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 the ways 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 edges of city after city. The church marquees. The truck stops with their diesel islands and 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 drove from Virginia to California, picking up I-40 for the westbound crossing, then returned through Kansas and Indiana: roughly five thousand miles. 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. The franchise monoculture, the death of regional distinctiveness—these are familiar complaints. By 2022, I had been in America eleven years. I had lived in the same Northern Virginia corridor for most of that time, moved through Walmart and the military and the professional world, and accumulated enough American context that I was not arriving at the road trip with the frame of a fresh arrival.
What the familiar critique can miss is what the sameness provides to the person passing through for the first time.
When I pulled off in Elk City, Oklahoma, at 9 p.m., driving alone and needing food and a known quantity, the franchise was not a symbol of cultural decline. It was the thing I could read. The menu I already knew. The interaction that would proceed in a way I could predict. The sameness was a legibility infrastructure. America had made itself readable at scale.
The same repetition that narrowed local difference also lowered the cost of uncertainty.
As an African on my first drive across America, I was not nostalgic for the regional distinctiveness that had been lost. There was nothing for me to be nostalgic for. What was available instead was the discovery that a country this large had made itself this legible to a stranger. The franchise at the exit said: You are far from where you started, but you are not in a foreign country. You know how this works. I was grateful for it and also aware, by 2022, that the gratitude was data. It told me what kind of traveler this legibility served and what problem the repetition solved.
Texas is larger in area than metropolitan France. I drove across it in a day. Interstate Texas had everything interstate Virginia had shown me: strip malls, Baptist churches, Walmart, and the highway sound made by the same cars on the same pavement with the same white lines.
I drove west out of Amarillo the next morning across 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 beyond the exit to find it.
The difference between Texas and Virginia is real. On that drive, it felt approximately ninety miles beyond the exit.
The observations behind these notes date from June 2011 onward. This drive took place in April 2022. I began 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.