Exactly six weeks before Tom Petty died, we had a moment together in rural Montana.

On a weekday morning in late August, my wife, Tina, and I awoke in our van just outside of Hardin, a tired little town sandwiched between Billings and Little Bighorn, the battlefield where the vain Custer lost his last stand to a group of righteously indignant Native Americans. We were three months into a two-year pilgrimage across North America, an 80,000-mile journey of national parks, alpine peaks, and regional culture we could only imagine from the desks of our discarded jobs.

The day’s mission seemed simple: Drive 40 miles north from our campsite along the grass-banked Bighorn River to Pompey’s Pillar, a chunky tower of sandstone near the placid Yellowstone. In 1806, during a brief split with his expedition partner, Meriwether Lewis, William Clark carved his name high into the rock in a halting, unsteady hand. Hidden within a small alcove, it is one of the few physical records of an expedition that would transform the fledgling country’s boundaries and beliefs. By comparison, our tourist to-do was easy enough.

But I’d unwittingly selected the extra-scenic route, one that directed us for a few dozen miles through a circuit of rutted gravel roads. Our 24-foot vehicle weighs more than 12,000 pounds, so divots in the road can feel like valleys. This would, I reckoned, take a while. I eased off the accelerator and reached behind the seat to retrieve my childhood copy of Tom Petty’s Wildflowers on compact disc. One of us turned up the stereo. Staring out the window at actual amber waves of grain, we puttered along the gravel, listening to what I soon remembered was one of the great highway rock records ever written, especially for such a slow country roll.

Wildflowers is an alternately wistful and urgent crucible of everything one may feel in a lifetime. There is teenage abandon (“You Wreck Me”), lascivious laughter (“Honey Bee”), and middle-age angst (“To Find a Friend”). To wit, it ends with “Wake Up Time,” a slightly mawkish tune about self-liberation that fits the highway perfectly, like a shove in the back that’s a little too hard but exactly what you needed. We were in eastern Montana, and we’d been without cell service for miles. In that moment, a compact disc pulled from a decades-old, tattered Case Logic binder could provide the vibe when my Apple Music account could only remain silent.

During the last seven months, I’ve shared lots of these poignant moments with records I’ve long loved, liked and forgotten, or sometimes overlooked altogether by pulling them, one by one, from a 256-capacity Case Logic. In 2018, perusing pages and pages of plastic-covered CD sleeves feels like a dusty mausoleum of a music industry we’ve left behind; it’s the sort of thing your Boomer parents might still have in the family sedan, but that you (and, for the most part, me) have long since discarded for streaming subscriptions and rows of 12-inch records. Even Case Logic itself seems to have mostly given up on the beasts, these days favoring svelte camera and tablet bags.

Still, when we sold our house last summer and committed at least temporarily to a tiny home on wheels, I stuffed the pages of the last of 14 such binders I once owned with a potpourri of discs, from Biggie’s Life After Death and Albert Ayler’s Spiritual Unity to Nina Simone’s At the Village Gate and Khanate’s Things Viral. There are complete box sets by the Band, Charlemagne Palestine, and Harry Smith, and DVDs of John Fahey, Kraftwerk, and Harvey Milk. The road trip, after all, is the ultimate time warp: a journey that allows you to see eons into the past or glimpse into the future in the timespan of a single afternoon, to witness decaying post-industrial bastions like Butte and thriving greenway-and-coffee-shop burgs like Missoula with a short highway sprint. What better opportunity exists to explore the way nostalgia, both personal and social, unspools from the present?