We pulled the car over in Denver at dawn. The night before, we had driven north on I-25 through the sand and scrub of New Mexico and into the evergreen forests along the alpine shelf of Colorado. We had just parked outside the house of a friend, who had agreed to take us in for a few days of rest after we dropped Richie off at the airport.
Jordan killed the engine, and we sat. We sat for a long time, listening to the muffled tuning of the new day around us. For the first time in a week, the two of us were alone, and we were exhausted. The trip through Mexico had taken its toll. But there was something else. Before we rested, we had some healing to do.
“Chris,” Jordan began, “I’m really sorry about Carlsbad.”
A car went by, its tires noisy on slick streets.
“Me too,” Chris said. “I thought we would’ve been able to handle that kind of thing better by now.”
A few days before, on our way from Los Angeles to Tijuana, we had stopped in Carlsbad, a town 35 miles north of San Diego, to see another old classmate. The four of us hadn’t seen one another in months. We found a bar along the Strand, ordered wings and fries, and settled in, trading bar-exam stories and ruminating about what lay ahead. As the night stretched on, the conversation turned to politics and things grew more and more charged until someone—neither of us can remember who of the four—said something about how Republicans are just much better at stealing elections than Democrats.
Chris glanced at Jordan.
“That’s ridiculous,” Jordan said, bristling. “Every Republican says the same thing about Democrats.”
“Well, at a minimum I’d say Republicans are just better at it,” someone said. “Democrats are way too disorganized to be effective.”
Jordan noticed Chris tense up, but pressed on anyway.
“That’s a silly generalization,” Jordan said. “Both sides are trying to win, and they’re both good at it.”
“Yeah, but only Republicans push policies that systematically disenfranchise people.”
“Like what?”
“Gerrymandering.”
“Gerrymandering is bipartisan. Both parties have done it for 200 years.”
“What about voter ID laws?”
“ID requirements don’t disenfranchise people. Electoral integrity is a legitimate concern. It’s completely reasonable.”
“Republican officials have been caught on camera saying those laws are designed to suppress minority votes.”
“Bullshit.”
“I can pull it up for you.”
“I don’t care what some idiot somewhere said. I can pull up any number of dumb quotes from Democrats. My point is that there are legitimate reasons why Republicans believe it’s important to have at least some kind of identification before voting.”
Contentions ricocheted across the table.
“Plenty of academic studies have shown no evidence of widespread voter fraud,” Chris said.
“And there is clear evidence that voter ID laws suppress the votes of low-income people, especially minorities,” someone else added.
“It doesn’t need to be widespread to be a problem,” Jordan replied. “Even a couple of hundred votes can swing an election. And every election, there are reports of dead people registering to vote. How do you explain that?”
“Even assuming that’s true, which is the greater harm? You’re describing a handful of cases, and voter ID laws prevent thousands of legitimate votes each cycle. This is a cost-benefit analysis.”
“Voter fraud is a crime; having an ID is a basic feature of society,” Jordan replied. “Most states provide them for free anyway. Again, my point here is that Republicans have legitimate reasons for supporting voter ID laws that are not just Machiavellian.”
“No, they really don’t.”
“So you think Republicans are just ill-willed on this? And Democrats are pure?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t think Democrats, even a few of them, have ulterior motives in getting rid of ID requirements?”
“Democrats want more eligible voters to participate, and that’s a good thing.”
“But Republicans have only bad motives?”
“Yes!”
Chris saw Jordan’s jaw muscle clench.
“Look, I’m just trying to understand, but you haven’t said anything that justifies the Republican position,” someone said.
“Yeah, because nothing I say can get through your partisan filter. If you truly believe that Republicans are just malicious, then nothing I say matters.”
“Show me statistics—then I’ll believe you.”
“Great, I’ll write you a fucking report.”
“I don’t need a report, just tell me.”
“But,” Chris interjected, “what about—”
“—what about what?” Jordan snapped.
“Why are you so mad?”
“Say what you were going to say.”
Chris glared.
“I’m done with this conversation,” Jordan said, got up, and left.
An hour later the three of us were back on the road, heading for San Diego. We began talking again at the border with Mexico well after dark, but a bitterness lingered for the rest of the trip. And it still hung over the car as the two of us idled in the thin air of Denver in the early morning days later.
“Well, I love you, dude,” Chris said. “I’m sorry things ended up where they did.”
“I love you too, man.”
