About a half hour after we crossed the Oregon border, near Valley View, the landscape changed dramatically. We were driving on a tree-lined, two-lane road, came around a bend, and suddenly found ourselves staring at the leading edge of a formidable mesa that stretched for miles. The trees yielded immediately to sagebrush, announcing our arrival in the high desert. It was among the most abrupt transitions in the landscape we’d seen or would see.
At a fork in the road, we turned in the direction of our destination for the evening, Burns, and a sign proclaimed: “Last Gas for 90 Miles.” Even the Mojave was more touched by the hand of man. Indeed, the traffic on I-40 across the Mojave seemed like the morning commute into Manhattan compared to the desolation of the next ninety miles—we could have counted the number of cars and trucks we saw on two hands. All around was a sea of sagebrush until the road hugged the shore of another alkaline lake on the other side of which were great expanses of flat rock. It would not surprise me to learn that this is where they shot the scene where Charlton Heston’s spacecraft crashed in the original Planet of the Apes. For ninety miles the only man-made structures were the occasional fence to confine livestock, a few corrugated tin storage sheds, a state highway maintenance garage, and a small café at Wagontire which, from what I could tell, was the town of Wagontire.
If you’re a political junkie, as I am, you are probably well familiar with electoral maps that show America, county by county, to be a mostly red country with small pockets of blue, and looking at that map you would, depending on your political persuasion, be vastly reassured or ready to go into hiding. But Harney County, Oregon, where we now were, offers some perspective.
Harney County is deep, deep red America. It’s home to the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, the federal property occupied in early 2016 by a small band of armed anti-government extremists led by Ammon and Ryan Bundy, sons of the infamous Nevada rancher and Sean Hannity hero, Cliven Bundy. As the standoff continued, the tiny town of Burns, the nearest town to the refuge, was itself besieged by national media who had come to cover the story. During the siege, which lasted six weeks, one of the occupiers was shot and killed by authorities as he reached for a weapon. Though some of those eventually arrested pled guilty to federal charges, the Bundy brothers, who led the armed occupation, ostensibly to protest federal ownership of public lands, were acquitted on all charges in what ought to be exhibit A in the case establishing white privilege in America. Imagine a group of armed black men taking over a federal building and occupying it in defiance of federal and state authorities for six weeks. How would that have ended?
In any event, Harney County comprises more than ten thousand square miles of land, larger than all of Massachusetts. Roughly seven million people live in deep blue Massachusetts. A little more than seven thousand people live in Harney County, and sixty percent of them live in the five square miles that comprise the adjacent towns of Burns and Hines. On an electoral map, Harney County is red and Massachusetts, of comparable size, is blue, but Massachusetts has eight hundred seventy-five times the number of people, which explains why so much of the country, the places where few people live in vast empty spaces, is colored red. To put an even finer point on it, there is less than one person per square mile in Harney County. Manhattan is 73,000 times more densely populated but on an electoral map Manhattan’s twenty-three square miles are just a tiny speck of blue while Harney County’s 10,228 square miles is a solid chunk of red. But as Ammon Bundy and his merry band of heavily armed right-wing extremists proved, some people in Harney County can be just as dense as those in Manhattan.
We arrived in tiny Burns, Oregon, a little after 4:00 P.M. The main drag was what you’d expect, a McDonald’s (our only dinner option for that night), a few discount stores, some boarded-up storefronts, a small strip mall, and almost no activity. It was, after all, Mother’s Day Sunday. Old trailers, rusted lawn mowers, and broken-down pickups littered the lawns of the small single-story houses, many surrounded by chain-link fences.
As Albie and I walked the streets behind the seedy motel where we were staying the night, I thought of something JoAnn Clevenger, the New Orleans restaurateur, told me a few weeks before about people from all walks of life rubbing elbows in the Big Easy: that familiarity, far from breeding contempt, fosters understanding. When you live in a tiny town like Burns, profoundly isolated, 92 percent white and 4.7 percent Latino, who is there to challenge your prejudices and offer you another perspective? It’s no coincidence that red America is overwhelmingly rural, sparsely populated America.
The next morning, as Albie and I again walked the streets of the dispiriting neighborhood behind our motel, there were a few more signs of human activity than there had been the evening before.
