the signs are scattered along in the adjacent cornfields, but we see a lot more political advertising when we leave the Interstate and follow local roads just to see the small towns, and come closer to what may be family farms. We try to spend the night in state parks which are usually a significant distance from the Interstate, and getting to them is an opportunity to see even more of the “real” countryside, and also see more political signs.
In western New York there was almost an even split between Trump, who had a little edge, and Biden. Trump was leading three to one in Eastern Ohio as we headed along I 90 near Lake Erie. Things changed dramatically when we turned south at Sandusky to miss Toledo and Chicago, and began our trip across Western Ohio toward Indiana. Suddenly, Trump’s margin became closer to twenty to one. Biden/Harris signs were were even rarer In Illinois. Across Missouri we saw occasional Biden signs, but Trump still had at least a ten to one margin. Trump’s signs have more energy. Most are small yard signs, but those are in enthusiastic clusters. There are many huge signs. The signs are often associated with multiple American flags and other creative adornments that suggest the enthusiasm of the people who placed the sign.
While looking out the window at Trump’s signs, we have been listening to a steady flow of Trump news from the PBS channel on Sirius XM satellite radio. There is talk that he won’t leave office even if he loses because he will claim voter fraud. The New York Times has published an analysis of how he does not pay taxes. Every hour I hear that his appointee for Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Supreme Court seat, Judge Amy Coney Barrett will assure the end of the reproductive rights for women, and it will assure that the ACA is ruled unconstitutional. The sum of the signs, the recent suppositions that even if Trump loses he will contest the election and will try to stay in office by hook or crook, and the apparent certainty that we will lose what we had gained from the ACA, and the reproductive freedom that women have enjoyed, leaves me somewhat depressed and feeling alienated from these fellow Americans who seem to populate the heartland. What I am seeing is a dramatic presentation of the deep regional divisions that exists in America that are enhanced by the racial and economic inequities across the land that suggests that the pledge to our flag is false advertising:
The original pledge was not penned until 1892, and did not include “under God,” that was added during Eisenhower’s administration in 1954.
I get it that many Americans who support the president feel deeply alienated from minorities, those who don’t see government as an extension of religion, and the “coastal elites.” I understand that they imagine those groups to threaten the America they want. I don’t think we can easily dismiss the deep division represented by the differences between the those who placed the Trump signs in the cornfields and people like me who enjoy the intellectuals on NPR and the late night comedians who lambast the president for his awkward and self serving ways. I must accept the reality that the president is delivering what a significant segment of the American electorate wants. It may be true that again in 2020 I will have to accept the fact that for the third time in twenty years, because of the oddities in our Constitution that protect the voice of states with small populations, we could have a president that a minority of Americans want. I am troubled by the fact that I feel like I am in a foreign country when I “go home” to the South and Southwest, or travel through the rural Midwest. I know that the residents of those areas feel equally estranged when they go to Boston, New York or San Francisco. We read different newspapers, and we watch different channels when we want an analysis of what is going on in the world, and because of those differences we have different agendas. I have twice quoted Isabel Wilkerson’s description of the 2016 election, and I think, based on my observations traveling across the Midwest that with small adjustments it still fits this week. Last Friday I wrote:
It’s always impossible to know for sure what motivates anyone’s actions, but it is hard not to guess that the mask business is yet another attempt to craft a political advantage by creating a deeper divide in the country between those who Isabel Wilkerson, the author of Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, suggests are affiliated with “the more liberal party made up of a patchwork of coalitions of, roughly speaking, the humanitarian-minded and the marginalized” and those in “the conservative party that in recent decades had come to be seen as protecting an old social order benefitting and appealing largely to white voters.”
The next several weeks could be both hard and very disappointing. The presidential debates begin tonight. I hope to be watching, and I hope it will be clear from the issues discussed that we need things to change, but I doubt there is any chance of the debates changing the mind of a rural Midwesterner with a Trump sign in his yard, or that my mind will be changed. It seems that we have lost the will or ability to search for common ground. What divides us seems deeper than party, religion, region, or education. Looming over all that has happened thus far is the reality that there are likely to be more surprises coming. I am worried and concerned.
When my son’s song for the week came out last night, I realized from the associated essay that my concerns are shared by many. We still have some form of political PTSD from November 2016. As a result, we fear much, and trust little. Nevertheless, he tells us that we must look to the future, and resolve to make it livable. I personalize that admonition by saying that somehow I must tolerate the alternative points of view represented by those ubiquitous Trump signs, and the threat to the public health, and the planet, that I think they represent, while trying to find some sense of common interest with the people who proudly placed the signs in their yard.
My son wrote of his sense of alienation from many and the need to realize that we share a common future that we must try to make livable. I think that work begins with efforts to understand what seems foreign to us in our own country and threatens our collective future. He wrote:
I am a deer in the headlights of the oncoming election. I’m frozen and I don’t know how to keep from being flattened. I think often of the people who look at the remote past of the mid 20th century and imagine that the problems of their existence would be solved if we could only make our world more like that one. We are reckoning with the knowledge that we are not guaranteed a brighter future than our present, or indeed any future at all. To that end, I think I can understand why nostalgia is seductive, particularly for those who resemble the people for whom the past was least cruel. But the past was cruel nonetheless, as is our present for our attempts to recreate that past by entrusting our world to a malicious and incompetent charlatan. We are only destined to live in the future. We have to try to get there and make it livable.
We are continuing our trip westward. I hope to see a shift in the “sign statistics” somewhere between here and the West Coast. I’ll let you know what I see. Be sure to watch the debates tonight, and remember that even though you are only one among tens of millions, your vote should count.
