A record 45 million Americans were expected to travel this Memorial Day weekend, long considered the unofficial kickoff to summer. And most of them were hitting the road. Sarah Kendzior is no stranger to the family road trip. Her family, in fact, has visited 38 states—and counting. These trips were born out of a love and curiosity for America and a desire to explore small towns, vast national parks, and the unexpected oddities along the way. And when money was tight, the best way for her family to see the country was simply to jump in the car and go.
In her new book, The Last American Road Trip: A Memoir, Kendzior chronicles those family trips while grappling with a country she believes is failing to uphold its own ideals. She says she feels an urgency to share the country she loves with her children but often wonders whether these travels—and the version of America she knows—might be coming to an end.
“Every trip I describe in that book,” Kendzior says, “I set off wondering: Is this the last time the four of us will get to be together exploring America with the freedom that we have now?”
On this week’s More To The Story, Kendzior chats with host Al Letson about trying to show her children the America she adores while holding a light to its flaws, her concerns for the nation’s future, and why hitting the road is often the best way to understand yourself—and your country.
Credits
Producers: Josh Sanburn and Artis Curiskis | Editor: Kara McGuirk-Allison | Theme music: Fernando Arruda and Jim Briggs | Digital producer: Daniel King | Interim executive producers: Brett Myers and Taki Telonidis | Executive editor: James West | Host: Al Letson
Dig Deeper
Listen: Black in the Sunshine State (Reveal)
Read: Republicans Aim to Generate Support for Selling Off America’s Public Lands (Mother Jones)
Read: How to Travel Abroad as the World’s Most Toxic Brand: American (Mother Jones)
Read: The Last American Road Trip: A Memoir, by Sarah Kendzior
Note: If you buy a book using our Bookshop link, a small share of the proceeds supports our journalism.
Transcript
More To The Story transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. Please be aware that the official record for More To The Story is the audio.
| Sarah Kendzior: | I worried that this would be the last one. Every trip I describe in that book I set off wondering, “Is this the last time the four of us will get to be together exploring America with the freedom that we have now?” It’s my homeland, it’s a part of me. If I had to leave, there will never be another country where I feel at home. And I think a lot of folks feel this way. |
| Al Letson: | It’s that time of year where families are making plans for long weekends and hot summer days. Author Sarah Kendzior is a total road trip pro. She’s road tripped to 38 states, but lately the country outside her car window feels like it’s deteriorating fast into rage, dissolution and mutual misunderstanding. The fate of the great American road trip, coming up on More To The Story. This is More To The Story. I’m Al Letson. Author, Sarah Kendzior is no stranger to traversing the country with kids in tow. Her latest book, The Last American Road Trip, is a memoir of exploring the country by car during some really tough times. The joy in and love for the journey tainted by the fear that someday all of this could be lost. Sarah, I’m so glad you’re here. How are you doing? |
| Sarah Kendzior: | I’m good and doing well. How are you? |
| Al Letson: | I’m good because I am such a huge fan of yours. I’ve been a fan of yours for many, many, many years. |
| Sarah Kendzior: | Well, thank you. |
| Al Letson: | I think it was your first book, View From Flyover Country? |
| Sarah Kendzior: | Yes. |
| Al Letson: | It’s been years since I read that book, but I remember reading it and feeling like the book was a warning. Like, “Hey, this is the path that we’re on and if we don’t make some corrections, this is where we could go.” And your new book, The Last American Road Trip, it almost feels like that path forward that you are worried about is the path that we have, as a country, fully embraced. And what the book felt like to me was, it felt a little sad. This is where we are, and it’s kind of accepting of the fact that that is the path that we are currently on. |
| Sarah Kendzior: | Yeah, more expecting the path than accepting it, because I’m never going to accept this. I don’t accept what’s happened to our country, but it was preventable. The social and political problems that I laid out in The View From Flyover country warned of greater political crises to come. The Last American Road Trip is about the last eight years, 2016 to 2024 and my attempts to show my children this country as I felt it collapse. And now certain things have manifested where we’re in the full throttle of that collapse. For example, showing my children the national parks and now reading articles about mass firings and wondering whether they’ll still exist, they’ll still be open? Things like that. But yeah, it’s a bittersweet book. |
| This is more personal. This is, like you said, showing the result of not addressing those crises in a timely fashion. And I also see it as our problems are top down. I think that they’ve been imposed on us from people above who hold themselves accountable to no one, least of all us. | |
| Al Letson: | One of the things that I love about road trips is it gives me a chance to process. And my first job in journalism was really about traveling the country and telling stories about community. But really, I wanted listeners to understand what it felt like to live in that community, like what the people there were struggling with and what they were trying to overcome. So for me, being on the road has always been an exercise in thinking and contemplating both myself and how I fit into the larger world, but also really trying to get to know this country. And so it was really interesting to me in the book where you talk about that you and your family, this is your thing. You get your kids and your husband in the car and you guys just go out. Your kids have been to thirty-something states? |