Healing, by this point on our journeys, was relatively easy for us. But the tenor of this fight, and its lingering wounds, weighed on our minds. What did it mean that we couldn’t extend our civil dialogue beyond the two of us? It felt like through long and excruciating hours of fights, debates, confessions, and reconciliations we had earned something—the ability to trust each other so that somehow, despite our differences, we had forged a common language. But our friends didn’t seem to share that language, and in their presence we felt incapable of passing it along or abiding by it.
“I feel like we aren’t able to speak as ourselves sometimes,” Chris said outside that house in Denver. “I feel like we become standard-bearers for our parties—even when we don’t want to be.”
Jordan nodded. He squeezed Chris’s shoulder, got out of the car, and walked up the steps and into the house.
Chris lingered for a moment, looking up among the trees and feeling the rising sun on his face. Our dialogue felt fragile again—as it had been just before the saline waters of Mono Lake washed it all away almost two years before.
* * *
Over the next few days, we explored Denver. In the mornings we took long walks through the northwest corner of the city, stopping for coffee and perusing the shelves of local bookstores. At night we enjoyed the food and craft-beer scene under the guidance of our host, Colin. Much to Chris’s delight, we even chased down My Brother’s Bar, supposedly one of Jack Kerouac’s favorite haunts in town.
Our conversations became long and voluble again. Our thoughts returned to what we had seen and felt in northern Mexico, and what we hoped to see on the rest of the trip. Only a week had gone by since we left Los Angeles, which meant we had a month to go. Chris was anxious to see Detroit, where his godfather had been raised, and Jordan wanted to stop off in Nashville, where one of his translators from Afghanistan had just become a new father.
“How about a county fair?” Jordan asked as we paced the streets of Denver.
“Why not?” Chris responded. “Can’t say I’ve ever been to one.”
We decided to attend the Lorain County Fair in Ohio—an annual event that Jordan had found on a “Best of” site a few links down a Google search page.
One evening before we left, Colin told us he had extra tickets to a Leon Bridges concert at Red Rocks Amphitheatre.
“We have to go,” Chris said to Jordan.
Bridges had a soulful voice and sang the kind of music that conjured up the records Chris’s mother had played for him back in Berkeley—Bruce Springsteen, Waylon Jennings, Buffalo Springfield.
“You’ll love him,” Chris said excitedly. “He’s got this crooner’s voice, and he puts out these crackly records like the Black Keys or something.”
“I bet, man,” Jordan said with a smile.
“It’ll be like going to a Sam Cooke concert—like hearing Richie Havens at Woodstock.”
Chris was caught up in one of his flights of zeal, something Jordan had seen often by then.
That night we enjoyed cured meats, cheese, and beer with Colin and his friends on a knoll just outside the open-air theater in Denver Mountain Park before descending into the columns of giant red-rock outcroppings that give the place its name. The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, and the Grateful Dead had all played in that space chipped out of the hills of Colorado. A familiar roar of human voices—that singular outpouring of deep anticipation—filled the air as Leon took the stage, and the place came alive as the first melody echoed up the canyon.
Jordan looked over at Chris. A joyous, carefree spirit came out of him at gatherings like this. Jordan felt the opposite among crowds. Once, as a teenager going to concerts in Los Angeles, he had let go, same as Chris. But it felt like a long time since then. He had been drilled to be wary of large groups, and his vigilance never quite went away. As Leon strutted and sang, Jordan breathed deeply and tried to unwind.
For years by then, Jordan had grown weary of hearing Republicans described as ugly racists, or something just short. When faced with those kinds of accusations—especially when leveled against broad swaths of people, people he knew and loved—Jordan would defend the party even when he didn’t agree with it. Those feelings had rushed out of him in a snap back in Carlsbad, and they still tangled his thoughts as Leon launched into his latest.
Yet song by song, the music and Chris’s enthusiasm began to soften the knots in Jordan’s shoulders. Whatever toxicity remained from that fight was leaving him.
Chris was less distracted. He glanced up behind us at the sea of people, swinging, humming, laying an arm over a friend or partner. It was a soothing tableau—an unfathomably large and ecstatic gathering of people—and Chris was entranced. The howling battles of the road and the innumerable troubles of a country left him, at least for a moment or two.
“He’s damn good,” Jordan said, as Chris turned back around.
“He really is.”
* * *
We left Denver before daybreak the next morning. Jordan took the wheel, and Chris kept talking to keep both of us alert. We drove through the cornfields and meadows of Kansas and passed onward into Oklahoma and Arkansas. In Memphis, Tennessee, we paused to pay homage at the Civil Rights Museum, standing on the spot where five decades earlier a sniper’s bullet had cut down Martin Luther King Jr. on a balcony of the Lorraine Motel.
