One Beiruti photographer went looking for America's heart in 24 towns named for his homeland. This is his journey.

Photos By Fadi Boukaram

Text by Ruby Mellen



April 27, 2017



A decade ago, while studying at business school in San Francisco, Fadi BouKaram started feeling homesick for the sunbaked hills of his native Lebanon. He typed “Lebanon” into Google Maps — and was stunned to find himself looking not at the Middle East, but at Lebanon, Oregon, a mere nine-hour drive from his apartment. He was puzzled: There was a U.S. Lebanon? Could there be more?

Another quick search led him to Lebanon, Pennsylvania. Then to Lebanon, Kentucky. Altogether, he found more than 50 Lebanons in the United States. The reason, of course, is that the word “Lebanon” appears more than 70 times in the Old Testament. What, BouKaram wondered, if one day he visited all of them?

Ten years later, this germ of an idea had landed him in a police station in Albuquerque, New Mexico, chasing a mother-daughter meth-dealing team that had stolen and gutted his rented recreational vehicle, the one he had slept in for five months, the one that had carried him 17,800 miles through 37 states, and left him with a better understanding of the American heartland than nearly all his coastal elite friends. But more on that later.

BouKaram, now 38, spent much of his childhood in bomb shelters in the Beirut suburb of Sabtieh at the height of Lebanon’s civil war in the 1980s. The war, combined with the conflict with Israel, left the country decrepit in every way. BouKaram got his degree in electrical engineering and soon landed a job. In 2005, he was so close when former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri was assassinated with a car bomb that his face was cut with glass from the explosion. “I needed a break,” said BouKaram, who decamped to San Francisco shortly after to study.

After business school, BouKaram returned to the Middle East as a tax consultant. His job took him from Cairo to Kuwait to Baghdad, often in an armored car. When in Baghdad, he had to submit a proof of life form with identification marks of his body in case he were killed. “All this for taxes?” BouKaram said he thought.

In July 2016, he quit his job and decided to make good on the dream of a decade before: He would visit all the Lebanons in the United States and photograph his way through America. His plan was pegged to a little-known historical event in 1955, when Lebanese President Camille Chamoun invited seven representatives from towns called Lebanon in the United States to see the country. According to BouKaram’s research, they spent two weeks in Beirut, touring the nation, and were gifted cedar — the national symbol of Lebanon — saplings to take home and plant in their towns. BouKaram wanted to see if the seven trees still existed.

The timing was also intentional. He wanted to see America before, during, and after the 2016 U.S. presidential election, even if that could be off-putting for a Lebanese-born, San Francisco-educated “coastal elite.”



A realtor's billboard in Minot, North Dakota, ten days before the 2016 presidential election.

His friends grimaced and then warned him to be careful: An Arab man traveling through Middle America when the Republican nominee wanted to ban all Muslims from the country? “People told me to wear a huge cross around my neck to show I wasn’t Muslim,” BouKaram said. (He is Catholic but skipped religion during his trip. “If they assumed I was Muslim, I let them assume that because I wanted to see their reaction.”)

“Now is not exactly the best time to be doing a road trip through the United States,” BouKaram told me in February from a parking lot in Illinois, where he was resting on his way to Lebanon, Missouri.

What he found as he began his journey in Seattle and snaked through Montana and North Dakota is a now familiar tale. But for BouKaram, who had only known America’s coasts, it was a huge culture shock. He saw closed businesses, shuttered houses, for-sale signs. “Even the Salvation Army was for sale,” he said. What’s going on here? BouKaram thought.

In all, he photographed 24 and toured 28 Lebanons (his first stop being the Lebanon, Oregon, he stumbled upon in business school), nearly every one of which has reliably voted Republican since the turn of the century. And far from feeling ostracized, BouKaram said he found some of the nicest people he had ever encountered.

“It got to the point where now I’m starting to feel uncomfortable sharing some of these stories with my friends because it’s as if I live in a different country than they’re living in on the coast,” he said.

