L iving in the United States today is to be fundamentally misunderstood, and the road trip is no different. That is not a bad thing. 

Here’s an example. It’s 2021, and I’m driving Peanut the Wonder Dog from the Pacific Northwest to my mother-in-law’s in Montreal. We’ve traveled this road many times over the past 12 years, sharing burgers in Ogallala, Nebraska, and submitting to a German shepherd somewhere near Green Bay, who ran the rest stop like a shogun-era warlord. Now, a dozen dog years have taken their toll, and I must lift her in and out of a rented SUV. Her panting, once so enthusiastic, is a rattle marking the miles as we cross Idaho and Montana.

We are just east of Medora, North Dakota, when a patrol car clocks me. I’m going 80, but everyone else is going 90, so I think I’m fine. 

Nope. A red cherry swirls behind me on a gray highway. I pull over. He walks up to the car, and I roll down the window. He asks for my license and peers inside. He sees that I’m alone.

“You don’t have anything illegal in the car, do you, like marijuana, cocaine, or heroin?”

I tell him I’m just driving my dog 3,000 miles to my mother-in-law’s. He chuckles. This is the weakest excuse he has heard in a while. He points at my shaking left wrist. “Are you tweaking?”

I tell him I’m just nervous. That’s when he tells me he can seize my car if I don’t consent to a search. I freak out: Stand up for my constitutional rights or prioritize the well-being of an elderly hound dog? He walks back to his squad car and runs my license and my rental-car agreement. He comes back.

“Sorry, man, you match the profile of a lot of guys trucking drugs through here.” He smiles, almost apologetically. “I’m new and can’t screw up.”

He doesn’t say what it means to be a Black rookie cop in a state that is only three percent African American. We talk for a few minutes, and I ask how he ended up here.

“It was just a good opportunity,” he says. “I’ve got a kid. We get good insurance.”

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And then we part. That is the essence of the American road trip: You go looking for clarity, and you find a story you didn’t know that you needed.

Most of the best things I’ve learned about America while making cross-country trips over the past decade have happened when I was lost or searching for something else. The cars change — Oldsmobile Alero, Volvo S60, a misbegotten Mitsubishi convertible, a parade of Nissan Rogues that refuse to sync with Apple CarPlay — but the American road remains the same. I’ve got good memories of road trips with buddies, the first one at 17 with Gordie, heading from Chilmark to Flint in a stick-shift K-car station wagon that I could only drive by climbing into the driver’s seat from the back. Then the grad-school-era drive from ­Clinton headquarters in Little Rock, Arkansas, to Houston for the 1992 GOP convention with a Mario Cuomo speechwriter suspected years later of writing Primary Colors. (He didn’t.) I never saw him again, but he haunts my memory more than some people I’ve known all my life.

The older I get, the more I appreciate the subtle moments. Sure, I remember the cheeseburger at Nepenthe on CA-1 with the outtasight Big Sur views. But it somehow pales compared with the Italian restaurant off the turnpike in Youngstown, Ohio, during Covid. There was plexiglass between the patrons and a bow-tied man playing a Casio keyboard. Slamming vodka and ravioli and remembering, halfway through the second drink, that it was my birthday.

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Or the time I drifted off U.S. 18, heat like a hallucination, and pulled into Edgemont, South Dakota, where I found a YMCA outdoor pool on a 100-degree day. Sure, the moms with their kids looked at me like I might be a serial killer. But I swam. The water was cold and chemical, the sky was enormous. For an hour, I savored an accidental version of America that can’t be mapped.

America is so vast that a road trip can take you through all of the stages of grief and back again. I left Boston for Chicago in a ’91 Honda Accord without a radio — pilfered on another road trip — after my first marriage imploded. By the time I hit Albany, New York, I had convinced myself that maybe it was a good thing. Somewhere outside of Gary, Indiana, I was certain my life was over.

Now in my fifties, the road trips are usually solo and taking stock of who I am, and whether the day can still be salvaged by a grilled cheese 200 miles away at a Panera in Bismarck. Things change you on the road. There was a deer in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. I hit it in the early-­morning gloaming not long after leaving Wisconsin. I pulled over, got out of the car, and stared at the animal on the shoulder, lying completely still. I wept. And then, maybe three minutes later, the deer jumped to its feet and sprinted into the woods. I stood there wondering if it had all been a dream. And then I drove on.

There was a whiteout outside Livingston, Montana, after a Montana-Montana State basketball game. I knew it was dangerous, but I just wanted to make it home — that night, an Emigrant cabin in Paradise Valley. I slid off the road. It didn’t feel like an accident. It felt inevitable.

And there was the drive from Williston, North Dakota, to Los Angeles in 30 hours, the last stretch from Barstow a blur I do not remember. Precise coordinates could not be conjured, like that grad-school romance that seemed so important at the time.

That’s the thing about the road trip. It’s sold as freedom — the idea that you can reinvent yourself somewhere outside Winslow, Arizona. I find the road more confirms who you are, stripping away the white noise that lets you avoid yourself.  For me, a Navy brat with a genetic tendency to wander, the road is less an escape and more a birthright.

Where am I running tonight? Probably a Hampton Inn. Beyond that, I have no fucking clue. 

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I was exhausted by the time I got Peanut to Montreal, a week focused on watching the road, watching her breathing, and praying to God I would not need to lay her to rest somewhere in Ohio. She limped into my mother-­in-law’s family room, circled three times, and laid down like she was home.

I envied her. She knew when the trip was over. I never do.

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STEPHEN RODRICK is a senior writer who’s reported on the ICE occupation of Minnesota, coal miners on strike in Alabama, and embattled late-night hosts in L.A.