PUT-IN-BAY, OHIO: August 16, 2008

I always dreamed of driving across the country.

I think the idea, not just the notion, but the concrete idea of such a journey first sunk itself inside my head sometime in high school. The idea was to graduate, get a pick-up truck, and drive to Alaska for the summer with a friend or two. But I never did graduate, nor take the drive. Crime and then prison intervened.

But all those years while I was away I gazed through the razorwire, or over the wall, whatever was between me and the open road read, and imagined the day when I, too, would finally trek across our nation and see for myself all the things that make us great, and all the things that makes us human. From sea-to-sea, as the song goes, I pictured the highways and the byways, the Dairy Queens and the Walmarts, the prairies and the mountains, the rich and the poor, the pretty and the desolate.

And then I got out and my parole officer wouldn’t let me have a driver’s license for three years. Nor could I leave, first, the State, then the City, without his permission. And he never gave it. The furthest away I got was the Adirondacks, not counting the time I flew to San Francisco for eighteen hours of work. But flying doesn’t count. Then I met Clark, and he grew comfortable with me shooting him, and he invited me along for this ride.

So that’s how I came to be where I am right now: on the shore of Lake Erie, at 5:30 in the morning, the sun about to rise, with a brisk, stiff wind blowing from the north as I sit under a canopy of oaks and try and convey to you all that being here, amongst you, on the road, means to me.