| Sarah Kendzior: | 38 states, yeah. |
| Al Letson: | 38 states. I mean, you make me look bad as a parent. |
| Sarah Kendzior: | No. |
| Al Letson: | I think my kids have been to five. |
| Sarah Kendzior: | We live in Missouri, so we’re surrounded by eight states. It’s pretty easy for us to hit at least a few more. |
| Al Letson: | Yeah. So tell me, what have your kids taken away from all of these trips? |
| Sarah Kendzior: | What they took away from all of this, and I’m glad they do, is to disregard any stereotype, anything about what people say about a city or a state or people in particular and see things for yourself. And also that there are wondrous and amazing things that are often denigrated that are not lauded, that people will tell you to stay away from certain areas or certain cities, because they’re “unsafe”. I wrote about Gary, Indiana and how much we enjoyed visiting that, and that’s one of those places that people used to warn to stay away from. They, of course, know this already because we lived in St. Louis, so we’ve heard all of the denigrating remarks. But yeah, I think they also, because I don’t hold back on what I tell them, they know the history of America. They know about Native American genocide, slavery, Jim Crow attacks on immigrants. |
| They know that this is part of American history. They know that what’s happening now is not new. And so when we would travel around, they would see that firsthand. And I think for children especially, it’s a much more vivid thing than learning from a book, is being in the places where this happens. But I think that they came away with more empathy and hopefully a love for their country that will sustain the crisis that we’re in now. A love that will let them know that this is a place worth saving despite its sins, despite its many flaws. | |
| Al Letson: | Yeah, I think from being on the road a lot, and I’ve been to 49 states, I really feel bad though thinking about my kids. I’m like, “Gosh, only five.” But I think the thing that I have been struck with in traveling to so many states is I just don’t understand politicians who are really against the idea of diversity. Because if you spend any time in America, really traveling America, the only thing you can come back with is how diverse it is, both in landscape and people. We are varied people with multitudes of personalities and landscapes and all sorts of stuff. It’s not the monolithic culture at all that some people would suggest it is. |
| Sarah Kendzior: | Oh, absolutely. And that was one of the biggest takeaways, and especially places that are hybrids of so many different cultures intertwining over centuries and producing new things. I mean, St. Louis itself is that way. So that was not an unfamiliar concept for them. There are microcosms of America within America, and I don’t think that any of them are more representative or genuine than others. I think the beauty of America is that combined effect, like pieces of a puzzle being put together, each of them separate and distinct. But it’s the fact that we are held together that makes us, I think, a special country in, one, where we do have shared attributes where they’re encouraged for people to see, for example, the national parks. It’s a beautiful thing to see so many people from all over the country coming together in appreciation. |
| Al Letson: | Well, why did you choose to raise your family in St. Louis? You’re originally from Connecticut, right? |
| Sarah Kendzior: | Yeah, well I lived in Connecticut until, I guess, I was 17. Then I went to college, then I worked in journalism in New York for about three years, and then I went to grad school at Washington University in St. Louis. And whenever I hear the word choice, I’m like, “I didn’t have choice. I had circumstances. While I was at WashU, the global economy collapsed. And so by the time I finished my PhD, I had two small children and no money. And so the idea of moving out of St. Louis, which is a very cheap place to live compared to a lot of other places or a lot of cities in the United States and offers a lot of things, free museums, free zoo, that are really beneficial for parents, I didn’t particularly want to leave. I was very attached to St. Louis because it’s not my hometown, but it’s my children’s hometown. |
| And when your children are born somewhere, you see the world through their eyes and you appreciate things in a different way. And that’s also how I feel about Missouri. And then when it came to travel, again, a lot of this came down to, “Well, we didn’t have very much money, so if we were going to go somewhere, we were going to drive to it.” And if we were going to drive, it often meant driving 13 hours in a day or something like that. And this is a very typical Midwestern thing, but the consequence of that is that they have seen a lot of America. They have seen the back roads, they have seen lots of places that don’t really come to mind as obvious destinations, and I’m glad that they’ve seen that. I think in that sense it is more real than kind of flying into a city for a couple days, getting a little taste and coming back because watching that progression along the way is often one of the most interesting things. | |
