Photograph by Stephanie Wambugu.

Once we had ventured far enough into America to no longer be anywhere near the mood-lit wine bars and overrun coffee shops of North Brooklyn, where I live, secession began to strike me as not only possible but inevitable, as if it were only a matter of time before we all realize this Union is a house too tenuous, inharmonious, and ill-defined to remain standing, and act accordingly. From state to state, there is such variation in accents, languages spoken, climate, culinary traditions, and racial demographics, and such a complete lack of consensus when it comes to guns, drugs, and abortion, that it is hard to say what we all have in common, apart from the interstate highway system and reliance on certain corporations.

Yet in Nashville, Tennessee, while eating a plate of roasted lamb in an Halal Uzbek restaurant whose interior looked so residential it was as if we had trespassed into the suburban sitting room of a Central Asian family and been allowed to stay, I was swept up for the duration of the meal in the romance of American multiculturalism, which made me think of the sweet but nationalistic songs I was made to sing in school during the cloyingly optimistic Obama-era years of my childhood. 

Especially on my mind was the sanitized version of “This Land Is Your Land.” We always skipped the final verses of the folk standard to omit Woody Guthrie’s explicit mentions of Depression-era hunger and his ideas about private property. I felt the song’s aspirational brotherly love most while buying a pack of cigarettes that were so inexpensive I thought the single-digit prices on display behind the gas station counter must be a mistake. There, smoking was still affordable and I was an Everywoman participating in a cheap, eternal national pastime.

I was regressing in the passenger seat, becoming porous and susceptible to whimsy. Some stretches of the drive felt like the passive childhood experience of falling asleep in the car while headed toward an unknown destination and waking up to find you were already there. So as not to forget the folksy minutiae of flyover country, to not lose track of all the places I had been, I overbought souvenirs. It’s a wonderful ritual, stumbling upon an object you didn’t even know you wanted and discovering you needed it. 

I handed the Goth-y Midwestern cashier a postcard of a female deer standing in a wildflower meadow with the caption “SURE DO MISS YOU!” The plain but poignant sentiment evoked my favorite of our cultural exports, the American rolling stone: living out of a bag, with a woman at every port, missing them but not being able to stay, buying cards like this one, sending them with no return address. I was not an outcast, or itinerant. I had a lease, and strong social bonds, but the postcard offered me—much like the folk music in which this roaming figure most vividly emerges—the vicarious pleasure of entering a fantasy. And it cost only one dollar. 

***

When we pulled into Oklahoma City, the only place open for a late dinner was a sporty breastaurant called Twin Peaks. The half-nude waitresses looked so young that I felt the urge to overcompensate female solidarity, to behave in a way that showed them I didn’t mind their low-cut blouses and that I saw them as women with rich interiority. The two martinis I drank in rapid succession in order to get drunk before last call contributed to my sense of self-satisfaction, and while stumbling back to the hotel I looked at myself as a benevolent emissary from a foreign land, sent to deliver the message of broadmindedness. There really are few things more provincial than those who leave their major cities for holidays in small, faraway places, looking for examples of backwardness to confirm their own sophistication. But I didn’t care about that because I was on vacation. I bought a hideous heart-shaped, bedazzled Oklahoma key chain and attached it to my key fob. 

Later in the journey, the exponential growth of my fondness for kitsch was interrupted by the natural splendor of the Grand Canyon. The vast gorge put forward the possibility that what was missing from my life was the opportunity to be dwarfed on a regular basis by the sight of something millions and millions of years older than myself. The solemnity and quiet of looking alongside other people—Chinese tourists, Midwestern suburban types, European retirees—broke, at least for a few hours, the hard shell of atomized life that had made me rigid and far less likely to be moved. Because of all this I couldn’t help but cry as the light shifted over the rocks, which looked to me like many imposing stone pagodas in a mythical city a world away. When the sun sank out of view behind them, I had the impulse to applaud.

Photograph by Stephanie Wambugu.

