Mapping the American spirit

During the past year I read countless news stories about the American spirit, American values, and what Americans supposedly would be doing and thinking about this summer, almost a year after the terrorist attacks. I began to wonder: Just who are all my fellow Americans that are mentioned in these polls and statistics? What are their names? Where do they live? What do they look like?

In July I decided to find out. I grabbed a tape recorder and a digital camera and racked up almost 8,000 miles driving across the country, talking to average Americans wherever I found them.

Looking at the US through the small oval window of an aircraft is great for appreciating the contours and topography of this land. But I wanted to taste and smell the middle of the country, to see if Americans – and if America itself – had changed in any dramatic fashion, not only since my last big extended trip in the 1960s, but since Sept. 11, 2001. I wanted to find out what working Americans were thinking – and doing – this summer of 2002, and how they felt about being American.

In my rented El Monte RV I hit the road, trying to avoid the big cities.

It is no secret that the semiotics of the American interstate system are the same all over the country: well-lit signs soaring into the sky, announcing another Subway, McDonald's, Wal-Mart, Exxon-Mobil, Pizza Hut, or Hampton Inn at the next exit.

So, whenever possible, I tried to get off the Interstates and onto the less-predictable roads.

There, the change I noticed in America was not so much in the physical layout as in the subtle ways people were relating to one another.

Sure, cities have changed physically, renovating downtowns with historic districts, parks, Starbucks or cappuccino cafes, a new Borders bookstore, a farmers market. But in most areas America's scenic beauty has not been diminished. The Blue Ridge Mountains, the Tetons, and the Southwestern desert are all spectacular. The summer winds in the Dakotas still smell like a field of wild flowers, and sun-splashed southern California is, as always, all sunglasses, Porsches, palm trees, and ocean fog.

But in speaking with Americans this summer I was stunned by our newfound ability to communicate with one another, despite our lingering social and political differences. The issues that unite us, at least during the summer of 2002 – foreign terrorism, corporate greed, child abuse in the church, kidnappings, high gasoline prices – have superceded the issues that used to divide us – race, politics, capital punishment, abortion.

Thus, this was a good season for a wandering journalist to be invading backyard barbecues, urban stoops, Main-Street benches, and lakeside beaches, talking with locals about American ideals we could, finally, all agree on.

I felt at home. I had a sense that in these small towns and villages across America I could communicate, one on one, with anyone I spotted outside the windows of the RV.

Perhaps I could have done this years ago. But last year all of us shared an experience that brought us closer and, in some ways, has given us a sense of being part of an American family.

Writer Richard Todd once wrote that the soul of America can be found in a Happy Meal. I am not so sure. The American soul is more complex than that, almost impossible to describe. But it can be experienced talking to average Americans and witnessing simple American pleasures: watching families gather in the outfield for the fireworks display after a minor-league ballgame at BellSouth Field in Chattanooga, Tenn. Listening to children during a Pledge of Allegiance contest at the Piggly Wiggly grocery store in Meridian, Miss. Even spotting the red neon glow of a Sonic Drive-In in Fort Stockton, Texas, against the wide prairie sky as it turned purple at sunset.

What made my trip so stimulating is that, while there is no quintessential American experience, it seemed that every person I met was so quintessentially American.

So, as I traveled I asked questions: What does it mean to you to be an American? And what are you doing this summer?

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