Masha Hamilton | The Atavist Magazine | September 2025 | 2,261 words (8 minutes)
This is an excerpt from issue no. 167, “I’ve Gone to Look for America.”
The sky is dark. The highway hums beneath our tires. We’ve covered a lot of miles today, and the night is pressing us off the road, toward a Virginia rest stop where, years ago, a man was murdered in a bathroom. I want to see the door he pushed open, stand where he stood, feel how quickly ordinary moments can turn.
But more than anything right now, I want to stop. Stretch out in the back of Cheney’s car, let the wash of highway noise lull us for a few hours. It’s been another long day of catching strangers mid-journey, asking one personal question and then another.
We’re on the road, my oldest son and I, traveling nearly 2,000 miles on Interstate 95 from Miami to Maine, and pausing at virtually every rest stop. Our project is simple and vast at once: to ask fellow travelers where they’re headed, and where they think America is going too. I take notes. Cheney takes photos.
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For me this trip is a therapy session with my country. I fear that there is a deep crack in our union, and I’m not sure I belong here anymore. Maybe the road can convince me otherwise. I also want time with a son I once knew so well, back when I looked down at the top of his head, but whom I’m learning all over again now that he’s grown to six-foot-four and seen what he’s seen, weathered what he has.
I’m six weeks past being laid off, in a season of layoffs. Cheney is a little over a year past a breakup that shook him loose from the life he thought he’d have and thrust him into another. It marked the end of a marriage he didn’t tell me about for 11 years, a secret that would recast all the holidays we celebrated, dinners we shared, and trips we took. Now we’re driving the coast of a country that has imprinted us with its violence—me in Afghanistan when a bomb tore open a morning during America’s forever war, him on the banks of the Rio Grande when the river swallowed breath. A nation itself now bruised and battered has scarred us with pain and sorrow.
The long ribbon of road insists that life goes on. The days gather, falling into one another, changing Cheney, changing me.
Beginnings and endings—let’s do both now, up front. No spoilers, just a map to provide a sense of direction amid the uncertainty to come.
Our journey began Memorial Day weekend 2025, at the I-95 on-ramp in Miami Beach, where the northbound and southbound lanes split, carving through a cityscape that’s a chaotic snarl of polished skyline and subtropical thicket. Two peacocks wandered in the brush bordering I-95 North, one of them calling out in loud, catlike screeches that competed with the drone of traffic. Along the southbound side, a small community of chickens foraged beneath an overpass. Feral birds, exhaust fumes, wild color: a surreal overture to the road ahead.
We ended 17 days later near Houlton, Maine, on a deserted bridge overlooking the border with Canada. Rain had just passed—puddles were alive with mosquitoes, and the sun hung low behind gauzy clouds. We took a couple of selfies to mark the moment. The clerk at a shop offering travelers duty-free goods told me that business had all but disappeared. I was the first customer he’d seen in three hours. As if to explain, he walked me to a display of chocolate bars, their wrappers stamped with Donald Trump’s face, stars and stripes curling beneath his grin. “People come in from Canada, and they turn the chocolate around so the face doesn’t show. Sometimes they drop the chocolate on the ground. On the ground!” the clerk said with dismay. “Aren’t we supposed to be grown-ups here?”
In between the peacocks and the chocolate were startling revelations and moments of grace. They came from a Cajun great-grandmother driving an 18-wheeler A philosophical cop from Georgia. An unhoused community living in cars, inventing rest-stop resilience. Conversations arrived unexpected, unguarded. Some drifted open, while others cracked wide in an instant. There were bursts of candor at vending machines and outside bathrooms—intimacy in the unlikeliest of places, with the murmur of the interstate a constant soundtrack.
I-95 isn’t just asphalt. It was born of two ambitions: one public, one military. In 1956, when Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act, lawmakers envisioned a road connecting the country’s entire eastern edge that could also be a means of moving troops and supplies if the Cold War turned hot. Now, at its busiest, more than 300,000 vehicles crowd the interstate daily, including tens of thousands of commercial trucks, those hulking giants that thunder by, rattling mirrors and nerves.
Families ride I-95 with coolers wedged between the seats of their minivans. Truckers push through the night, carrying oranges and lumber and coffins. Greyhound buses, Teslas, and beat-up sedans weave at high speeds. I-95 is an artery of ambition, movement, and flight. A place where millions of people hurry toward love and loss, carrying their hope, their grief, their ordinary Tuesdays, all at 70 miles per hour.
This story unfolds like our experience of the road: not a straight shot but a series of quick confessions, bitter jokes, whispered memories. Strangers laying themselves bare, then moving on. No two encounters were alike; wherever they went, we followed.
In every conversation, and the silences in between, I listened for the shape of an answer to my question: Are we breaking apart, or is there enough left to bind us?
“When it comes right down to it, I don’t think anyone has all their bases covered. So I focus on the things that bring me joy.”
“You’re going to appreciate this trip after she’s gone,” Dale says to Cheney, tipping his head toward me.
It takes a moment to register what he means, that he’s referring to my death so casually, after we’ve known each other 25 minutes.
“I appreciate it already,” Cheney responds with a smile.
Dale, 65, retired four years ago and moved from upstate New York to Lake Placid, Florida. We found him on a weathered bench under a sky collecting dusk at the Santee Welcome Center in South Carolina, midway between the Georgia and North Carolina state lines. Death is on his mind this evening, and not just mine. He’s thinking about the end times.
“I was raised a Fundamental Baptist,” Dale offers. “I call myself a recovering Baptist. But some of those things are hard to overcome.”
