Clouds hovered over the highway like omens hinting at what lay ahead. Some looked like pillowy cotton candy, suspended in the blue sky without a care in the world. Others gathered into gray, despondent masses or stretched into white sheets from one end of the horizon to the other.
The road trip across America was conceived out of both necessity and curiosity. It was a way of moving my family of five and two cars across the country from Massachusetts to Utah, the beginning of a new chapter for our family.
The drive would also be a way to show my kids the unexplored corners of the country. After all, as Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy put in his campaign for Americans to take a cross-country road trip to celebrate America 250: “To love America is to see America.”
As a journalist, I spend much of my time writing about America from behind a laptop, scouring the news and talking to people through a screen. But the 250th anniversary presented an opening for a kind of reacquaintance with America. I wanted to see what America smelled and sounded like — to conjure a multidimensional portrait of the nation outside the headlines and media feeds.
The trip was supposed to be a journalistic quest as much as a personal one. After my naturalization ceremony to become a U.S. citizen in 2021, I brought home the letter in the envelope signed by President Donald Trump.
It called me a “fellow American” and had the following words: “The United States is now your homeland, and all Americans are now your brothers and sisters.” The president, presumably, went on: “You have pledged your heart to America. And when you give your love and loyalty to America, she returns her love and loyalty to you.”
But what, exactly, had I pledged my heart to? Up until then, I had a clear sense of what it meant to be Ukrainian — defending national identity, correcting distorted historical narratives from the Soviet past, and, of course, spreading my love of borscht. But what my new Americanness meant was less certain at the time. American identity was diverse, and apart from a right to vote, I didn’t have a good answer of what it entailed for me personally.
I wondered whether I might find some sort of answer on my family’s road trip across America. Over the course of roughly a dozen states and conversations with people at gas stations, motels and ad hoc stops along the way from Massachusetts to Utah, this became my animating question:
What exactly made my “brothers and sisters,” as my citizenship letter called them, American, when the country’s founding ideals are interpreted so differently by different groups, and what is America, really, beyond the political theatrics that so often define it?
And for me, in the most honest sense, what did it mean to inhabit that identity at this particular moment in the life of this ambitious and restless nation?
Looking for the American Dream
We deliberately kept the itinerary for the roadtrip loose. We knew we would spend several hours driving each day, stop at several historic sites of my faith, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and leave room for detours whenever a sign or roadside curiosity pulled us off course. I was especially eager to visit the nation’s heartland — Missouri, Illinois, Kansas, places that I imagined would reveal a face of America that I had never gotten to know while living in Boston for 15 years.
We had a few mostly practical constraints. We limited the trip to a week, trying to preserve both our sanity and our budget. The children would switch between two cars, forming various personality configurations that we hoped would reduce inter-sibling fighting on long drives.
The lush greenery enveloped the road as we arrived at the area outside of the Hancock Shaker village, one of the earliest and largest Shaker communities established after Ann Lee brought the faith to America in 1774. Our friends Carl and Gloria welcomed us for the night in what was once a Shaker dairy farm. Over breakfast at a local diner, our conversation turned to the astounding arc of progress that our country, and the world, had seen in the past hundred years. Child and maternal mortality have fallen dramatically, and with medicine, cars, air conditioning and cellphones, our material well-being has never been better.
If this is the best that life has ever been for humans in the history of the world, Gloria noted, why does it not feel like it?
“I think the question is, did we get it wrong? Are those not the things that make us happy?” she said, while our combined five children buzzed around in an anticipatory thrill of pancakes. “Because people seem like they’re spiritually sick, people are so unhappy. People feel a sense of social threat all the time from a lack of cohesion.”
Gloria’s great-grandfather came to California from China at 14 years old after selling his water buffalo. Carl’s ancestors were among the first Quakers in England who fled religious persecution and landed on the banks of the Delaware River. But today, despite those inherited stories of striving and refuge, the promise of the American Dream felt not as straightforward as it used to be.
On the road, I learned that the modern iteration of the American Dream was no longer just about social mobility and economic prosperity. For Ankit Patel — the owner of the Super 8 in Macon, Missouri, where we stayed for a night — living in America was complicated. His parents came from Gujarat, India, in 2007, and began working in housekeeping — a job they could do without speaking English. Patel went to college in Kentucky, became an accountant and saved enough to buy a 15-room hotel in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He now owns two hotels and supports his family.
