Arterial highways exist everywhere, but interstates are a whole circulatory system. They don't just run between cities, but through them, above them and under them, threading their way through every part of American life. The vehicles pulse down the streets and avenues, suffusing the city's centre with people, but also the outlying organs, the factories, the suburbs, small towns, rest stops, roadside attractions. And when an interstate blocks up, when you can see nothing but cars clotted together for miles in either direction... there's nothing else for it, it feels like death.
An American once said that the personal is political, and that feels truer here than anywhere else. Identity is something you wear on your sleeve, on your hat, on your lapel, and on your bumper. In the din of the parade, it's easy to hear echoes of a young country trying to assert its national identity. Listen carefully, though, and you notice a darker kind of identity; the drive to prove who you are all too easily gives way to a drive to prove who you aren't.
A lot of people come to this country pursuing happiness. I wonder how many find it? Life and liberty are things you can acquire, keep and protect. But how do you secure happiness? It's perhaps telling that Jefferson's "unalienable rights" didn't – couldn't – include a right to happiness. Instead, we are given happiness as a pursuit; not some goalpost we pass and then stop, but a guiding light ever in the distance.
You haven't seen true love until you've seen Americans and their flag. From houses and churches, on subway cars and lighters, in every corner of every city: the flag. It seems sometimes like the only thing the country can agree on. Fifty states, each one different, somehow all represented by the same stars on the same rectangle. How all these different people can coexist under one banner is anyone's guess, but it is, unquestionably, something to be proud of.
You wonder what it must have been like to be the first people to climb these mountains and look out in every direction at the land laid low beneath you. All the more humbling, then, to journey back down through the trees and scrub, rocks and roots and loose dirt underfoot. Down into that uncertain and dense land over which you could once see so far, dreaming of the next peak where you might see far again.