Late October '14

I woke up driving an eighteen-wheeler 60 miles per hour through a field east of Amarillo, Texas. My partner was screaming as he bounced around in the back; he had just woken up, too. Everything in the truck rattled and shook. Baggage rained down on me from the upper bunk. The view a dark blur, I slammed on the brakes, but 80,000 pounds of inertia wasn't going to stop for air brakes.

My last clear memory was standing outside a rest stop at 3:00 a.m. watching the canvas of white stars meet the glittering orange lights of the nuclear-weapons plant far to the north. It was crisp outside Amarillo, where industry meets the Texas plains, and I considered what I'd left and the world I was delving into. A spiritually paralyzing tower of student debt from four years of college. I'd been a long-haul truck driver for exactly three weeks. This was my test run.

There's something metaphysical about driving alone through the night. As the world slips into darkness, you enter a free-form self that is post-sleep and incoherent. After a few hours, the parameters that separate you from the prism of night dissolve, and only an elongated tube of light sucks you along. And you begin to hallucinate. Under prolonged sensory deprivation, your brain invents its own visions. Before we reached Amarillo, I'd spent days on an acrobatic sleep schedule, trying to weather my driving partner's erratic temper and fearing for my own safety.

My partner's name was Chuck, a fifty-nine-year-old truck driver who dubiously claimed to have once been one of Ford's top nationwide salesmen, despite a noticeable speech impediment he coolly didn't acknowledge. I'd met him a week earlier and was sharing the nine-by-seven compartment with him, exploring his temperament, which cycled at random from giddiness to virulent outbursts. That's part of how you trained long-haulers at Paschall Truck Lines, the company I worked for—put two new hires in a truck and let 'em roll. Never mind the mental-health histories. To live in a box with an unstable man is its own ethereal journey.

I considered what I'd left and the world I was delving into. A spiritually paralyzing tower of student debt from four years of college. I'd been a long-haul truck driver for exactly three weeks.

But then, Chuck might have a similar impression. As he came to, his head slammed into the wall, and his body jerked with the truck as it skimmed the washboard plains. I hoped the trailer wouldn't come loose from the kingpin, or that it wouldn't jackknife and tear us down sideways. Either way, I'd been looking forward to California. It didn't look like we were going to make it.

I didn't begrudge Chuck when, after the truck bounced to a stop and the air brakes hissed into the night, he flew out of the sleeper, threatened to ruin my entire life if I blamed any of this on him, and became my corrections officer for the next several days, forbidding me to leave the sleeper cab for anything more than pee breaks. Multiple times a day he called and messaged Paschall's offices, berating them for having put him in danger.

We arrived back in Murray, Kentucky, where Paschall's front office was. After a day of waiting on site, I was called in. The man who fires people folded his hands and sighed at me, speaking with a southern tiredness.

"You fall asleep at the wheel?" he finally asked.

I said yes.

"Well, that guy," he said, nodding to Chuck, who was standing outside. "He's just…"

"I know," I said.

"Are you okay?"

"Yes."

He sighed again. I was not among the first thousand drivers to come through here. "I'm going to write a book someday about all the shit I've seen." He was looking through the wall. "It's just… somebody's got to give these people a second chance. Or I guess not. But we do."

I walked out of the office, still, somehow, employed.

Robert Langellier

Early September '14

I entered the industry in the way many do: with a sense of complete personal abandon and lack of direction. No one enters out of high school, because they can't, so everyone goes in because something else didn't work out. Layoffs, breakups, and prison stints are popular notes of inspiration. I graduated journalism school tens of thousands in debt, and I needed fast cash with minimum expenditures. Craigslist, I noticed, was overrun with trucking companies making desperate pleas. So I spent three grand, earned a commercial driver's license at a community college, and applied to nine trucking jobs.

The American Trucking Association famously claims that the trucking industry is forty-eight thousand drivers short of demand. Then again, there are 1.7 million large truck drivers, which makes the shortage sound less impressive. What is impressive is the industry's 87 percent turnover rate. The average driver age is in the upper forties. Poaching is rampant, and companies are constantly trying to replace drivers as fast as they're leaving.

But there are plenty of megacompanies—Swift, Werner, JB Hunt, US Xpress—with pockets big enough to hire legions of unskilled kids who have no idea how a truck actually works. Like me. I'm what old-timers refer to as a Steering-Wheel Holder. I can't diagnose, much less repair, a collapsed oil filter, but I can shift the truck and drive it down a mountain. I'm under forty-nine years old and under two hundred pounds. I'm trucking's next generation.