“Was he living the American Dream?” I asked. Yes, but only in a financial sense, he responded. “I try to make as much money as I can,” Patel told me. “And then I’ll figure out something later.” He had doubts about bringing his son over, who was still living in India.
He’d seen the darker side of America, too, ravaged by addiction and crime. At the first hotel he owned, he told me he found nine dead bodies over the course of his time there. “I cried for four years running that place,” he said. The scenes of America’s underbelly have instilled in him a mistrust of society, even though the latest FBI data showed that crime rates in America have dramatically declined after the COVID-19 spike.
Patel much preferred the quieter pace in Macon, where truckers and construction workers check in late for the night and leave early in the morning. Ironically, he thought the city’s diversity — even despite his fears about safety — would ultimately help his son assimilate more easily if he joined him. “I’m kind of stuck right now,” he said.
The American Dream hasn’t vanished, but after talking to Patel, I realized that maybe it looks different today. For earlier generations, it meant the chance to build a business and give children opportunities their parents never had. But for many today, the longing goes beyond upward mobility. The American Dream is also about finding a sense of belonging in communities and institutions and building relationships of trust.
A quiet and steady faith
Traveling with children infuses nearly every experience with a dose of wonder and awe. At Niagara Falls, we boarded the Maid of the Mist boat and drifted toward the roaring curtain of water. Within minutes, we were soaked despite the awkward blue ponchos we were wearing. But to my surprise, instead of complaining, the children shrieked with delight. “This is incredible!” my 13-year-old son yelled out.
As we headed farther west, the crowds thinned. We passed through towns that were quiet and felt almost suspended in time. In Fremont, Ohio, storefronts were decorated with American flags and patriotic bunting, yet many businesses sat dark behind locked doors. I wandered the streets only encountering a few passersby. Where has everyone gone?
Fremont, which is about halfway between Toledo and Cleveland, is known for being the home to two things: the Heinz Ketchup factory and the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Library & Museums, the first presidential library in the United States.
For how few people there seemed to be in town, it was brimming with churches. From the center, I could see at least four: two Lutheran churches standing next to each other, a Catholic church with an adjacent school, and the First Presbyterian Church, marked by a “for sale” sign planted in the front yard. Last September, it held its final service and merged with another Presbyterian congregation in town. After looking at the map later, I spotted 17 total churches in the area.
When I was a child, the first Latter-day Saint branch in Kyiv rented a space within a building that housed Soviet trade unions. So an abundance of church buildings in towns like Fremont reminded me of how visible faith could be if it weren’t restricted or banned.
I rang the doorbell at St. John’s Lutheran Church, where secretary Karen Schwochow welcomed me in. Like many churches in America, St. John’s is made up of a largely aging congregation with a total of about 150 people who attend two Sunday services. In an attempt to attract more people, the pastor experimented with a nontraditional Sunday evening gathering with shared meals and music.
“But it’s the same people that are sitting in the pews on Sunday morning that are still coming Sunday night,” Schwochow said. Still, she takes comfort in the fact that her 11 grandchildren still go to church. “We’re trying,” she said with a sigh.
What has sustained their church was continuity — a loyalty to family traditions that go back for generations and that have persisted in the face of secularism. One denomination in town seems to be thriving unlike the mainline churches, Schwochow said — the nondenominational congregation.
I thought about what happens to the rest of these churches in Fremont when a cycle of inherited belonging is broken.
I asked Schwochow if she felt like politics was a point of division in her community. “We try to keep politics out of it,” she said, noting that many congregants are involved in the Republican Party. “We really don’t talk about politics, it doesn’t come up a lot.”
I heard similar sentiments from others, and they seemed to counteract the picture of adversarial and polarized America that we read about in the news. People talked with ease and respect about those with whom they disagreed and they surely didn’t sound like the angry pundits encountered online. When in a Western Kansas town, I asked if everyone was supportive of Trump, a Kansas cattle worker said: “Everybody’s got their own choice.”
It’s not to say that polarization, and passionate convictions behind it, was entirely absent. I’ve seen a fair share of bombastic billboards along the way: “If you die today, where will you spend eternity?” or “Kill relativism, not babies.” But in conversations with farmers and residents, it didn’t feel as strident and sharp as I had imagined.
Faith wasn’t a culture war weapon, but a steady and quiet force that held small and struggling communities together like glue.