Then, somewhere out past Memphis, the voice of Malcolm X passed through a pair of headphones we were sharing.
“It’s got to be the ballot or the bullet. The ballot or the bullet. If you’re afraid to use an expression like that, you should get on out of the country,” the great orator railed.
“I like the empowerment must come before reconciliation point,” Jordan said, speaking over the recording.
“If this is a country of freedom, let it be a country of freedom; and if it’s not a country of freedom, change it.”
Jordan found him mesmerizing. Malcolm X was acerbic, direct, powerful. His was a call to action.
“Whose speech do you think was more effective?” Jordan asked. Before Malcolm X we had listened to King’s “I Have a Dream” address.
“I think you’d have to say MLK, based on how we remember it,” Chris said. “Besides, it’s a master class in how to give a speech.”
Chris, like many, was often drawn back to the reverend’s words. They offered something timeless. King preached love in the face of insurmountable danger, and while his courage stirred the two of us in that Volvo all those years later, his poetry was nearly as affecting.
“You know he almost didn’t say those words?” Chris said.
“Which?”
“‘I have a dream.’ King had said it so often, he almost didn’t use it again. Someone had to encourage him to say it.”
Jordan nodded as he absorbed it all. Harmony, understanding, reconciliation—it all flowed out from the words of a leader who would give everything to persuade the country of his vision.
“I wonder if ‘Ballot or the Bullet’ might’ve had a broader reception today,” Jordan said.
“Maybe,” Chris responded. “But if they’d both lived, they would have seemed a lot closer in message.”
“How so?”
“Malcolm had started to change after coming back from Mecca. He was softening his tone. Before—”
Chris didn’t finish the thought.
As the Boat drifted north toward Cleveland, we fell silent.
Chris bit his nails. King’s and Malcolm’s words weren’t just beautiful; they were certain. A good speech has conviction, purpose, and moral clarity. Yet all Chris saw around him was complexity. Since we set out on the road, we had experienced challenges to what we thought we knew. All we could do was acknowledge how humbling it was and keep at it. We could talk to people. We could learn from them. And in the process we could cross a few lines together that, perhaps, we weren’t supposed to cross under other circumstances.
“About Carlsbad…” Chris ventured. “I understand your point.”
“Oh, yeah?” Jordan said.
“About electoral integrity.”
As the silence deepened, Chris’s thoughts had returned to our fight. Chris had disagreed with Jordan, but the conversation shouldn’t have gone that way. Pummeling one another wasn’t conducive for friends to listen or learn.
“Just look at how Russia was able to affect voters in 2016 with Facebook,” Chris continued. “It could’ve been much worse if they’d directly hacked voting booths.”
Jordan heard a cautiousness in Chris’s voice. We were venturing back into what could be turbulent seas, and Chris was testing the waters.
“And when you really think about it, it doesn’t have to be an either-or choice,” Chris said. “One can be for election security and for expanding the franchise.”
Jordan looked over.
“We may never see eye to eye on voter ID laws in places like the Carolinas or Wisconsin,” Chris continued. “But I understand there’s a defensible value behind the concept, at least when the two of us are talking about it.”
Since Carlsbad, Chris had often wondered if he could have reduced the tension by admitting what he saw as reasonable in Jordan’s perspective. A single word or two might have expanded the conversation. There is a grace in acknowledging the virtue in someone else’s views, and Chris hadn’t summoned it.
“Sure,” Jordan said. “And I get the concern around these laws, especially if political actors are shown to have bad intentions.”
Chris nodded.
“No matter what,” Jordan continued, “the negative effects of voter ID laws should be mitigated, and there are bipartisan ways to do that—like longer windows for voting and free identification cards for low-income residents.”
We sat in silence for a moment.
“I feel like we can often get here,” Chris said. “To a place where we agree.”
Jordan considered it.
“I think on most issues, we’re actually debating policies that reflect two values we both share. The difference is how we choose to prioritize them.”
“That makes sense,” Chris said. “The problem is when politicians or policymakers trot out those values as a defense for something more nefarious that only looks like one of those values.”
Chris glanced over at Jordan.
“That’s right,” Jordan said.
We were engaging, again, on things that mattered.
“The challenge,” Jordan continued, “is that we live in a world of uncertainty. We don’t have perfect information. Not just about the scale of the problems, like voter suppression or electoral fraud, but also about the motives of the people emphasizing one priority or the other.”
