where have all the heroes gone?

The only upside to leaving nearly four hours later than planned on your entirely unstructured (except for the departure time, I suppose) two-month road trip is that your tardiness lets you catch the rapidly receding September light in its full color. Does that make your 10:30 PM arrival time in the rural Pennsylvanian Motel 6 worth it? Probably not - but it's not like there's much to do at a Motel 6 apart from delicately peeling off the UV light rave show of a bedspread and falling asleep anyway.

Every day you drive across America is a different day. I don't know that from this trip - this trip is too much in its infancy to deliver any kind of wisdom just yet - I know that from the last time I embarked upon this cross-American exercise nearly three years ago, when I zig-zagged through the Mid-Atlantic and the Southeast before darting through the low-hanging heat of the South for the open expanses of Texas and New Mexico. Nothing replicates itself on a journey like this, nothing can. You wake up at different times, in motels or campsites that made you feel safe or unsafe in different measures. Some mornings you skip breakfast, others you stop somewhere with a name like Brenda Lou's Bandshell and sedentarily eat something that's 80% lard. There are days where you smoke two cigarettes before noon and others where the rain pounds with such ferocity that you drive eighty miles with your hazards on. The only constant is the ever-looming threat posed by your grandparents' devilish weaponization of your loneliness-induced vulnerability to their incessant Whatsapp calls and FaceTime (I'm driving!) requests. Some days move fast and free, others grow entangled on the detritus of old memory and not-yet calcified regret. You can't predict any of it, monotony never quite seeps in - and that's the joy of it all.

Every day you drive across America is a different day because every day you drive across America, you see a little better. Your eyesight isn't what's improving - if anything, the Krispy Kreme glaze progressively clouding your corneas as the hours pass is the most dangerous element of this mode of travel - but rather it's your perception, your capacity to recognize patterns, nuances, America. For the first two days of this trip, my eyes still adjusting and out of focus, all I could see were heroes, flitting in and out of early morning and late evening shadows.

The past is powerful in the stretch of Rust Belt/Industrial Pennsylvania and Ohio I've driven since Thursday. The relics of long-shuttered industry sit idle and passive-aggressive alongside rutted surface streets. Oxidized bridge makes a funky little rumble when you drive over it. No outlet signs carry different, darker meaning. I don't intend to condescend, nor do I mean to paint a picture of these stretches as grim or foundering in fatal poverty. There is immense beauty in Pennsylvania's rolling hills, an undeniable feeling of intimate, tight-knit community in Ohio's industrial towns (at the restaurant I stopped at in Youngstown this morning, the hostess greeted everyone at the door (save me) by name), and a tangible sense of unpretentious identity endures among these small towns and rural hamlets. The last thing I want to do is come off as one of those New York Times writers crouched in a diner, preening and craning their necks in a desperate, cloying attempt to understand. But there's a reason that those journalists so often came to this part of the nation, and didn't book Southwest flights for St. Louis or Bozeman. The past - a heavy past, one with lofty expectations and a not-yet faded veneer - is still fresh enough to glimpse here. That past never existed in other places. And you see that past most vividly, I think, in calls to heroism.

Two nights after I left the warm embrace of home, I'm still thinking about that sunsetting light and what it illuminated. It was at its most golden when I crossed New York into Pennsylvania at the latter's Northeast corner, the border traversed over a small, covered bridge between the industrial towns of Port Jervis, NY, and Matamoras, PA. You really can't tell that you've left one state and entered another - there's no WELCOME TO PENNSYLVANIA, GOVERNOR TOM WOLF sign announcing your arrival, no palpable distinctions between license plates or regional twangs. But in that September light, especially in its final throes, differences are thrown into high contrast. Matamoras, unlike Port Jervis, adorns its main thoroughfare, Pennsylvania Avenue, with 30x60 inch banners affixed to every telephone pole. Those banners are decorated with the faces of Mataamoras' sons and daughters who served in the military (and whose family expended the $100 fee to purchase a banner). In the last minutes of late summer light, the shades of amber and auburn creep into the crevasses and crags of faces young and old, make them appear as if they're moving, talking. If you catch them at the right time, from the right angle, Matamoras' heroes feel alive, right there alongside you.

The next morning, as I dodged the horses and buggies that populate Amish country roads and tried my best to suppress the guilt I felt every time I passed by a 'free kittens' poster plastered outside a farmhouse, I saw the sign that made me want to write all this down. I was in the middle of nothing at all, houses a mile or two apart, and by the side of the road in neon lighting stood a flashing placard advertising or, rather, begging for new staff at a phenomenally remote mental health facility. There were no details on what the positions entailed, nor the expected qualifications - just two words: Heroes Wanted. Either that job is pretty rough or they're speaking in the local dialect. Probably a bit of both.

This is a country that has always - foundationally - elevated and mythologized the language of heroism. That common rhetoric and its many implications live within the narrative of this country's 'discovery,' were expanded and stretched in dimension as settlers conquered and irrigated the West, and they flourished under the victorious gluttony of empire and self-essentialized exceptionalism. It is nearly impossible to divorce the concept of the hero from what it means to be an American, or at least from what it means to aspire to be the idealized American. But now, it's difficult to affix anything other than the unmistakably pungent aroma of expired nostalgia to such a concept. After all, this has been a week where little about this country has felt heroic, a week after many more similar weeks before it. There's the unending misery in Afghanistan, the misery that will last for many years to come in Texas, and the ever-increasing existential despair associated with daily headlines about flooding and smoke-filled skies and decisions needing to be made about which communities to save. Now is the time for heroes, I suppose, and while everyone seems to be looking for them in flashing lights or on faded banners, they don't seem to be in abundance.

But as I said earlier, the more time you spend on the road, the more clearly you see. Today, I went to Kent State, because every road trip deserves some morbid solemnity. There was no language about heroism in the Julian Bond-narrated audio tour I listened to, just sadness about lives needlessly cut short, kids younger than me standing up and getting gunned down for peacefully protesting what they knew was wrong. The past was overwhelming on that empty college campus, so vivid that I had to pause to sit and collect myself once or twice. I thought about the fear they must have felt as uniformed boys their own age turned, knelt, and shot at them. I thought about the panic that must have coursed through their veins and the deep, dark depression that must have consumed them when they returned to their dorm rooms to wash off the blood. College students the country over must have been feeling a despair not too different from the despair that I and so many others I know are presently feeling. They were out there chanting, peacefully disrupting, just as so many people I know and love have done in response to Greg Abbott's viciousness, in response to the malicious lack of action on climate change, in response to police murder after police murder, in response to... Before those bullets flew towards them, were the kids at Kent State looking for heroes too?

I'll close on this note. Before I left on this trip, my mom (thanks mom) gave me a copy of Steinbeck's Travels with Charley in Search of America - the best road trip book I've read yet. There's a passage that sticks out to me.

"Before I left, I was briefed, instructed, directed, and brain-washed by many of my friends. One of them is a well-known and highly respected political reporter. He had been grassrooting with the presidential candidates, and when I saw him he was not happy, because he loves his country and he felt a sickness in it. I might say further that he is a completely honest man.

"He said bitterly, 'If anywhere in your travels you come on a man with guts, mark the place. I want to go to see him. I haven't seen anything but cowardice and expediency. This used to be a nation of giants. Where have they gone?'"

Steinbeck published his book in 1962. It seems like even much before then, we were looking to the past for heroes who never were. Maybe it's always just been up to us, in the fading summer light.