A handful of sleepy-eyed kids with their backpacks emerged from houses on their way to school. We exchanged “good mornings” with a young mother and her son, who appeared to be about twelve or thirteen and a bit awkward in his black-framed glasses, and a blond-haired daughter a few years younger.† Our lives are filled with thousands upon thousands of such cameo appearances by people whose lives intersect with ours for the most fleeting of moments, never to be seen again. Yesterday it was Jean, the homeless woman in Redding. Back in Natchitoches it was the young waiter who steered us to the Eiffel Tower in Paris, Texas. Along the Natchez Trace it was the park ranger with whom we discussed the fate of Meriwether Lewis. Now, more than four weeks into our journey, we’d had countless such encounters, some even more brief than this one.
After we’d said “good morning” to this young mom and her two children I began to wonder about them. The son hardly appeared to be a rough and ready rancher type in waiting as one would have expected in a rugged ranching town. Was he dreading going to school on this May morning? Would he be bullied there? Will he stay in this town all his life and work on the roads or the ranches? Does he daydream about the places that lay beyond the extreme isolation of his tiny town? Will he graduate from high school? Go to college? Will he live to a ripe old age and have children of his own? Every one of these people who have cameo roles in our lives has a story, a life to be lived, heartaches to bear, and questions to ask and answer. And we know nothing of what has been and what will be for almost all of them, which is why, until and unless they prove otherwise, they deserve our courtesy and kindness, even if it is just to say, “Good morning.”
Out here in what’s called the “Oregon Outback” I was also struck by how similar and how different the lives we lead are. We get up, get kids ready for school, fill our cars and trucks with gas, go to the market, send Mother’s Day cards, blow out birthday candles, and share Thanksgiving turkey. But a life lived here in the isolation of Burns, running a small motel or herding cattle on the ranchlands, is a very different life than the one lived by the software engineer in Silicon Valley, the cancer specialist in Houston, or the investment banker in New York. I wondered what I ultimately had in common with the young mom with two kids doing what I had done so many mornings when our kids were in school. The basic outlines of life were familiar, but the rich details within those outlines were likely much, much different.
About a half hour east of Burns the terrain again turned dramatic. Hills of massive boulders lined the highway and rivers ran through valleys, but still virtually no signs of human life other than the road itself. “Towns” were little more than an RV park in one case and a roadside café in another. For the most part it would have looked exactly the same to those pioneers who trekked west on the Oregon Trail, forbidding yet beautiful. If you had a time-lapse video—say, an aerial view of New York City over the past one hundred and fifty years—you would see incessant activity: the rise of great skyscrapers, the tearing down of old neighborhoods to make way for new, excavation of great tunnels, and the building of great bridges and sports stadia and airports; millions of people going about their daily business, first on horses and in carriages and later on buses, in cabs, and in subways. You’d see the dynamic flux of a great city constantly changing, the arrival of countless immigrants aboard huge ships docking along the west side of Manhattan, or dream seekers arriving by train from the Midwest. If you had a similar time-lapse film of this part of Oregon over the past thousand years it would practically look like a still photograph with the occasional traveler, whether by wagon or car, passing through. Time stands almost still out here.
Boise, Idaho, is farther from any other major metropolitan area than any city in the continental United States. I’d never been there and really didn’t know what to expect.
When we arrived in the midafternoon we headed directly to the state Capitol; almost every magazine photograph of Boise I’d seen shows a majestic building set against large, wheat-colored hills, and in my experience state capitol buildings are usually a good way to get oriented in a capital city.
It was a magnificent spring day, sunny, clear, and about seventy degrees. The Capitol grounds were beautifully landscaped with flower gardens and deep green lawns all around. Within the grounds Albie and I found a bench in a small, circular, memorial park dedicated to Cecil Andrus, the progressive, conservation-minded former governor who served as Jimmy Carter’s secretary of the interior. Thanks to Andrus some of the nation’s most treasured wilderness has enjoyed protection from the forces of development and greed. Across from where we were sitting was a pedestal with a bust of Andrus on top. On the bottom I was surprised to see that the memorial we were enjoying had been dedicated just a few days before. Perhaps even more surprising here in deep, deep red Idaho, one of the most Trumpian states in the country, was this inscription beneath the bust of Andrus:
Now we must look ahead. We must prepare ourselves to fight and win new battles, to press the great and just cause of improving the human condition. Our calling is to assure a full place at the center of society for those who, too often, live on its edges. Our mission is to use the power we possess and the good that government can do to carry the fight against ignorance, disease, poverty and intolerance.
