For the last week of the series, we packed the car, put Darby in the back, and drove east. Missoula, Bozeman, Big Sky, then Laurel, where my parents grew up and where we’d spend the Fourth. The posts changed on the road. Less record, more landscape. These are Days 24 through 30, one a day, from wherever we’d stopped that night.
June 27: Missoula, and the primaries I skipped
We left this morning. Packed the car, loaded Darby in the back, pointed east, and started the long drive that will take us all the way to Missoula tonight.
There is something about a long driving day that makes you think. Not the scattered thinking of a regular day, the sustained kind. The kind where one thought leads to the next, and by the time you have crossed the Cascades and watched eastern Washington open up into high desert and then slipped through the Idaho panhandle and started climbing into Montana, you have arrived somewhere in your head that you did not expect. I was thinking about primaries.
I vote. I want to be clear about that because this series is built on honesty, and I am not going to claim a failure I did not have. But primaries? I have not always shown up for those. And primaries are where so much of the real damage quietly happens. Turnout is low. The most extreme slice of each party shows up while everyone else assumes the general election is what matters. By the time most people are paying attention, the real choice has already been made by the people who bothered to show up when nobody was watching.
In Washington State, everything comes in the mail. I fill out my ballot at the kitchen table and drop it in the mailbox. Twenty minutes. No line. No inconvenience. Just the choice to do it or not. I have not always made that choice for primaries. I am making it from now on.
We made it to Missoula tonight. Montana already feels like something different. More on that tomorrow.
June 28: Bozeman, and somebody should do something
Missoula to Bozeman today. If you have never driven this stretch of Montana, I do not know how to prepare you for it. The sky is not something you see. It is something you are inside. The mountains give way to valleys and the valleys open into plains, and the whole thing just keeps going, wider and bigger and more indifferent to your smallness than anything you have driven through before. Darby had her nose out the window for most of it. She seemed fine with the scale of things.
I have been thinking about the words “somebody should do something.” I have said them more times than I can count. They are comfortable words because they maintain the feeling of caring without requiring any particular action from you specifically. I spent years in that zone. Watching things happen, trusting the right person would eventually step forward. Feeling vaguely guilty about not doing more and then moving on.
The people serving on school boards, city councils, and county commissions right now are not special. They showed up and filed the paperwork. Many of them ran unopposed because no one else did. The races are decided by hundreds of votes. Driving through this state today, I keep thinking about that. About how much of the actual governing of this country happens at a level most people never consider. And about how the people who stepped into those rooms did it simply because they got tired of waiting for someone else to.
You know your community. You know what is broken. That is more than most people currently in office started with. The somebody you have been waiting for might be you. Bozeman tonight. Big Sky tomorrow.
June 29: Big Sky, and the woman at the festival
Bozeman to Big Sky today. If yesterday was about the plains, today was about the mountains. The kind that makes you feel like you drove into a postcard and forgot to come back out. Darby approved. Matt approved. I approved while quietly calculating how many more driving days my back has left.
But here is what I keep turning over in my mind on this drive, somewhere between a mountain pass and a valley I did not have words for. Back in May, I was sitting at our local festival raising support for our school’s foundation. No children of my own, but a deep belief that a community is only as strong as what it builds for its kids. That is why I show up for this. That has always been why.
A woman came up to me. Her tone was sharp before she even finished her first sentence. She wanted to talk about the illegals who go to college for free while she had to pay her own way. She believed it completely. The unfairness of it had settled into her like something solid. I did not know how to respond in the moment. I still do not know if what she believed was true. But here is what I keep coming back to on this drive.
She was not a bad person. She was frightened. Frightened that something was being taken from her. Frightened in a way that had curdled over time into something that looked like anger. Someone put that fear there. Someone told her where to point it. And it was not pointed at the people actually making the decisions that affect her life. It was pointed at people with even less power than she has. That is not an accident. Fear pointed in the wrong direction is one of the oldest political tools.
I do not know how to reach her. But I know that staying quiet leaves that fear unopposed. Say something. Even when you are not sure what to say. Big Sky tonight. It lives up to the name.
June 30: Staying put
We are staying put in Big Sky today. No driving. Just this.
I have spent 26 days writing about what is wrong with this country. I believe every word of it. And then you stand somewhere like this, mountains in every direction, the air doing something to your lungs that city air simply does not do, the quiet so complete you can hear Darby breathing, and the argument gets more complicated. This is also America. Not the cable news version or the Twitter version or the version being debated in congressional hearings. This. The actual physical country. The one that is so much larger and stranger and more beautiful than any political argument has room for.
We passed through small towns on the drive here. The kind where the hardware store has been there for sixty years, and the diner still has a pie case by the register. Places that looked tired and places that looked stubbornly alive and places clearly trying to figure out which one they were going to be. All of it is the country I have been writing about. The beautiful parts, the struggling parts, and the parts that do not fit neatly into anyone’s argument.
I keep thinking that the people who want to make us afraid of each other are counting on us never actually looking at each other. Never driving through each other’s towns. Never standing in the same landscape and feeling the same thing. This country is worth showing up for. Every complicated, exhausting, beautiful inch of it. Tomorrow we head toward Laurel. We are almost there.
July 1: Laurel
Big Sky to Laurel today. The last leg. The landscape changes completely on this drive, from mountains to foothills to the wide Yellowstone River valley opening up into Billings, and then the smaller, quieter roads that lead into Laurel. The sky stays enormous the whole way. That part does not change.