I also may be one of trucking's last generations. Autonomous trucks have been tested and legalized in Nevada, and although they won't eliminate the need for a pilot in the front seat, a day may come when the demand for drivers softens. But it isn't today.

The day after applying, seven companies hired me.

Late September '14

Truck driving is an exercise in profound solitude. But not one of quiet. Steel and fiberglass long-haul trucks—Peterbilts, Kenworths, Internationals, Volvos—look like drugged beasts, slagging over pavement at 1400 rpms, groaning, straining over loads, gears churning, tires screaming, exhaust choking. Trailers, held together by eight thousand rivets, jangle over bumps. Eighty-thousand-pound trucks scream across asphalt highways. At warehouses, forklifts beep like confused geese. Pipes hiss. Manufacturing plant machinery whirs.

Trainer number one; Bob Jennings.

Solitude is not always lonely, either. My trainer at Paschall was Bob Jennings, a fifty-eight-year-old child with an actual trucker mustache who called me Topher Grace because I wasn't cool. I codrove with Bob for a couple of weeks, learning how to wake up or go to sleep at any time of the day or night and work. Trucking theory I learned in community college; the shortcuts I learned from Bob. From Laredo to Chicago to Lancaster, he instructed me on how to squeeze every drop out of my available hours of service, how to edit my log entries, how to steal the rubber grommets off trailer air lines on the border. "Otherwise the Mexicans take 'em," Bob said. He knew how to replace a fuse, repair a truck, build a house, pave a road, mine coal, mill steel, pump oil, represent a union, and weld a piece of whatever it is people weld. He rides Harleys because they're "balls-ass cool" but never joined a biker gang because "I don't like to conform, even to nonconformists."

"If I wanted to go to church," he once said, "the Hells Angels would look at me like, 'What the hell?' Well tough luck, I'm going to church."

"I'm not religious, though," he added.

One morning I passed a wreck on the side of the interstate in Arkansas. As the truck slowed for the bottlenecked traffic, the shifting inertia woke Bob, who was sleeping in the bunk.

"What's going on?" I heard through the curtain.

"Accident," I replied.

He poked his head out; his hair was matted from the bed.

"Well, if there's a wreck, I gotta see it," he said, pulling out a pack of cigarettes and climbing into the passenger seat. "Might be something cool. Might be brains scattered all across the highway." It wasn't, and there weren't.

Later, in Chicago, we stopped at a consignee to deliver a load—truck engines, cereal, who knows (sometimes I forget what I'm hauling)—and approached a serious-looking woman at the check-in desk.

"What company are you with?"

"PTL." He grinned. "Poor, Tired, and Lonely."

"Oh, that's cute."

"It stands for other things, too. That one's just my favorite."

"Hm."

The boyish charm doesn't always work.

I entered the industry in the way many do: with a sense of complete personal abandon and lack of direction

From Chicago we were to head back to the company's main terminal, where I'd move on to Phase 2 of my training, running a truck—eventually into a field—with Chuck.

Bob liked night driving—the roads are empty, and most of the weigh stations are closed. In between descriptions of Metallica concerts long faded, there were periods of straight-ahead silence, eyes unmoving from the two lines of light on the road. And to break that silence was to chatter in the pew—you don't talk about loneliness, you talk about the accidents.

An Historical Digression

Trucking as you know it was born in 1980, when the industry officially deregulated. Until then, Teamsters and price fixing ruled the industry. The truck driver routinely made $80,000 a year in today's dollars and was seen, as in John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, as a generous tipper in restaurants and in promotional videos as "a good American, a gentleman of the highway, a man who knows his job and does it proudly and well."

Then deregulation brought a wave of shareholders. Competition made shipping cheaper and swept union companies out of business. Companies passed the losses from lower shipping costs almost entirely on to drivers. Driver wages and union membership both fell about 40 percent and never significantly rose again. Driver pay switched from hourly to the modern standard of "cents per mile," a clever false incentive that heaved the onus for all unforeseen delays—weather, traffic, shipper detentions, slow freight—onto the driver. The industry shaped itself to encourage drivers to go for days with no sleep, and the stereotype of the bleary-eyed, upper-popping trucker crystallized. By 1983, they had appeared in William Least Heat-Moon's travelogue Blue Highways as crazed, dangerous, "ludicrous attempts to be folk heroes." Instead of dedicated routes that sent drivers home regularly and often, the industry shifted toward the notion of drivers staying out on the road for weeks and months at a time.

