On the afternoon that a bunch of white supremacist idiots marched in Virginia and murdered a young woman named Heather Heyer, I found myself crossing from New Mexico into Oklahoma, the state where a smaller group of white supremacist idiots killed 168 people in 1995. From a forensic perspective, there’s no direct connection between these two events 22 years apart. But they were both very much on my mind Saturday afternoon, as I began a trip that would criss-cross almost 3,000 miles of a nation that seems to be tearing itself apart.

The spreading fissures in American society weren’t obvious from the highway at 65 miles per hour—certainly not as much as last summer, before the election, when political signs were everywhere in Oregon and Washington and Montana. Everyone I interacted with on my three-day drive to Iowa was pleasant and polite (well, except for the overwhelmed Dairy Queen cashier in eastern New Mexico cursing “all the Texas idiots” lined up at his drive-thru window). Of course, as a middle-aged white guy with a pickup truck and a cowboy hat, I wasn’t exactly venturing into hostile territory.

The red-rock hills between Santa Fe and Las Vegas (the one in New Mexico, not the one in Nevada—although what happens there stays there too, mainly because nothing ever happens there) quickly gave way to the grasslands of northeastern New Mexico and the Oklahoma panhandle. My first overnight was in Guymon, birthplace of Mike “Heckuva Job Brownie” Brown, who oversaw the botched response to Hurricane Katrina for G.W. Bush. I spent the night at the Corral RV Park and Drive-in Theater, but the movies had stopped for the season a week earlier and my only entertainment was the whistle of passing freight trains all night long. (I learned that the final film had been the apparently execrable “Emoji Movie,” so perhaps I lucked out with the trains instead.)

I rolled out early Sunday in a heavy downpour and gusty winds, both of which stopped by the time I crossed into Kansas 45 minutes later. There’s a lot of Kansas to look at as you drive diagonally from southwest to northeast, and most of it looks exactly like the rest of it. I camped that night at a pretty Army Corps of Engineers park outside Emporia, which had more trees than I’d seen anyplace else in Kansas and more freight trains than I’d heard the night before in Oklahoma.

My dog Zora, who is deaf as a tree stump and slept through all the train whistles, absolutely loved our grassy campsite by the lake and gave me a skeptical look as I urged her back into the truck Monday morning for yet another long day of driving. We managed to get briefly lost in downtown Topeka trying to avoid the toll road, but eventually made it across the Missouri River in Atchison and into The Show-Me State.

Missouri didn’t have a lot to show me that seemed much different from what I’d already seen in Kansas, so I passed the time wondering if, given my route, the trains that had kept me up both nights were on the famous “Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe” railroad. That got me thinking about Judy Garland who, not surprisingly, seems to keep coming up in Kansas—I had passed a replica of Dorothy’s house from The Wizard of Oz the morning before in Liberal—and before I knew it I was in Iowa.

Two days later, I’m still here. The trailer is parked out at the farm of Maureen’s Aunt Pat, and Zora and I are enjoying a respite from the road at my father-in-law’s house in Des Moines. Tomorrow and Friday promise visits to the Iowa State Fair to see butter cows, smell the swine house, and eat trans fats, before Maureen joins for the next leg of our trip.

That promises to be a somewhat more interesting journey than the trip documented above, featuring stops in the Badlands of South Dakota, Mount Rushmore (which will offer an interesting opportunity to reflect on what “presidential-ness” really looks like), and the Black Hills. I’m just hoping it doesn’t feature too many more campsites next to the railroad tracks.