BEYOND THE DIN, QUIET VOICES OF A NATION

It began, as these things often do, with a simple proposition: Let’s go see America. But nothing is that simple in this moment, so what we were really saying was: Let’s go see America as inflation is soaring, as democracy is under attack, as the specter of nuclear war hangs over our heads, as personal freedoms are vanquished, as the climate crisis wreaks havoc, and as we stare down the barrel of another Trump/Biden presidential campaign.

Yes, let’s go see America.

The point, though, was not to pull out a recorder and ask people, regular people, about Jan. 6 or the Mar-a-Lago search or staggering food prices or the war in Ukraine. The point was to hear the stories that people wanted to tell rather than the ones we expected to be told, to meet them on their terms, not ours. Which is what we did.

We flew a dozen journalists — eight reporters and four photographers — to Kansas City, Mo., on Sept. 6. They separated into four teams, each team pointed in a different direction — one toward Seattle, another toward Los Angeles, another toward Miami, and one home to Boston. Take two weeks, they were told, and tell us what you see and who you meet along the way.

John Steinbeck once wrote, “We don’t take a trip; a trip takes us.” And by that, he could have been thinking about the sweaty Elvis impersonator in Las Vegas whose rickety pink Cadillac careened off the road with us riding shotgun. Or the early morning ferry ride across the choppy waters of Lake Michigan with a man clutching a bouquet of flowers heading toward his girlfriend on the opposite shore. He was lovesick, we were seasick — a particularly unfortunate combination. Or maybe the famously haunted bar in Memphis, empty on a Wednesday night, in which one of us heard a ghost yell “Hey” in a long and darkened hallway as the other claimed to hear nothing while running for the door.

In all, the teams traveled over 22,000 miles through 30 states, not counting one trip over the border to Mexico. Every one of the journalists came back changed by the experience. The open road will do that — the prairies, the mountains, the lakes, the two-lane Main Streets that anchor so many thousands of small towns, the big cities where prosperity and misfortune seem to engage in a daily clash.

Even more memorable were the people. We’re thinking of the optimism of the four Afghan refugee sisters who launched a bakery that is being embraced by all of Boise, the wisdom of the mother of a young victim of the Oklahoma City bombing, the pride of a shoeshine man on the most famous street in Tennessee, the expertise of the Nebraska man who may be the foremost collector of marbles in the world. He chose a beautiful marble for us on our way out the door. It is not the only gift we received, just the most tangible one.

It’s impossible to tie a bow around a place as vast as our country, which means it is equally impossible to tie a bow around an initiative like ours and say in simple terms, here’s what we learned. We promise we won’t try.

But it’s also impossible from the open road not to realize, and realize quickly, that we’re better than the sum of so many cable channel chyrons that make it seem like a deeply damaged nation is one day, one speech, one vote from even further irreversible catastrophe.

We went and saw America, and for the next week, we’ll share with you what we found.