The work of truck driving became less skilled, less paid, and entirely less enticing. New technologies like ABS, stability control, and automatic shifting made the labor easier and even cheaper, while often making overhead costs more expensive.

Certain publicly traded companies emerged as powerhouses: JB Hunt, Swift, and Werner, among others. These megacompanies tend to lobby Congress hard for regulations and safety mandates—hours-of-service limitations, speed governors, collision-mitigation systems, electronic logs. One might argue this is all in the name of making our roads safer. Alternatively, one might point out that these measures are increasingly difficult for small businesses to afford, forcing buyouts that make those big companies, in true American fashion, even bigger.

"The carriers are offering a 1980s job at 1990s pay in the 2010s," wrote Bill Cassidy, who has covered trucking for the Journal of Commerce for nineteen years. Veteran drivers, by choice or by force, have left in droves. Few recommend the practice of owner-operating anymore. Those big companies have found cheap and necessary replacements in young people, who in turn hop from sign-on bonus to sign-on bonus.

And these companies continue to seek labor in its cheapest, least skilled form. Recent pay raises for drivers fall comically short of what is necessary to bring turnover down. Instead, the president of the American Trucking Associations has recently called for immigration reform in order to recruit more drivers, and the ATA tried to lobby this year for changing the interstate driving age from twenty-one to eighteen. In 2008 the FBI raided a Swift training facility for illegally issuing CDLs to eight thousand driving students. Cents-per-mile and hours of service are still cleverly designed to reward dangerous driving. We may have safer trucks now, but potentially less safe drivers.

In recent years, crashes involving trucks have gone up for the first time since the 1970s. Upon our interstates in the past year have spilled the following: 47,000 pounds of eggs, 400 gallons of fecal matter, 40,000 pounds of consumer-grade fireworks, $4.8 million in gold, 14 million honeybees, 30,000 pounds of live lobsters, 2,200 pigs, a shark, a horse, and a pontoon boat.

Early January '15

For hernial reasons I took a brief medical leave after training. On my first day back, I walked from the double-wide that served as the terminal's office with a slip of paper with a number on it: "16729." My own truck.

A brand new Freightliner Cascadia. Behind the front seat, in cramped quarters, was a foldable double bunk, two DC outlets, an inverter, a dim red floor light, and overhead storage cabinets. I stocked the truck generously: fridge, rice cooker, skillet, teakettle. Incense boat. Indie-rock CDs, podcasts from Radio France, from The New Yorker, from Peter Sagal and NPR, and an audiobook discography of Charles Dickens novels. A big stuffed gorilla. I felt like a sixteen-year-old driving home from the DMV: powerful and powerfully undeserving. I played the War on Drugs' album Lost in the Dream and drove into about sixty sunrises in a row.

Robert Langellier

My debt began to disappear. At my truck's governed speed of 65 miles per hour, I moved from red to black, carrying Reese's Puffs to General Mills, mattresses to IKEA, kitty litter to PetSmart, Plexiglas, coffee, additives, air conditioners, tampons, muffin pans, diapers, and maltodextrin. Eventually, my hair grew long and coworkers stopped assuming I was corporate.

It might not sound like it, but truck driving can actually be fun, as long as you don't have a family. Technically homeless, I saw friends in Denver, Kansas City, Minneapolis, Oklahoma City, Memphis, St. Louis, and Wichita. I dropped into my childhood home in Springfield, Illinois, and my adopted home in Columbia, Missouri. I hiked in Yellowstone, swam in New Mexico springs, saw burlesque in New York City, and worked the organic farms of northern Wisconsin, where they take mushrooms and hoe the fields. About once every three weeks over-the-road drivers, as we're known, are allowed a few days off, which is often a fugue of mixed colors and bottled energy: The suddenness of being around so many hearts and lights and sounds after three weeks of solitude is often overwhelming.

And then, afterward, back to the truck, where the bang of hearts dies quickly, replaced by a single, more acute—and suddenly lonely—pulse.