Encounter with the land
Each state unfolded with its own distinct landscape and set of concerns. Driving through Illinois, I was utterly mesmerized by the synchronized motion of wind turbines that rose like otherworldly creatures over the fields. But Galva resident Randy McGinnis said they killed too many birds and wore out too soon.
Galva residents were concerned over another issue: a project that would take carbon emissions from their ethanol plant to then be liquefied and pumped into the ground. On the one hand, carbon capture could help with rural manufacturing jobs, but people like McGinnis worried about safety. “I don’t like to see it this close to people, right next to the diesel plant,” he said. “There’s things that could really go wrong.”
The war in Iran, he said, has disrupted the fertilizer and energy supplies, which is driving up production costs for farmers. “We’ve never seen it like this,” McGinnis said. Still, a self-described libertarian, he is pleased with the current administration. “I feel that we are more powerful, we’re getting more work in the area,” he said.
Some states announced themselves with a pungent smell. In Oakley, Kansas, the wind carried the foul smell of manure and wet silage from the nearby feeding yards, where over 50,000 steers were eating corn, ethanol byproduct mash, and hay to be fattened up for slaughtering. The stench, I learned after visiting those feeding yards, was a result of a blessing for drought-stricken farms — plentiful rain, the most the area had seen in 10 years in a span of a few days.
The land changed first to shrubs and then hills and mountains.
Driving into Colorado, I first noticed a haze along the horizon, the Rockies emerging as dark silhouettes against an orange blur. As we approached Utah, I rolled down the window and caught the acrid smell of wildfire smoke in the air.
The woods looked apocalyptic — we passed scorched, blackened trees rising from grass that somehow still remained green. The fire had burned nearly 30,000 acres along the border and claimed the lives of three firefighters.
On our last stretch of the drive, I thought about the words of Jane Kamensky, a historian and president and CEO of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. “As you mark this moment on July 4, what is the nature of your patriotism?,” she said during a panel I stopped to cover at the Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado, a high-powered conference of the world’s most influential movers and shakers. “Because ‘none’ is not an answer. ‘None’ just means somebody else will define it for you.”
The act of becoming
When we entered Utah, the setting sun pierced through the gray clouds in straight shafts of light. I took it as a kind of welcome. We had Cafe Rio for dinner and we were exhausted.
On Sunday morning, in Vernal, Utah, I approached a man outside of a 7-Eleven.
“Excuse me, what does it mean to you to be an American?” I asked.
He wore work clothes, maybe paint or construction gear, and was clearly in a rush.
“I don’t know. Freedom or something,” he said, then added a string of expletives about the state of the country.
His companion, waiting in a truck, asked if I was liberal or conservative. When I said I was a journalist trying to understand different perspectives, he sent more expletives my way and drove off.
The encounter left me feeling foolish, even embarrassed that I had asked two men to contemplate a question that they clearly had no time or interest to indulge in at that moment.
Far from the Aspen Ideas crowd, they were likely on their way to work, and while that didn’t excuse their brusque reaction, it did feel revealing.
I realized that asking the question itself — to contemplate what it meant to be an American — was itself a kind of luxury. To pose it assumes a certain distance from the urgent demands of life, and the willingness to answer it implies that whatever said will not be held against you.
There is no single way of being an American, or even talking about it. In many ways, the most American characteristic is the ongoing attempt to figure out what that means within the circumstances and histories of one’s own life. This land has witnessed and absorbed so much hope and it has become for each person, whatever they needed it to become.
After driving with his dog Charley across America in 1960, John Steinbeck observed: “External reality has a way of being not so external after all. This monster of a land, this mightiest of nations, this spawn of the future, turns out to be the macrocosm of microcosm me. If an Englishman or a Frenchman or an Italian should travel my route, see what I saw, hear what I heard, their stored pictures would be not only different from mine but equally different from one another.”
The more I considered the pledge I made in my naturalization ceremony, the more I thought of Roy, a Vietnam veteran I met in Duchesne, Utah, who told me that he carried $50 to $100 on him to hand out to anyone who asked for help. He had more than he needed, he said. He had so much. “I never refuse someone in need,” he told me. “And people in this valley would do the same.”
Perhaps I feel most American in that refusal to disengage — in the ongoing act of becoming more generous, more honest and more caring for those in our proximity.
America encourages that kind of remaking without requiring perfection or certainty. It’s an invitation to keep arriving, over and over again, together.