Especially now. Floods, plague, conflicts, corruption, the money changers in the temple—“you look around and it looks like all that stuff we studied in Sunday school,” Dale says. “When God has had enough with the sins of humanity…”
He breaks off his thought as his mini Aussiedoodle, Winnie, tugs hard on her leash, tumbling in wild arcs around our legs, ecstatic with the kind of life that doesn’t yet know limits.
Dale stresses that he’s not a prepper. But he has thought about what he might need to survive should the world fall apart, and he’s stockpiled a bit of it. He acknowledges that this is an exercise in futility. “When it comes right down to it, I don’t think anyone has all their bases covered,” he says. “So I focus on the things that bring me joy.”
Living in Florida was a longtime dream for Dale. “Since I was a teenager and made my first trip,” he says. A job, a bad end to a relationship, and a delay in getting his pension kept him anchored in New York longer than he wanted. When finally he was able to move, he purchased a house in foreclosure, sight unseen. “When I walked in, I was tickled,” he says. “The house was about in the condition I’d expected—nothing worse.” At last he felt like he was home.
“I asked God for one year of peace and quiet to enjoy my retirement in the sunshine. And this month I’m starting year five,” Dale tells me, his voice catching with the knowledge that no one gets forever. “I feel more than blessed.”
But Winnie is disrupting that peace. So Dale is heading to the mapled city of Hornell in upstate New York this summer and saying goodbye to her there. A friend has offered to adopt her. “I think it’s a good idea,” Dale says, to himself as much as to me.
“I love her to pieces,” he adds. “But she’s too much for me. She’s a puppy. She needs more than I can give.”
Doubt flickers across his face, and I suck in my breath, feeling the sharp ache of his hesitation. At a time when he fears that the world might end, Dale is giving up something that brings him comfort as well as complication. Winnie, sweet chaos in motion.
Dale is already practicing his goodbye. I can see it in his eyes and the way his hand lingers on Winnie’s head. I want to believe I’m not practicing my own goodbyes, but long road trips, with their constant departures, stir up profound feelings about mortality, about letting go.
I have been a news junkie all my life. As a college freshman, I rose early to sneak-read the copy of the New York Times left outside my dorm neighbor’s door, sitting cross-legged on the hallway floor. But as Trump’s second term began, I found that I couldn’t stomach much beyond the headlines.
Still, I knew that avoidance was corrosive. During my five years living and reporting in Moscow, mostly during the Gorbachev era, the Russians I knew had a rule: No discussing politics except very late at night, in cramped, smoky kitchens, after a few rounds of vodka. But that kind of reticence seemed only to deepen communal resignation and embolden political leaders.
So in Trump’s America I wanted to talk, even to people who might disagree with me. At the same time, I was scared—that I’d ask the wrong questions, trigger tripwires I couldn’t see. “It’s not going to be like that out there,” Cheney kept telling me.
I wanted him to be right, to trust him. But he’d kept silences of his own.
I’d learned of his marriage only after it was already coming undone. A friend of his, crashing at my house, let it slip, either unaware or forgetting that Cheney’s mom didn’t know. I called my daughter. “Is Cheney married?” I asked. “Oh, Mom, no,” she said, brushing off the idea. Turns out she didn’t know, either. Later that day, when she pressed him, the truth came out. The woman we’d known as Cheney’s longtime girlfriend was actually his wife.
I have a 48-hour rule: When anger strikes, I try to wait that long before speaking, hoping that time will cool my ego and allow curiosity to surface. This time, 48 hours barely made a dent. Two weeks passed before I could bring it up. By then, Cheney was braced for the discussion.
The whole thing started as more whim than promise, he explained. Even he wasn’t sure that it would hold. Also, I hadn’t yet met her and was far away in Afghanistan, working at the U.S. Embassy during one of the most violent stretches of America’s twenty-year war. “If I’d told you,” he said, “it would only have added to your stress.”
“I’ve been back from Afghanistan for a while,” I said, and he laughed ruefully.
“Eventually, it seemed like too much time had passed,” he replied.
It all stung. Not just the secrecy but the assumption that I couldn’t handle the truth, that my life was too fragile to absorb it. He had decided on his own what was best for me. And not for the last time, probably. If I’m fortunate enough to grow old, there likely will come a day when Cheney and his siblings weigh my choices for me. The only consolation: When they were small, I decided for them. Maybe this is how the cosmic books stay balanced.
By the time I suggested the trip up I-95, Cheney and I had said what needed saying. Still, I longed for the kind of trust built not by declarations but by the quiet choreography of collaborating, sharing meals, spending time side-by-side for days on end. In ordinary acts, I hoped to restitch the thread of connection between mother and son.
The morning we set out, the road’s toll was already visible on Cheney. He’d been living largely out of his car for months, moving constantly in part to avoid the pain of staying still. To meet me, he drove 2,200 miles: from Colorado to Texas and on to an old storage unit in Georgia—he had places for his belongings, but not places he felt he belonged—then finally to Miami. Now small red welts freckled his skin, the work of insects so minuscule they’re called no-see-ums. The bugs had slipped through the netting strung across an open window of Cheney’s 2015 Subaru Outback the night before while he slept.
Cheney was feverish and scratched absently as we drove, his discomfort like a low drag on everything he said. We added many pharmacies to our itinerary, searching unsuccessfully for the perfect anti-itch cream. The bites were insistent, and they seemed to trouble my son beyond the physical irritation.
This is how harm so often arrives, not with sirens but with a whisper. The no-see-ums that bite through the night. The slow burn of heat that turns seasons hostile. The safety net that unravels slowly until there’s nothing left to catch you. A nation, like a body, can be marked before it recognizes the wound.
