On my way home from several fabulous days of work in France and Germany, I happen upon Paul Theroux’s ‘The Long Way Home’ in the September 2009 issue of The Smithsonian.
Like me, Theroux is a ‘world traveler’. He has seen far more of it than I have and, it seems, has chosen to do so. I have seen only a little, though I fancy myself an expert on Holiday Inn conference rooms and Starbucks city mugs. I have not so much chosen to travel. Indeed, my favorite place in the world is home. Rather, I have chosen—or been chosen for—a vocation that requires frequent trips to places that I generally find less interesting than the stupendous human beings who live in them.
Theroux, having traveled the world, has chosen to drive across America. In a better world than ours, it is a journey that would be required of every immigrant before he or she secures citizenship. It would be an obligatory box to check off on some official for before any of us receives her first Social Security check. It would constitute a preamble to the luxury and responsibility of saying the words ‘I am an American’.
I have never met Paul Theroux. Yet, by way of his final paragraph. I feel as though we are old friends. It says:
A trip abroad, any trip, ends like a movie—the curtain drops and then you’re home, shut off. But this was different from any trip I’d ever taken. In the 3,380 miles I’d driven, in all that wonder, there wasn’t a moment when I felt I didn’t belong; not a day when I didn’t rejoice in the knowledge that I was part of this beauty; not a moment of alienation or danger, no roadblocks, no sign of officialdom, never a second of feeling I was somewhere distant—but always the reassurance that I was home, where I belonged, in the most beautiful country I’d ever seen.
Indeed.
Canter Bridge 
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