Early February '15

Pasadena, Texas. A warehouse at 7:30 p.m. An all-night shipper in an industrial park, an isolated universe of space and product, a place apart from the outside world and normal business hours.

The loader shoved a reflector vest at me in the shipping office and directed me with his index finger to my dock at the loading bay. "Go stand by Dock 17" were the first and last words of our friendship. The warehouse, piled with millions of cans of Red Bull, could have housed airplanes. The man climbed into a forklift and sullenly loaded twenty pallets of energy drinks into the yawning trailer. The air was bleary. A fleet of forklift operators buzzed and beeped around with dizzying precision. My loader worked with a weary, bored efficiency. Me, I got to drive off into the sunset. He had to stay on this assembly line all night, shoving safety vests into the hands of an endless stream of truck drivers and pointing across the way to Dock 17.

This is how it always goes. From there, I take my load to a consignee. A distribution center, or another warehouse, or a retail store. I then drive eight to eleven hours a day, about six hundred miles. Burn one hundred gallons of fuel. Maybe forget what region of the country I'm in. Take a shower at a truck stop. Squeegee my windshield. Thump my tires to check for flats. Scale my truck to make sure I'm not damaging the road. Watch cars zip by like mice. Try not to step on any. Dodge blown retreads. Talk to myself. Count the money I'm making. Count the money I need to make. Eat at Subway again. Consider the relative merits of an economy that produces twenty-six thousand Subways. Back into a dock when I arrive and wait to be unloaded. File the bill of lading back to my company. Back into a truck-stop parking space. Wait around until the next morning, when I find out where I'm going. Thump my tires.

Valentine's Day '15

February 14 in Toledo, Ohio. An industry town entrenched in snow. Flurries swirled over unplowed roads, and the minus thirty-degree wind chill, unbeknownst to me, was gelling my fuel, causing my engine to break down the following morning a block from the truck stop and a hundred feet from a pair of railroad tracks. But that night, after a gas-station Heineken or two, I stumbled down the street, past the car-hauler lot, past the polyol chemical plant, to Glass City Showgirls.

I would expect that Valentine's Day on a Saturday night would be a boom night for any gentleman's club. Not in the Toledo industrial yards. To my discomfort, I realized upon entering that I was the only actual customer present. Girls sat around tables chatting. The stages were empty. Two men in the corner may have technically been customers but seemed to have long crossed the line between clientele and establishment fixtures; they seemed to be here more to see dancer friends than to spend money.

It was my strip club.

I sat at the bar, deciding how to confront this fact, and pounded Dos Equis while a girl started dancing on the only stage. The club's owner, a large, bald man, described the club's audience as trucker-dominant, which I agreed was presently at nearly 100 percent. I bought tequilas for a kind, gap-toothed girl from Oaxaca named India, who said she was in the States for neuroscience. It made sense to me. We were both paying our way. We went to a back room for a private dance, during which I couldn't stop wondering if anyone was dancing onstage in my absence. I felt a financial obligation by now to keep the entire club afloat.

When we returned to the bar, I spoke with India a bit longer. I closed my tab, which was nearly a hundred dollars, a lie so absurd that I paid it out of respect for temerity and left, head spinning, relieved, as if I'd paid for a kind of sweetness.

Mid April '15

After six months at PTL, I left for Crete Carrier Corporation, also a private company but with five times as many trucks, and who could offer a $300-a-week pay raise. But Crete, perhaps the most professionally run of the megacompanies, does not care if PTL claims to have trained you. They send you out again, with one of their own trainers, for four weeks.

Nelson Jefferson is a fifty-four-year old black man from Americus, Georgia, with a shimmering bald head and compact body. "I like to take my shoes off when I step in the truck," he said when I met him, eyes gesturing to my feet. There were pillow covers on the seats. His cab was musk-scented and impeccably clean. Throw pillows on the lower bunk. He smoothed the pillowcases out before sitting down.

Trainer number two; Nelson Jefferson. Robert Langellier

Nelson is short and unrealistically jolly, with a prosaic charm.

"Guess what time it is?!" he shouted one night, as he did every night, the light of his television flickering on.

"It's movie time, isn't it."

"It's movie time," he grinned.

He ritualistically inserted a DVD and sank into a new film bought at the truck stop.

"How many movies do you watch a year?" I asked.

"About 365. Hoo-ho-hee-hee!"