Jordan paused.
“So the question is, how do we reconcile our different priorities when we don’t trust each other’s numbers and we don’t trust each other’s intentions?”
“Have some humility, I guess,” Chris replied.
Jordan nodded.
“I think just recognizing that there are competing values goes a long way,” Chris said. “Even if leaders never actually agree on certain policies, that’s still a basis for understanding.”
Two years earlier, we had nearly torn our friendship apart in Nevada. That fight had revealed real differences between us—differences that would persist. Our friendship would have to navigate them from there on out, and that was okay; they weren’t a reason to pull away from each other. Now, as we sped for the belly of the Midwest, we were realizing something else: the road was humbling us.
The people we were meeting—and the fuller picture of one another—were complex. Yet in our weaker moments we sometimes overlooked that complexity. We might generalize or rely on symbols to understand each other, knowing full well that those things often obscure what matters most. Sometimes we fell prey to our prejudices and expectations. It was the easy thing to do. But then, when we calmed down, something else could take hold. We could remain open-minded. Good faith and compassion could take root.
Wide river valleys with low green prairies replaced the fields of corn where homesteads rose up along their slight hills like sentinels—some long ago abandoned.
As we pulled up to a toll booth, we were met by a pungent rush of air.
“Whoa,” a toll-taker with glasses that made her eyes small and colorless said.
A truck sagging low with cows pulled out of the next booth.
“Pigs smell the worst,” she said.
As the window went back up, the gentle words of a stranger seemed harsh and foreign. When left to our own thoughts, the same nagging worry returned: Could we find a way to talk like this with others? Or would we splinter as soon as we left the Boat?
* * *
We reached Lorain by late afternoon, finding the county fair at the end of a dusty parking lot bisected by a railroad line. Inside was row after row of farm-equipment stands. Retirees in turquoise T-shirts square-danced, and thin men, blue around the eyes, cajoled us to shoot air guns at feathery paper targets.
We meandered through the maze of booths.
We were prone to amble like that after a long drive. The fatigue of the road would slowly slough off us as we walked—whether in Memphis, Yellowstone, or there in Lorain. We passed through the junior barns, where teenagers showed off prized cattle, sheep, and pigs. Young boys and girls with white-collared shirts tucked into dark, belted jeans presented fidgety chickens to admiring parents and onlookers, who took photos and rhapsodized over the quality of each fowl.
The Lorain County Fair was a simple picture of untroubled Ohio life. The grounds felt safe and serene. Everything moved at a slackened pace that suited the road-weary like us—until we stumbled across a more raucous affair.
Outside a large tent, men and women dressed in red getups talked jovially among themselves and passed out American flags. The booth practically teemed with the middle-aged, and election placards along the walls made it clear this was a Republican tent.
Lorain, with its largely white working-class population, had long been a Democratic stronghold. But on election night 2016, Donald Trump took Lorain County by just 388 votes, the first time a Republican had won there since Ronald Reagan. A revision later handed the county to Clinton by the slimmest of margins—121 votes—but the sea change was evident. Four years earlier, President Barack Obama had carried 57.8 percent of the vote, trouncing Mitt Romney by 16 percentage points. Two years after Trump’s election, the Republicans filling the tent seemed ascendant.
We passed by and ducked into another tent, where a television reporter and a cameraman lingered a step or two outside. They eyed us as we walked under the flap and out of the din.
Inside looked like a makeshift storefront on Bourbon Street or Times Square. Hats, T-shirts, flags, and vanity items lined the tarpaulin walls. Then Chris stopped, tapped Jordan on the shoulder, and nodded upward.
Jordan followed Chris’s gaze up the wall and spied a large Confederate flag hanging next to an assortment of other standards.
“Hey, fellas,” said a stout man with a pimply chin. “Anything catch your eye?”
“Just browsing.”
“Lots of good stuff here,” he said.
“Sure is.”
The reporter and cameraman outside made more sense. It seemed as if we had stepped squarely into a heated political debate at the county fair, of all places. Reading up on our phones, we learned that shops at the fair had sold the Confederate flag for close to eight years. But other sites in Ohio—including the larger Ohio State Fair—had banned its sale, and pressure was mounting on Lorain to follow suit. Three billboards on the outskirts of the grounds demanded a ban on the “Stars and Bars,” and someone had draped the Confederate standard over one of those signs just as we arrived.
We exited the tent from the other side and found ourselves in another row of booths. Politics had not been on either of our minds when we reached the fair. We had recently escaped it, only to be thrown back in unprepared.