My goodness, whatever became of that Idaho, the progressive bastion that sent Andrus to the State House and a liberal icon such as Frank Church to the United States Senate just a few decades ago? That was also the sentiment of a young employee of the state education department named Mark who was perusing some of the markers that memorialized Andrus’s legacy to Idaho. We said hello to one another and I remarked that this memorial was brand new.
“Yes, the area’s been roped off for a few months, so I wanted to see it,” he said.
“Are you from here?” I asked.
“Born and raised,” he replied. I ventured a cautious comment about the inscription under the bust of Andrus.
“That seems very progressive for Idaho,” I said. He shook his head in dismay.
“I don’t understand what’s happened to this state,” he said. He told me how friendly a place Idaho is, but that he had recently had two encounters where people were rude, as if these were black swan events, so rare as to be practically unique. One involved a skier who cut him off on the slopes and muttered something about his skiing too slow. Wow, I thought to myself, he wouldn’t survive a day in Boston or New York. But it was his sense that something was shifting beneath his feet that struck me; that we were all losing something, a basic decency, that held us together. We shook hands, and Mark wished us a safe journey and headed back to his office.
I took the time to read the various displays about Cecil Andrus and one seemed especially relevant given the Trump administration’s hostility to public lands, its evisceration of the Bears Ears National Monument in Utah (a gift to mining interests) its desire to open virtually all U.S. waters to oil exploration. We forget that conservation of land, water, and air was once a very conservative value. During Andrus’s tenure as governor, large swaths of wilderness in the state were protected, including the Sawtooth Mountain Wilderness. One of the plaques in the park bore this quote from Andrus:
You and I will be dead and gone, but future generations will come here and see the Sawtooths with snow on it, the beautiful lakes that we have here. Future generations are entitled to benefit as we have. The good Lord didn’t put us here to change what we have. We were put here to enjoy it, but to also make certain that we didn’t alter or destroy it.
Boise continued to surprise wherever we went. There were huge well-manicured parks and the Anne Frank Human Rights Memorial situated right behind the Boise Public Library. The memorial comprises two semicircular walls of granite divided by a waterfall that flows into two moats in front of the granite. On the panels are inspirational quotations about human rights, peace, freedom, and social justice from Anne Frank, Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Jimmy Carter, and comedian-activist Dick Gregory, among others. There’s even an image of Cesar Chavez among the farmworkers on whose behalf he toiled so hard. The names of major donors to this memorial are etched into some of the benches and I recognized one: David and Mary Peterman. Mary, formerly Mary Zheutlin, is a second cousin I had never met and with whom Albie and I would be staying for the next two nights, along with her physician husband, David Peterman, and their two Labs, Maya and Scout. Mary, I would learn over dinner that night, chaired the effort to create the memorial; second cousins and kindred spirits.
All of this—the memorial to Andrus and this moving human rights memorial—surprised me, and I wondered what other surprises Boise would have in store for me. Downtown was filled with outdoor cafés and coffee shops; it was like a slightly smaller version of impossibly hip Portland, Oregon. Albie and I stepped into a wine store; never arrive for dinner, especially with family you’ve never met, empty-handed.
Albie and I spent two days with Mary and David and Maya and Scout. Just as I was pleasantly surprised that Albie and Ollie had gotten on well during our stay in the Bay Area, Albie seemed to enjoy having more canine companionship. We walked the hills just behind Mary’s house with the dogs and talked and talked and talked about our related families.
As we age, more and more of we baby boomers seem to be taking more and more interest in genealogy. This is hardly surprising. With our time slowly dwindling there is an urge to find our place in that great circle of life, to see where we fit in the larger scheme of things. There were no revelatory family secrets, just tidbits of information that filled out, for both of us, a little more of our family trees. Mary’s late father, Bert, and my father were first cousins, both raised in Jersey City, and had been in medical school together at Johns Hopkins in the 1940s. I’d met Bert many years ago and knew my dad was very fond of him. My dad was one of eight children of whom six were boys; Bert had just one sibling, a sister, and Mary described her father’s relationship to my father and uncles as more brotherly than cousinly. How odd, it seemed, that Mary, just a year older than me, and I had never met (I’d met two of her three siblings), but then again, she’s lived most of her adult life in Boise and I’ve lived mine in Boston. But sharing stories of our families gave our meeting a sense of familiarity and connectedness and intimacy it would not otherwise have had. With each memory shared and tidbit of information offered we were able to add little pieces to the larger jigsaw puzzle.