On the road, Nelson used his air horn in a wondrous, childlike way; that is to say, gratuitously: When a kid honked a fake horn in a car window; or to make a loud noise in any tunnel; or to helpfully inform a woman, for five full seconds, that she pulled out in front of him. A true company man, Nelson parroted Crete dogma every day. He once pulled through a truck wash and exclaimed, "Man, I love being clean!" free of irony. He'd go to hell if he heard it was safer.



I'm under forty-nine years old and under two hundred pounds. I'm trucking's next generation.

It was much later that he told me how his first wife died in a T-bone accident on the eve of their twentieth anniversary. That, legally, they had to take the survivor's word, but that there's no way she would have rolled through the stop sign because she went through that intersection every day, and she knew better. That years later his son also nearly died, also T-boned. And now he trains drivers.



Nelson, like most truckers, is now a bachelor. Has been for a while. The road is insular. The singular fact of over-the-road trucking is that it doesn't relent. You make your own escapes.

From the top bunk I heard the intro theme to The Magnificent Seven for the seventh night in a row.

Late April '15

Honey buns, baby. Texas cinnamon rolls, frosted honey buns, cheese Danishes, powdered donettes, Hostess cupcakes, Zingers, Sno Balls, Twinkies, Cremey Curls, Dreamies, Buddy Bars, bearclaws, French Sweeties, fudge brownies, Nutty Bars, Zebra Cakes, Nutella sticks, cinnamon almonds, chocolate long johns, Doritos, Cheetos, Fritos, Takis, Funyons, Munchies, and cheese popcorn. Polish sausages, hot dogs, cheddar brats, jalapeno brats, bacon cheeseburger logs, cheddar smokes, pork tamales, maple sausage skillet links, pepperoni cheese tornados, taquitos, and a microwaved burrito called The Bomb. Vacuum-sealed packages with grease-dampened plastic. Desserts with an entire day's worth of saturated fat, sandwiches with two days' sodium value, everything with a day's sugar volume.

Nelson went inside during our fuel stop and came out with a Wendy's bag.

"I gotta get me one of them—what do you call 'em?"

"A rice cooker."

"A rice cooker." He said it reverentially. "I'm gonna get me one of those."

The horror of healthy eating at a truck stop is not in the availability of evil; it's in the unavailability of good. There is no way to maintain a healthy diet at truck stops, and other than Walmarts and occasional exit-ramp restaurants, they are the only places one can eat. They almost always come paired with fast-food chains. You can eat at Subway, you can buy individual protein bars, an apple or a banana, or a bottle of Naked juice. That is an unabridged list of all health foods at most American truck stops. You can buy a mini fridge and cooking appliances, but some companies have limitations or outright bans on inverters, rendering them useless.

Truckers have an obesity rate that hovers around 69 percent. Nearly 90 percent have at least one chronic health risk—that is to say, they smoke, are obese, or live with hypertension. At least one study has found truck drivers to die at far younger ages than average American men. Eleven years younger. The Department of Transportation requires regular medical exams, but in general there's a jaw-dropping lack of demand for healthy living. In a year on the road, I saw no more than four drivers exercising outside their truck.

I was often one of them. Then again, the number of bags of powdered donettes I've eaten on the road should cause medical concern. A twelve-hour workday does not lend itself to cooking. The fact is, if it's there, if it's in front of you, and if it's colorful, you're going to eat it.

Mid May '15

There's not much to be had in CB radio chatter. The era of CB handles largely passed in the seventies, replaced now by Bluetooth headsets on every driver's ear. Today the CB universe is no more than a real-life chatroom for ridiculing new drivers trying to back trailers into parking spots.

Unless you're in West Memphis, Arkansas, that is. There, and in a few other southern big-city truck stops, the sale of drugs, sex, and Christian rap mixtapes is alive and well. Prostitutes, known as "lot lizards" in trucker slang, roam the lots at night in flip-flops and sweaters, knocking on doors.

"You gettin' it done? You brushin' your teeth?"

"Yep."

"You want some company?"

"No, thanks."

Truck stops are hives of human trafficking, and many companies train drivers to spot and report signs. I never saw any, but I also never carried a CB in my own truck. I thumbed across reviews of truck stops on a trucker app on my phone:

I m heading that way get the lizards ready and lined up hurry

Lot Lizards pounding on the door for the Lunchtime Special.

speed whore just squirted all over my bunk

Nelson pulled into the West Memphis Flying J to fuel, and parked in the fuel bay. He grabbed the CB mic and spoke in a low, deep tone, his voice seductive.