| Al Letson: | Yeah, I’m a Floridian and I feel like being from Florida and working in news media, gives me a different perspective. While Florida is on the coast, I don’t really think of Florida as a coastal state. Well actually I feel like Florida is a whole country unto itself, but I don’t know, I feel like it gives me a little bit of a different perspective. Do you feel the same way about being in St. Louis? |
| Sarah Kendzior: | Oh, absolutely. And this was clear, especially whenever I would cover national political events and I was always on a panel with people who lived in DC or New York and were raised there and certainly would never voluntarily live where I was living and looked at me with great pity, like I couldn’t have possibly been happy with the situation that I’m in. I often was the sole representative of just the middle of the country. I was the only one, which I think is strange, just our voices are often thought of as inconsequential. And the same thing happens to the Southwest. It’s not unique to the Midwest and Plains states at all. |
| Al Letson: | As we’ve talked about, you and your family do these road trips all the time, like this is your thing. So why is this the last road trip? |
| Sarah Kendzior: | Well, it’s more the sense of every time we left during this very chaotic period, whether it’s because of political developments or because of COVID or climate change or other things, I worried that this would be the last one. Every trip I describe in that book, I set off wondering, “Is this the last time the four of us will get to be together exploring America with the freedom that we have now?” And I still wonder that. And when you enter a trip with that sort of mindset, you appreciate everything. You appreciate the smallest things. And especially after COVID, when life was transformed and derailed so abruptly, just being out in the open air, being able to go into a gas station, just the slightest things felt so reassuring in their familiarity and so magical. |
| I missed other human beings, I’d missed new experiences and I didn’t know what was going to happen. And I’m grateful every time. So there’s a strong sense of gratitude in that book, but also of vigilance and fear. And I still feel that now. And I hope to this day, every time we get in the car that it’s not the last time we do this, we still have places left to go. We haven’t hit all 50 yet, and that we’ll still have the opportunity and that there will be a United States of America of 50 states to go to. | |
| Al Letson: | Coming up, Sarah says she’s tired of people telling her to move out of the country. If she doesn’t like it, she’s in it for the long haul. |
| Sarah Kendzior: | We have beautiful landscapes. We have, I think, an incredible unique culture, American music, American food. I don’t want to live anywhere else. I don’t want to move. |
| Al Letson: | But before we get to that, we are a couple months into our new show and I am so happy you’ve come along for the ride. So I’m going to ask you for a favor, tell your friends about us. Come on, make it Facebook official. We go together. Look, you and I both know, public media is under threat, but we’re still here reporting the stories that are important to you. Feel free to give us a rating and review to help others discover the award-winning reporting from Reveal. All right, you got that. Okay. Now more from Sarah Kendzior coming up. It’s More To The Story. I’m Al Letson, back with my guest author Sarah Kendzior. Her book is The Last American Road Trip. So Sarah, after traveling the country and seeing all these different locales and different groups of people, what’s your advice on getting people to really talk to each other again? |
| Sarah Kendzior: | Yeah, I mean I think in person, at least in my own experience, the divisions are not quite as blatant as they certainly are online. When you meet people in reality, I think you’re more likely to just give that person a chance in part because you want to avoid confrontation. I think most people, they’re not interested in getting into a giant feud with a stranger in real life, but they may be more than happy to do that multiple times a day with a stranger online. So I think it’s possible. I think we were heading in a positive direction in that respect until COVID arrived. And then what happened was COVID prevented the sort of physical in-person interactions with people that you may not know. |
| And that was just a windfall for the worst political opportunists who took advantage of that to push a lot of hateful rhetoric, to push a lot of propaganda, and also to people rightfully were questioning whether those that they interacted with online were real human beings, were who they said they were. You go in with the kind of default of distrust that’s logical, but eventually it becomes harmful and it can, I think, spill over into “real life”, into in-person experiences where you have the attitude you’ve cultivated being online, interacting a lot, and you begin applying it in real life, eyeing everyone with suspicion. And obviously this is different for every individual, but I think that that’s been harmful and it’s hard to build back that trust. It’s very easy to tear it down. | |
| It takes a lot of effort and openness, and I think if someone is struggling to preserve something or save something, join them in that battle and respect that people in their own locations, they know their land and their neighborhoods better than you as an outsider ever will. And I think just folks should go into viewing the rest of the country, with a very open mind and listen, above all, to the people actually living in these places before making a judgment call. | |