The following morning, we returned to the park to see it again, and I’m embarrassed to say that I spent a portion of the outing looking at my phone, answering an email I described to my boyfriend as urgent, though there are very few writers whose work can be called urgent in the literal sense. We went ahead to our next destination and I thought, and still think, I sent an email from my phone at one of the natural wonders of the world. What sort of spiritual affliction was this, and if it could not be cured by this place, could it ever be cured? 

I felt better in Vegas, where, because I abstain from gambling for semireligious reasons, I got to feel smug about being able to look at a glowing slot machine and feel no temptation. Then, in Salt Lake City, at the Temple Square Visitors’ Center, I realized that I had no business thinking of myself as pious while the pretty young missionaries in long dresses smiled at me with looks of perfect contentment I wrote off as cultlike simply because I could not access it in myself. What on earth were they so happy about? I wondered, looking at the lavish motorized dollhouse replica that was as close as we were allowed to the real place of worship, since it was undergoing earthquake-proofing. 

Photograph by Stephanie Wambugu.

Later, at dinner, still in the Jell-O Belt, my boyfriend was denied a drink because he had only a driver’s license from his country, rather than the requisite U.S.-issued form of identification. Our server, a warm, young West African immigrant, told us that Utah’s drinking laws were the strictest in the country; I found that theocratic. This is America, I thought, it isn’t right to deny an adult—a paying customer—a beer. It was a xenophobic policy, I said. It triggered my sense of justice, which is not as fine-tuned as I’d like to think and often takes up myopic and inconsequential causes, such as liquor laws in states where I do not live. In frustration, I looked up the law to find that it had changed just five days before, allowing valid identification from any country. So we were given our drinks and I was satisfied, having achieved nothing important. 

In Brazil, Indiana, I saw something I think of as the most quintessentially American image of the entire trip: an livestock truck with many small openings from which pigs’ ears jutted out and flapped in the wind. It horrified me, the sight of these animals stacked many feet high, their body parts protruding from the vehicle meant to carry them to, I supposed, slaughter. I sped up to avoid seeing them again, trying to overtake the truck and avert my eyes, but each time it caught up with us, bringing the animals’ pale-pink flesh back into view. 

There were other symbols of captivity on the journey, such as the designated prison areas along county highways, which warned against pulling off to the side of the road or picking up hitchhikers who could be escapees. I preferred not to think of those in captivity, and, as a result, they were all I could think about, those imprisoned against the startling magnificence of the snow-covered Wyoming mountains in spring. 

Once we reached the Pacific Ocean, the inbound portion of our journey began and I made notes to myself, notes that, when read back, did not readily cohere. The ubiquity of churches, McDonald’s, and billboards for personal injury lawyers aside, it was difficult to make any generalizations about this country. How did it hang together, if at all? 

Photograph by Stephanie Wambugu.

As we neared New York, I thought back to the first full day of our road trip, when I’d opted out of a visit to Monticello. My stated reason for staying in bed was vaguely ideological, having to do with not wanting to tour a founding father’s home and plantation, but in truth I just didn’t want to get up at seven in the morning. I wasn’t given any grief for this decision and was left alone to sleep in, but I later regretted my incuriosity.

I got over my remorse by reading about Thomas Jefferson on my iPhone. I googled “Thomas Jefferson house,” “Thomas Jefferson presidency,” “Thomas Jefferson slavery,” and “Thomas Jefferson children,” got distracted and looked up “Which states marijuana illegal?” and other semirelated things, and then remembered my task and googled “Thomas Jefferson secession” and screenshotted an excerpt from a letter he wrote to a Kentuckian senator. The highlighted text in this image in my camera roll reads, “God bless them both, and keep them in union, if it be for their good, but separate them, if it be better.” 

Blessed by God or not, here we are. The possibility of some states breaking off is now, of course, just one of many fringe views in our mecca of conspiratorial ideation. Under it, there is room enough even for those cranks who think it achievable. 

America will soon be two hundred and fifty years old. There were signs announcing this all along the way, mostly put up by shops advertising low prices on fireworks for the occasion, reminding us that if we found ourselves in a celebratory mood, there were plenty of places to buy explosives.