"I got that true blue, everybody, hit me up. I got that true blue, whatever you want, that true blue."

He hung up and smiled.

A gruff, static-y voice came on: "Shut the fuck up, nigger."

Nelson leaned back in his seat and chuckled, satisfied.

Deregulation made racism unprofitable on a hiring level, but it is still employed on a person-to-person level. More truck stop reviews:

to many niggers

too many white people

all i can say is NIGGERS NIGGERS NIGGERS

NO WHITE LOT LIZZARDS, ONLY NIGGERS BEWARE BEWARE BEWARE

Deregulation made racism unprofitable on a hiring level, but it is still employed on a person-to-person level.

Late May '15

Have you ever considered solitude? I don't mean abstractly, in the way we confront the ghosts of past loves or the specter of time. I mean concretely, like the way you confront a one-thousand-pound pallet of Scott-brand toilet paper landing on you, with no one around to help. Twenty-nine million feet of two-ply toilet paper, the industrial quality, commercial white wax paper. Porta potty toilet paper. It was 6:30 a.m. in Aurora, Colorado, half-light and raining. The parking lot was empty. The warehouse employees hadn't even shown up yet.

Robert Langellier

This seemed like a good time to ask: why? Most drivers have something to look forward to outside the truck. Bob had motorcycles and a son. Nelson had a few kids. Others have wives, husbands, families, at least a boat.

Some don't. Those few live out of their truck, have mail sent to proxy addresses, and stack money and miles. They're the ideal post-1980s truck drivers. They can stay out for months, collecting the means to no end, on a trip with no destination.

I'd paid my last debts off a month ago, in April.

I lay for a few minutes in the parking lot, getting soggy. Crawled around a bit. Waited for my head to clear. My back and knees hurt. I'd opened the door of my trailer and the boxes had come leaping out at me, like a predator that tens of thousands of consumers would later wipe their asses with. Corporate pawnship is humiliating enough; I do not need these metaphors. Eventually, the damaged toilet paper was put back in the trailer and taken to a nearby warehouse.

Late September '15

You can only drive eleven hours a day, and I ran out in Jacksonville, Illinois, ninety miles from home time in St. Louis. It was nighttime, and the untended dirt lot behind the gas station was riddled with potholes that looked more like small calderas. A few trucks were parked, the place mostly empty. A dim light emanated from the C-store.

I was tired.

I shut the engine down and shuffled inside. Stared at a refrigerated six-pack of beer for more than a minute. Decided no. Nodded to the graveyard-shift woman at the register on the way out.

I slunk back to the truck, parked away from the lights of other trucks. At some point I started avoiding other truckers. It's true that there is a bond. Wherever they cross paths, truck drivers exchange winks and nods in a fashion similar to bikers, gang members, or people with mustaches. They share a bond that is only shared by groups of people that live very differently from other Americans. They're the grease of an economy, not much a part of the actual machine but facilitating its movement.

There is at the same time, in my experience, an inclination for truckers to mistrust one another. Eleven hours alone is a lot of time to birth specific hatreds, to hone narrow political and social narratives with no one around to contradict you. In order to hold on to his sanity, a trucker convinces himself he's the only one who has it.

I don't do that, certainly.

But then again.

The silence over the small lot in the small town eclipsed me. You can try to cohere what you see every day into some vast and multiform image of America, but mostly you will see patterns. Patterns in terrain, automation in labor, patterns in small talk, patterns in food, patterns in music. An economy in uniform. After half an hour, I went back inside. I grabbed the six pack, put it on the counter. Now I noticed the woman at the register more closely. Stringy hair and a face that evoked dust. And I saw a harrowing look, one of a critical mother. She recognized me, knew I was taking six beers back to a commercial vehicle. Her look was so haunting that I wilted and paid for the beer, walked back to the truck, and went straight to bed, another day with a meaningless end.

What you do each morning is try to remember that America is still a beautiful and diverse country. What you face is the awesome singularity of its interstates, its goods, and our place in its endless means. The light of morning bends through the windshield, so that, for a moment, before the roar of acceleration on the entrance ramp, everything—our collective progress, my day's route, the distant trees—sharpens into focus.