Ultimately, his work aimed not to express political viewpoints but to subvert the expectations that come with them. He was not interested in the inhabitants of red states and blue states but in the “people who are in the middle,” he said. No, not independents, but those who don’t subscribe to a “prepackaged ideology.”



A protestor at the Women's March in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 21.

An example? When BouKaram rerouted his trip in January to come to Washington, D.C., for Donald Trump’s inauguration and the Women’s March, he witnessed a face-off between an anti-abortion, anti-Trump protester and a pro-Trump, pro-abortion rights atheist. These people, their refusal to fit the bill, so to speak, “led to a much richer debate,” BouKaram said.

Back on the road, even the odd scrape had happy endings. One November evening in McCook, Nebraska, BouKaram was having a beer at a seedy local bar — “I’m not going to go to a microbrewery. No hipsters, please.” — when a man approached him and asked him where he was from. Lebanon, he told him.

“You came all the way from Israel to here? How would you feel if I came to your town?” the man demanded. The man started shouting at him, and the bartender had to toss him out. BouKaram was shaken and then stunned when everyone else at the bar hugged him and apologized.

The next morning, he found a Post-it note from the bartender, who had paid for his drinks, on his windshield.

“Fadi,” she wrote, “There’s a lot of hatred in this world, and I’m sorry for that.… I hope you meet more good souls than bad on your journey. Safe travels, Alissa.”

A few bad souls were still out there, of a sort. On March 3, BouKaram was in an Albuquerque hotel, mapping the route to his final destination, when his RV was stolen. He was left with the clothes he was wearing, his computer, and an overnight bag — everything else from a five-month odyssey was gone.

Police weren’t hopeful; Albuquerque is notorious for crime, especially auto theft. But 12 hours later, he got a call: They had found his RV and his belongings. And they had found the women responsible, a mother and daughter.

BouKaram arrived at the scene and saw a pickup truck full of his bags. The RV was gutted and had been transformed into a makeshift drug lab. Tubes of lipstick and what BouKaram described as “really questionable sex toys” littered the empty space. All his photography equipment had been inventoried, with hopeful appraisals for what it might fetch.



Officer Megan Maestas examines the cab area of a stolen pick-up truck where BouKaram's belongings were recovered after his RV was stolen in Albuquerque.

His whole project was put in jeopardy, but BouKaram was sympathetic. The daughter, in particular, resonated with him.

“She wanted a place to live, and she didn’t harm me,” he said. He would have dropped the charges against the two if he could’ve, but since it was a rented RV, he had no choice.

BouKaram’s trip was rife with unexpected discoveries. The story of the cedars of Lebanon, for one, took a strange turn in Lebanon, Oregon, when he discovered the town’s proclaimed “cedar” was actually a juniper tree. After doing some digging, BouKaram found that when the representatives returned from their trip in 1955, the saplings were quarantined and fumigated. Only one survived. The rest were secretly replaced with junipers. The lone surviving cedar still stands in Lebanon, Ohio, next to an abandoned railroad.

In another way, BouKaram’s trip was as much about his own history as his country’s. “The Lebanon I grew up in is not a Lebanon I’m fond of because of the war,” he said. “So going to all these places was me searching and looking to see what a Lebanon would look like without a war.” While he found poverty, drug addiction, and suffering in these towns, he also developed a newfound faith in the characters he was once warned about.

“It’s made me more optimistic to find out that so many of them are kind people regardless of what their political beliefs are,” he said.

BouKaram is now back in Lebanon living in his old apartment. He hopes to come back to America soon but has become a decidedly noncoastal elite. His dream city now is Birmingham, Alabama — and not just for all the friendly folks he met on the road.

“The price of real estate there! Oh, Jesus.”

To see more photos and read about BouKaram's trip in his own words, visit his trip blog or follow him on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.

A hunter shows off his kill on the last day of deer season in Sanford, Maine.