Since returning from my trip with Albie, many people have asked me what the biggest surprise was, and the answer is Idaho, and not just Boise. The state was more spectacular than I had thought.
In keeping with our commitment to stay off the interstate wherever feasible, we followed Highway 20 across the wider, southern part of the state from Mountain Home to Idaho Falls. Looking at a map there was no way to know that the line representing Highway 20 would take us through some of the most breathtaking scenery of the entire trip. Within just a few miles we were surrounded by snowcapped peaks and shimmering blue lakes set in verdant valleys that edged up against the foothills. The high desert had met an alpine wonderland. The sky was immense and lavishly adorned with a mix of cumulus and stratus clouds.
We stopped near an old grain elevator by the side of the road and stood staring at the Sawtooth Mountains that Cecil Andrus had done so much to preserve. It was still and utterly silent. “In wildness,” Thoreau once wrote, “is the preservation of the world.”
Here along Highway 20 in south-central Idaho is a literary monument of sorts, one Mary’s husband David told me about. In the tiny town of Picabo, hometown of Olympic skier Picabo Street, is the Silver Creek Store, a general store that specializes in hunting and fishing gear and houses the local post office. The store is now in the hands of the son of founders Leonard (“Bud”) Purdy and his wife, Ruth. Back in the day, when Ernest Hemingway used to spend much of his time, when he was away from Key West, living and hunting in these parts, he and the Purdys became close friends and hunting and fishing partners. On display in the store are signed books, letters, photos, and even rifles Hemingway gave the Purdys. Steinbeck was our touchstone for this journey, but the opportunity to gaze upon tangible evidence of Hemingway’s life was an added bonus.
Hemingway and Steinbeck, great writers of the same generation, did not know one another, but Steinbeck publicly and privately praised Hemingway’s work, even as Hemingway disparaged his, perhaps jealous of Steinbeck’s success with In Dubious Battle (1936) and The Grapes of Wrath (1939), a time when Hemingway was unproductive and being criticized for not tackling major social issues in his writing.
I chatted briefly with the fellow behind one of the counters and explained that Albie (who was waiting for me in the car; it was cool enough) and I were heading back home to Boston. He then asked a question that took me by surprise.
“Are you taking 20 all the way?”
It never occurred to me that we could. I had assumed Highway 20 was a state road. When I looked it up I learned we were on U.S. 20 and that U.S. routes ending with a zero signifies a coast-to-coast highway. We were on a precursor to the Interstate Highway System; indeed, U.S. 20 runs from Newport, Oregon, right to Kenmore Square, near Fenway Park, in Boston. It’s the longest highway in the United States, 3,365 miles. I was familiar with a Highway 20 in the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts, I’d driven on it many times, but it never occurred to me it was part of a coast-to-coast route. If we’d had more time, it would have been tempting to follow this road all the way home, but our six weeks were rapidly evaporating.
About fifteen miles east of Picabo, the highway entered terrain that was distinctly different than what we’d been passing through, an otherworldly landscape of ancient lava fields, dark brown and red piles of rock many dozens of feet deep, some extending for more than fifty miles to the south. At Craters of the Moon National Monument we pulled in to walk among these strange rock formations. These massive lava fields didn’t result from a volcanic eruption, however. There’s no vestige of a volcanic cone to be found, nor was there ever one. These fields were formed by lava that seeped out of great fissures in the Earth thousands of years ago.
The isolation of eastern Idaho made it a logical place for the U.S. government to research and develop nuclear weapons and nuclear energy, a legacy reflected in various ways throughout the region. At Pickle’s Place, a restaurant in the tiny town of Arco, they feature an “Atomic Burger,” and we drove through Atomic City before passing the sprawling Idaho National Laboratory (INL), thirty miles west of Idaho Falls, which occupies more than nine hundred square miles of land, an area three-quarters the size of Rhode Island. INL was the site of the largest nonnuclear explosion ever detonated. Since 1949 more nuclear reactors have been built here, more than fifty, than anywhere else on Earth. The landscape here bears little resemblance to the one we had driven through earlier in the day; no regal mountain ranges topped with snow or rivers flowing gracefully through green valleys, just brownish flats.