I did not grow up here. My parents did. This is their hometown, their big sky, their place, the one that made them who they were before they made me who I am. Driving into it feels less like arriving somewhere new and more like reading the beginning of a story I have always been in the middle of.
I have been thinking about community on this drive. What it looks like when it is real. Out here it looks like knowing your neighbors by name. It looks like showing up when something hard happens without being asked. It looks like loyalty that doesn't need to announce itself. I think about the woman at the festival. She is my community too, even when it did not feel that way. Community is not the people who already agree with you. It is everyone you share a place with. Everyone you are responsible to, whether you chose them or not.
The strongest communities I have seen are not the ones without conflict. They are the ones where people stay in the room with each other anyway. Where they show up for schools without kids. Where they say the thing that needs saying, even when silence is easier. That is the work. Not the grand gesture. The staying in the room. We are in Laurel tonight. It feels right to be here.
July 2: Row after row
Some places ask something of you just by being what they are. Today was one of those places. Quiet. Orderly. Row after row of markers stretching out under a Montana sky so wide it felt like the whole country was watching. Each marker has a name. Each name a life. Each life is a person who decided that something was worth serving, worth the cost, worth showing up for, even when showing up was the hardest possible thing.
We have been in Laurel since last night. I slept in the town my parents grew up in and woke up knowing what today would ask of me. I am thinking about someone specific today. I am not going to say much about him here because he was not a man who needed the room to be about him. He was the kind of person whose strength was never loud but always felt. The kind who showed up quietly, steadily, for decades, without needing anyone to notice. He served this country when it asked. He served his family the same way for the rest of his life.
Standing in a place like this, surrounded by the names of people like him, I felt the full weight of what this month has been about in a way I did not expect. I have been writing about citizenship. About the distance between what we say we believe and what we are willing to do about it. About the cost of silence and the value of showing up. The people in this place paid a price most of us will never be asked to pay. What they gave does not ask for our grief. It asks for our participation. Our presence. Our willingness to keep the country they served worth having served.
That is not a grand gesture. That is a vote. A phone call. A conversation you were avoiding. A meeting you almost skipped. That is the ask. It has always been the ask.
July 3: The night before
Tomorrow is the Fourth of July. Tonight I am in a small town in Montana, the kind of place that still does the Fourth the way it was meant to be done. There will be a parade tomorrow. Pie. Fireworks in the park after dark. Children on blankets looking up at the sky. People who have known each other their whole lives, standing together in the warm summer dark.
I have been thinking tonight about fear. Not my own. I have been thinking about other people's faces. The woman at the festival before we left. The people I have encountered over these last months whose anger, when you look past the surface, is really just fear sitting underneath everything. Raw, exhausting, completely human fear. And when I really sit with it, when I stop reacting to the anger and look at what is underneath, I understand it. I do not agree with where it gets pointed. But I understand where it comes from.
People are afraid they will not be able to pay the mortgage next month. Or the rent. Or both. They are watching the cost of groceries and the cost of gas, and the cost of insurance go up while their wages stay where they are, and they are doing the math in their head every single day, and the math is not working. That is not a political talking point. That is a kitchen table conversation happening in millions of homes right now, and the fear that comes out of it is completely legitimate.
People are afraid for their children. Afraid that the world their kids are inheriting is harder and more precarious than the one they were handed. Afraid that the things they sacrificed and worked for- the house, the stability, the sense that if you did the right things, the right things would follow- are no longer guarantees. That the promise has been broken somewhere along the way, and nobody told them when it happened.
People are afraid for their parents. Watching them age and wondering how they will afford the care they need. Watching Medicare and Social Security become political footballs and feeling the ground shift under something they were told was solid. Afraid of what it means to love someone who is getting older in a country that keeps making it more expensive to do so.
People are afraid that everything they have worked for is slowly being taken from them. Not by strangers. Not by immigrants. Not by the people they have been told to blame. But by a system that has quietly tilted away from them for decades while keeping them busy arguing with their neighbors. That fear is real. I do not dismiss a single piece of it. What I grieve, what I genuinely and deeply grieve, is what happens to it.
Because that fear is being harvested. Someone is collecting it, shaping it, giving it a target, and pointing it. Not at the people making the decisions that actually affect their lives. Not at the policies that drove up housing costs while protecting the people who profit from it. Not at the lawmakers who have spent decades cutting the programs that might actually help. Instead, it gets pointed at neighbors. At strangers. At people with even less power than they have.
And it is working. That is the part that is hardest to sit with tonight. Fear is consuming people. It is controlling them. It is making them see enemies in the wrong places and miss the ones that are actually there. It keeps people so busy being angry at each other that they don't have the energy left to look up and ask who is actually benefiting from all this division. The answer to that question- who benefits when frightened people fight each other instead of holding power accountable- is always the same. It is the people in power. It is always the people in power.
I do not know how to undo the fear. I do not think one conversation or one month of posts does it. But I think presence helps. I think showing up at the festival table, in the uncomfortable conversation, at the school board meeting, at the polls in June when nobody is watching, is how you offer a different story to people who have only been given one. I think you say, “I see your fear. It is legitimate. And I want to show you where it actually comes from, because the people pointing it at your neighbors are the same ones picking your pocket while you look away.”
The people gathering in this park tomorrow love this country. I believe that completely. Across every difference and every fear and every argument that has been manufactured to keep us apart, they will stand under the same sky tomorrow night and watch the same fireworks and feel something that has no political label. Something older than all of this noise. Something that reminds us, briefly and beautifully, that we are still here together. They are worth fighting for. Every frightened one of them. That is what I am taking into tomorrow. Tomorrow I will say the rest.
— Patrick