Soon after, we came across the stall of a group of Democrats with election signs in robin’s-egg blue. All four of the gray-haired women there that day held miniature American flags. One of them had a whole handful.
“Love the flags,” Jordan said as we walked by.
“Where are you from?” one asked.
“California—by way of Connecticut.”
“You two are a long way from home.”
“Things are a little more subdued over here,” Chris said. “There’s a Republican tent up the way, you know.”
“The Democrats have sort of pulled out of Lorain,” one of the women said. “We’re here as volunteers—to protest, I guess. But more to be here to represent our community. A lot of people in Lorain and Wellington think like us, and we want to make sure they’re heard.”
The other women nodded.
“Here,” one of the women with glasses said, pushing a small American flag into Jordan’s hands.
The fabric was frayed at the end. The glue showed on the splintered dowel. Such a small, delicate thing it was, yet Jordan had gone to war under that flag—and some of his comrades had perished for it.
Jordan grasped it and looked at the woman.
“Thank you,” he said, and we made our way down the rows of booths.
* * *
As the sun dipped low, the Lorain fairgrounds were emptying. Those who were left kept to the long shadows below the farm equipment and the trees. We ate alligator served by a Florida couple who drove up and down the Eastern Seaboard every year, working fair after fair all season long.
“Which stop is your favorite?” Jordan asked.
“They start to blend after a while,” said the red-faced man with a ratty baseball hat, turning away from a fryer bubbling with alligator fat.
We gnawed on bratwursts with sauerkraut and grainy mustard dished out by the descendants of German immigrants who owned a family restaurant in nearby Cleveland. We even perused a few RVs for sale, kicking their hitches and mumbling about the monthly payments.
“It’s astounding,” Chris said as we passed another row of booths. “No one seems all that concerned with the flag.”
“Looks that way.”
The flag’s presence might have been a news story, but Lorain, on balance, seemed more concerned with the judging of a goat, a dance step or two, and the specs on a tractor engine than a flag hanging in a tent down the way.
We settled in along the siding of a corral with dozens of other onlookers, then watched as handlers with sticks and tucked-in polo shirts chased prancing horses with braided tails and manes. An official-looking man with a purple tie and short sleeves gave hand-gesture orders and inspected each horse, which, to a stallion, pounded their hooves and flicked their tails upon his stern touch.
The day was waning as we made for the parking lot, and Jordan kept glancing down at the small American flag in his hand. He felt something stir as he turned the fabric over, rolling its dowel back and forth between his fingers.
The night before, we had shared a meal with Jordan’s Afghan translator, Zabiullah Mazari—Zee, to Jordan—at his home outside Nashville. Jordan and Zee had spent many evenings together in 2013, talking late into the night. Zee dreamed of a life in the United States, and before leaving the country Jordan had sponsored Zee’s special immigrant visa. Five years later, Zee ushered the two of us into his apartment, and Jordan saw how those conversations had come to life. Zee’s wife brought out their newborn boy, whom she placed in Jordan’s arms. We drank tea and talked over a spread of Afghani and Somali cuisine.
Not long before, Zee had worn the American flag on his own uniform, just as Jordan had. Back then it had been only an idea for Zee—and a gamble of an idea at that: he could have been killed for displaying it, and so could his family.
But now the flag was his, too.
In Lorain, these emotions welled up in Jordan. America was generous. America was good, and able to transcend whatever that other flag meant. That logic shaped Jordan’s worldview. It was why he was proud to wear that flag overseas, and proud to make the case for its people wherever he went.
With that same shred of dyed fabric twirling in his hand, and an after-image of the Confederate flag still in his mind, Jordan looked over at Chris.
Things were probably more complicated for his friend. The flag meant something different for Chris, and for the longest time Jordan resisted that notion. Yet faced with the complexity of the road, Jordan had come to terms with how the flag could mean one thing to himself, another to Chris, and yet another to Zee.
In Lorain, volunteers in red and others in blue—standing only 100 yards away from one another—handed out American flags to passersby. The “Stars and Stripes” was theirs in equal measure, and even to those who might disavow it. We may not always agree on which values it embodies, and even when we do, we might prioritize those values differently. But that flag, and the weighty ideas it carries, belongs to all of us. Maybe that’s enough for it all to still matter.
With the exit gate in sight, Jordan stopped short.
He turned to two girls no older than 12, who had walked by holding hands.
“Hey,” Jordan said. “Here.”
He handed the little flag to the nearer of the two. She took it in both hands and scampered off into the crowds beyond.