Just outside Idaho Falls, Highway 20 veers north and for many miles we had dramatic views of the western side of the Grand Tetons in Wyoming, heavy with snow and alternately bathed in sunshine and partially obscured by low lying clouds. Straight ahead the sky was a deep, dark purplish black and lightning bolts shot through the sky. In fields far away, massive curtains of rain fell even as we stayed dry. In the East you rarely get such a perspective on the weather for the simple reason that the view rarely extends for forty or fifty uninterrupted miles as it does here and throughout much of the West.
When I was last in West Yellowstone, Montana, the western gateway to Yellowstone National Park, it was a tiny place. That, too, was half a century ago and, needless to say, it’s changed. It was stunning, and not in a good way, to see there’s even an IMAX theater there now. Albie and I took a walk in the cold drizzle among countless other tourists poking their heads in souvenir shops, restaurants, and little museums.
We’d been gone now for over a month and even though Albie had had some canine companionship in Mountain View and Boise, I sensed that our routine was wearing thin for him, as it was for me. But I knew we were headed home, and he didn’t. As I’d learned in Santa Fe and again at Grand Canyon and Yosemite, he was unable to appreciate the scenery which made the trip so interesting for me. Seeing how the terrain changes (sometimes gradually, sometimes suddenly), the play of light and shadow and weather on the land, the features that make some of it a feast for the eyes and some an eyesore, the remarkable variety of vegetation, rock formations, mountains, deserts, and plains, all of it are what kept me interested across the miles. Albie didn’t have that. Mostly, when he wasn’t snoozing in the back seat, he seemed to watch me. When we were staying with family, even if I went out to the car to fetch something, he followed me to the door and watched. In our motel rooms he seemed to be monitoring my movements to make sure I wasn’t going to leave him behind.
I also knew ours was a temporary departure from the comfortable life we knew; he didn’t. To his eternal credit, not once did he balk, resist, or show the slightest sign of disaffection. But it was starting to feel like we were going through the motions. I tried to keep those feelings at bay, though, for the more intense I allowed the longing for home to be, the slower time would pass and the more torturous the long drive back would seem. And we were, after all, only in Montana.
I’d planned to drive the famous Beartooth Highway, “the top of the world” as it’s called, which straddles the Montana-Wyoming border. Its sixty-eight miles are widely considered one of the most spectacular drives in America. Alas, every spring those sixty-eight miles have to be cleared of twenty-plus feet of snow and the highway would not reopen until Memorial Day, two weeks hence. We settled for driving through Yellowstone which, of course, isn’t a bad consolation prize.‡
West Yellowstone was encased in a thick fog the morning we drove into the park. Not that it mattered to Albie, but it seemed like a dispiriting replay of our visit to Grand Canyon where we waited for hours for breaks in the fog. We paid the entrance fee and within a few minutes we were in the Wyoming part of the park (the vast majority of Yellowstone in is Wyoming; small slivers are in Montana). And just like that, the fog burned off, the sun glistened on the rivers and the grasses, pure white mists drifted through the valleys, and bison lumbered along the roadway. We pulled into a turnout to take it all in.
Why is the preservation of our natural treasures even remotely controversial? They are so rare and so magnificent, and if you aren’t emotionally moved as you gaze at all the majesty of a Yellowstone, a Yosemite, or a Grand Canyon—if you are not awed—check to see if you have a pulse.
Though Albie had proven immune to the manifest beauty of many of the places we had visited, that seemed to change, miraculously, at Yellowstone, though I don’t know why. At our first stop, along a river with snow gilded hills across the river valley and eddies of fog dancing along the mountain peaks, for the first time Albie seemed enchanted by the view. He stood staring for a good long time. Was it a fluke? Can a dog “see” and appreciate natural beauty after all? Can they take pleasure in it? Had I been mistaken about Albie’s inability to enjoy the sights? There’s no way to know, but Albie, for the first time, really seemed to be taking in the view on that crystalline morning.
