I drove across America in April 2022 and the thing that surprised me most was how much of it looked like Virginia.
Not the landscapes — the landscapes were genuinely different in ways the photographs promise and the body confirms. The red rock of New Mexico is not Virginia. The Grand Canyon is not Virginia. The Mojave approaching Las Vegas at dusk is not Virginia. These were as advertised and better than advertised.
But the towns. The suburban commercial strips. The franchise restaurants at the interstate exits. The Walmart Supercenters at the edge of every city large enough to sustain one. The church marquees. The truck stops with their diesel islands and their aisles of beef jerky. The gas station attendants in fourteen states who asked the same question — "You need anything else today?" — in the same register of professional warmth that meant the transaction had concluded.
I had driven I-40 west from Virginia to California, returned via Kansas and Indiana. Roughly five thousand miles. And the impression that settled over the drive was that America had built a single town and reproduced it across three thousand miles of varying geography.
This observation is not original. Americans have made it about themselves for decades, with varying degrees of lament. The franchise monoculture, the death of regional distinctiveness — these are familiar complaints. By 2022 I had been in America eleven years, had lived in the same Northern Virginia corridor for most of it, had moved through Walmart and the military and the professional world and accumulated enough American context that I was arriving at this road trip with a different frame than a fresh arrival would have had.
What the familiar critique misses is what the sameness provides to the person passing through for the first time.
When you are driving alone across an unfamiliar country and you pull off in Elk City, Oklahoma at 9pm needing food and a known quantity, the franchise is not a symbol of cultural decline. It is the thing you can read. The menu you already know. The interaction that will proceed in a way you can predict. The sameness is a legibility infrastructure. America built itself readable at scale.
Texas is larger than France. I drove across it in a day. It had everything Virginia has — strip malls, Baptist churches, Walmart, the highway sound made by the same cars on the same pavement with the same white lines. I drove out of Amarillo the next morning into the Llano Estacado and the sky was bigger than Virginia sky. Texas had kept something the franchise strip had not consumed. You had to drive far enough from the interstate to find it.
The difference between Texas and Virginia is real. It is approximately ninety miles from the exit.
These notes were made between June 2011 and the present.
I started writing them down in 2026.
The gap is not an absence — it is the difference between experiencing something
and understanding it well enough to put it on a page.