| Al Letson: | I think that in this country, most people feel like the way that America is working right now is not working for them. And what happens is it manifests in really different ways, and I think a lot of that has to do with the media you consume. If you consume media that tells you that immigrants are the problem and you’re already feeling like the American dream is out of reach for you, then immigrants are the problem. If somebody is telling you that your American dream isn’t working anymore because transgender athletes are taking over athletics, then that’s the problem. Versus also people who look at the world from the vantage point of, corporations are the issue. You’re not getting the American dream and corporations are standing in the way. So it’s really about the information that we take in that helps define us in these binary ways. |
| Sarah Kendzior: | Yeah, I think the rage is shared, but at whom it’s directed is different. And I think that there’s been a very successful exploitation of people’s rage in particular by right-wing actors and demagogues by outlets like Fox News or people like Donald Trump to direct frustration about legitimate grievances, economic exploitation, lost opportunity, the purchased merit and credentials now needed to get a basic job to pay your bills. They’ve gotten people to direct that, I think in ways that we’ve seen since the dawn of America. They directed it at marginalized groups, at Black Americans, at Latino Americans, at immigrants, anybody who is not in this White Christian category, even though many of themselves are not in that category. I mean that’s an age-old time-tested tactic of divide and conquer, making sure that people don’t find commonality and rise up against those that are hurting them. |
| They also want to just eliminate I think basic compassion and empathy. We saw a lot of that strained during, I think, the COVID pandemic. I saw people just behave in horrifying ways and I tried to remind myself each time I witnessed that this is coming from a place of pain, and I think as a nation, we haven’t confronted a lot of the painful experiences that we’ve been through over the last decade in particular, but really historically, and when there were attempts to address those grievances, we certainly saw a lot of that between say, basically all the 2010s, all these different social movements that were emerging. There was an incredible backlash, and the backlash is unfortunately what we are living in right now. | |
| Al Letson: | Yeah, I’ve said this time and time again in these interviews, I just believe that America operates on a pendulum. It swings one way you can believe it’s going to swing back hard the other. So DEI was a thing, but it really blew up with George Floyd’s death and all of my group chats with my black friends were extremely skeptical of people talking about race and saying they were going to actually change. |
| Sarah Kendzior: | Yeah, absolutely. I was skeptical as well because they kept seeing what were just purely symbolic displays. Congress dressing in kente cloth, miss if that’s the dominant culture, instead of there being an African-American culture or focusing on statues instead of laws, focusing on words instead of consequences and actions and opportunities for people actually bringing some form of redress for systematic problems that have long been there. That said, it’s horrifying to witness that backlash and the fury that comes with it and the fact that so many of these corporations and these politicians and these pundits who were so allegedly passionate back in 2020 feel no shame in completely backtracking, going the other direction. They live in a climate of conformity. |
| They live in careerist fear, and I don’t think that they have any convictions. Their statements are in fact bound by their lack of convictions, and we certainly are seeing that now in the media in particular. | |
| Al Letson: | So tell me what your America is and why it’s so different from the vision of those who you say want to destroy it. |
| Sarah Kendzior: | I mean, I don’t think there’s any one America and certainly no real America or fake America, there’s no red or blue America. As I’ve been saying for a decade, America is purple. It’s purple like a bruise. It’s a nation held together by disillusionment and pain, and a lot of that pain comes from the fact that we have so many wonderful attributes that are often being threatened or being stolen. We have beautiful landscapes. We have, I think, an incredible unique culture, American music, American food. I don’t want to live anywhere else. I don’t want to move, and I’m very tired of being told to move either out of the country or out of my “Red State of Missouri” in St. Louis, by the way, proving that there’s no such thing as a red or blue state seeing as. Until recently too, my representatives were Cori Bush and Josh Hawley simultaneously. |
| That’s America. I mean, that’s the situation for most folks, is dealing with a lot of different political movements and leaders at once that contradict each other. | |
| Al Letson: | One of the things that was striking to me in the book is that while you’re talking about all of the things that are challenging our democracy, it’s really clear that you really love this country as well, and you’re balancing those two things. I feel like the rage that comes forward in the book comes from a place of love. |
| Sarah Kendzior: | Yeah, I think that’s often true. I get frustrated when people tell folks not to be angry because I think anger is a form of compassion. Anger on someone else’s behalf especially is a form of compassion, and when you see people suffering, when you see them being hurt, when you know that that hurt can be prevented, it’s infuriating. And so I still have that rage now. I’ve had it before Trump. It’s a consistent feature of my life. But yeah, it’s kind of balanced out by other emotions like love and reverence and awe of this country. |