A short while later we shared the most exquisite, if fleeting, moment of our entire journey together. We parked the car at Gibbon Falls and started down the walkway that runs along the edge of the canyon through which the falls cascade. To keep visitors safe, a stone retaining wall, about three feet high, runs along the walkway. You can hear the falls before you see them, and a refreshing mist thrown off by the tumbling waters permeates the air. Albie couldn’t see over the wall, but he seemed excited and seemed to know something lay just beyond the barrier. To my surprise he stopped, put his front paws on the stone wall and stared down at the falls. His nose twitched, his tail wagged, and he seemed to be smiling. I squatted down and put my left arm around his ruff; I had his leash firmly in hand but wanted to be sure he didn’t get carried away. As I did, my head was against his and for several minutes we remained like that watching the water tumble over the rocks and letting the fine mist settle over us. And I spoke to him as I might have to my sons when they were little.
“Isn’t that beautiful, Albie? What do you think? Do you hear the water crashing on the rocks? Do you feel the mist?”
We were, at last, sharing the pleasure of this exquisite sight. At least that’s what I want to believe, and in that moment, I felt intensely close to him as you would a child experiencing wonder and awe for the first time. Whether it was the sound of the rushing water, the refreshing smell of the mist, or the physical beauty of the scene that prompted Albie to lift himself up on the wall to see what lay on the other side I don’t know, but I felt we had achieved a kind of perfection together. We had driven thousands of miles for this and it was worth every one. I love him so—it seemed we were joined together in some transcendental way that would outlast our physical presence together.
We exited Yellowstone at Gardiner, Montana, and headed north toward Livingston. The scenery around us was still breathtaking. But the first inklings that the trip was running out on us, that the best lay behind us, began to surface. From here on out we were going to be driving through less dramatic country; the northern prairie and industrial Midwest lay ahead, and the tug of home started to insinuate itself more strongly with each passing mile.
As I said, if you travel long distance on the interstate you quickly learn that most places of accommodation and restaurants are clustered near the exits which are often a couple of miles from whatever town justified the placement of the exit in the first place. Whenever we stayed in such places we made it a point, even if time was short, to drive into town just to see what we could see and it often paid dividends. It’s how we met Joan, the homeless woman in Redding, and discovered the lovely parks and pleasant streets of Tehachapi and the retro charm of Kingman. If you don’t venture the few minutes into these towns you might think they comprise only chain motels, gas stations, and fast-food restaurants. Some turn out to be duds, but many are minor revelations.
The evening we arrived in Miles City in eastern Montana we drove the mile and a half from our highway motel to downtown and found a classic American main street with a Western flair. There were saddleries, clothiers specializing in Western wear, and several bars with vintage neon signs: The Bison Bar with a bison outlined in red light, the Montana Bar with a map of Montana also in red light, and the Trails Inn Bar which featured a neon cowboy atop a bucking bronco. This wasn’t reproduction nostalgia, it was the real thing.
As luck would have it we had, yet again, stumbled into a town on the eve, or in the throes of, a major event. “Bucking Horse,” an annual festival held in Miles City the third weekend in May for the past sixty-eight years, features music, food, and a rodeo. Folks were out and about setting up tables, a few vendors were up and running, and Main Street was cordoned off, so we were able to walk right down the middle of the street and admire the classic all-Americanness of it all.
On Main Street, a young boy of about seven or eight wearing a Little League cap and uniform was standing behind a card table with his sister and mother. He appeared to have stepped out of a Norman Rockwell painting and was all smiles. In his hands was a sign announcing the sale of raffle tickets to help his mom pay her way for a choral performance her local choir was giving in Europe. He looked at me eagerly, hoping I’d buy a raffle ticket, and I offered him some advice.
“Turn the sign this way,” I said as I gently took the sign in my hands and turned it right side up, much to his amusement. He laughed and rolled his eyes, not at me but at himself. He appeared positively tickled. Tickets were twenty dollars and the prize, which I wouldn’t be around to collect if I won, was a freezer full of steaks. Very Montana, I thought.
“We’re from Massachusetts,” I told him, “and we won’t be here for the drawing.” Whereupon he reached out and earnestly tried to hand me the pouch with all the money they’d collected so far. He was adorable and the gesture kind; maybe he thought Massachusetts was a poverty-stricken place, I don’t know. But I thanked him, told him the money was for his mom, and made a contribution without buying a ticket. I appreciated his generous spirit, though. We could use more of that in America.