| Al Letson: | There’s a passage in your book that really moved me. Would you mind reading it for me? |
| Sarah Kendzior: | Sure. |
| Al Letson: | And this is towards the end of the book and you are talking to your daughter and she asked you a question. |
| Sarah Kendzior: | All right, so here’s the book. I’ll read that part. I think I know what you’re referring to. My daughter asked me if I loved America and this is what I said. I know it’s what I said because she made me write it down. “I love this country more than anyone I know.” I told her. “But you have to love it honestly. This country has done acts of incredible evil, almost unparalleled evil, and you have to be honest about that. In order to love it, you need to be honest. You can only love the good things and then be honest about the rest, then your love will be honest too.” She nodded and said she understood. “But you have to be that way about people too.” I said, my voice breaking. “And that is the hardest thing.” |
| Al Letson: | Yeah. For you, what does it mean to love this country? |
| Sarah Kendzior: | I mean, it’s a complicated experience. It’s a very overpowering love mixed with frustration. I think it was James Baldwin said something along the lines of, “I love America so much. I feel compelled to criticize it relentlessly.” And I understand that. I feel that same way, because I want it to be better. I want this country that I love to not be full of people who are suffering and hurting and being targeted in particular by the government that claims to represent them. I want the principles that have been put on paper hundreds of years ago to actually be honored in practice. And at the same time, it’s my homeland. It’s a part of me. If I had to leave, I would still be American. If America collapsed, if the United States collapsed, I would still be an American. |
| It’s embedded in me everything from our music and pop culture and landscapes and food. There will never be another country where I feel at home, and I think a lot of folks feel this way, which is why this time is so painful. It is not some abstract political equation to be solved. It’s our daily lives and also our vision of what our children’s life is going to be, and I think that’s the hardest thing. That’s the most painful thing is looking into the future and seeing all of these crises intersecting at once, particularly with climate change, but also with governments and other officials who seem to welcome mass death or tech oligarchs who seem to find an artificial reality and adequate replacement for our lived experience, which appalls me. | |
| It sickens me, and so I worry we’re heading in that direction and that’s one of the reasons I wanted my children to have their own memories of the United States. Not something they read in a book and not something they heard about from me, but something they saw with their own eyes. So that if anyone gives them some fake version of what this country is about or who lives in it and what they believe or whatnot, they’ll know. They will know what is real because they’ll have seen it themselves and informed their own opinion. | |
| Al Letson: | Yeah. You are such a beautiful writer, and when I was reading the book, when I got to the end, the thing that struck me is that there is a aching longing in this book for something better than what we have right now. Big question is, do you think that’s possible? |
| Sarah Kendzior: | Yeah, I think it’s possible. I think sometimes when you’re in a situation that’s as difficult as the one we have now, it’s a matter of mentality. Not that you wish problems away, that doesn’t help at all. You have to confront them directly, you have to acknowledge them, but more seeing beauty within the wreckage. If you can find pleasure and meaning in every very simple kind of experiences, then that can be beneficial. St. Louis has to some respect, built its identity around this, I described City Museum, which is an institution we have here where it’s literally repurposed industrial waste turned into this artistic children’s playground. That’s the kind of attitude that you need to survive a place like this, and you see it in downtrodden and oppressed places all over the world that people still find meaning and creativity and imagination within their experience. |
| But I think that that’s a good way to go through life when so many bigger things or more prestigious things are being stolen from us or being denied to everyday Americans. That said, that doesn’t mean that you just sort of contentedly wait for laws to change or for the bad guys to just magically give up. I think it’s good to be on the ball. But to just make life bearable, I think an appreciation for simple joys before they’re plundered is essential. | |
| Al Letson: | Sarah Kendzior, thank you so much for coming in to talk to me today. |
| Sarah Kendzior: | Oh, thank you so much for having me. |
| Al Letson: | Sarah’s book is called The Last American Road Trip, a Memoir. We’ll put a link for you in our show notes. If you like this episode, I really think you should check out the reveal episode, Black in the Sunshine State. It’s about my trip home to Jacksonville, Florida and how much things have changed and what that meant for Black Floridians. Lastly, just a reminder, we are listener-supported. That means listeners like you. You can help us thrive by making a gift today. Just go to revealnews.org/gift. Again, that’s revealnews.org/gift, and thank you. This episode was produced by Josh Sanburn and Kara McGuirk-Allison. Theme music and engineering help by Fernando Ma-man-yo Arruda and Jay Breezy, Mr. Jim Briggs. I’m Al Letson, and let’s do this again next week, because I guarantee you, there will be more to the story. |