This is an excerpt from my recent book, Lessons From The Good Books, What a Reading Addiction Taught Me About America, Music & Sports ©2016. The “Lessons” are set off in bold type.

Bismarck, North Dakota, is the bulls-eye of America, equidistant from the Pacific and the Atlantic, and from the Arctic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico. Me and my oldest son had the occasion not too long ago to pretty much drive through the whole of America, east to west. Along the way, we solved a lot of the country’s problems. 

We have A LOT of land, much of which seems to be surplus. The problem is that in almost every state the bulk of its population is piled on top of each other in a single, concentrated city or region. In the 1700s one-fifth of all the American colonists lived in Virginia. We could do away with all this yakking about overpopulation if we just made people spread out. For example, Nebraska, Colorado and Utah have tons of extra space; these states are basically empty across about 85 percent of their land mass. So if everyone would just stand up, face north and shuffle about 30 miles to their right we’d be good. OK, ready, go! Of course, all this extra land is on account of the American government over the years being really, really good at acquiring land.

Holy crap, invest in real estate. At the end of the Revolutionary War, the Paris Treaty had the Brits giving us all the land east of the Mississippi River. This was a pretty good haul considering that the thirteen colonies essentially only occupied territory along the eastern seaboard. It gets better. In the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the Mexican-American War in 1848, we gave Mexico some dough and they gave us 1.2 million square miles, increasing the U.S. land mass by 66 percent. Sweet. And then, just because we could, we bought Alaska from the Russians in 1867 for $7.2 million, about two cents an acre, adding 7,000 miles of American coastline (this transaction trumped the Louisiana Purchase where we paid a whopping average of about four cents an acre). The Mexicans, Brits and Russians were only too happy to make a little extra cash seeing as how they were selling land that belonged to the Indians anyway. As if all this real land wasn’t enough, we could always just make more, starting with the Island of Manhattan, as thirty-three percent of lower Manhattan is landfill, much of that fill being trash.

As we made our way across America we noticed that there needs to be a lot more signage. The Mississippi River gathers water from 40 percent of the continent from Buffalo to Wyoming, encompassing thirty-one states and two Canadian Provinces. Ya, like that. I mean, we don’t need to be entertained, but can’t everything just be labeled? Around every bend I had questions. Who does all this land belong to? What’s growing over there? I’m in the desert but I see snow on that mountain, how far am I from it? What’s the elevation? Is that water over there just a big puddle or did someone put it there? Uh-oh, there’s a “runaway truck lane,” how does that work? Yep, everything needs to be marked. It doesn’t have to be with neon signs or such, you could spell things out in rocks if that would make you feel better. Highway 61 is the main thoroughfare of the blues (and they say, the Mississippi River is the bloodstream of the blues); it begins in Duluth, Minnesota, and ends in New Orleans.

Because we’re jerks, as we took our east-west drive across America the Beautiful we voted on whether or not we’d let individual states stay in the Union. For a lot of the “square” states, you could make it from one end to the other in six hours or so. This gave us plenty of time to determine a state’s destiny. Our decisions were based on a few fairly serious factors: the general state of the landscape, the price of gas, colorful things you could see from the highway, the quality of snacks at the gas station, the design and color of the state’s license plate, etc. Needless to say, if our verdicts were binding, our flag would require a few fewer stars. Germany tried to get Mexico to fight with them during WWII by offering them the return of Texas, New Mexico and Arizona after the war. Losing Texas would have been rough. The other two? I wonder what we could get for them today? 

There are a million ways to live a life here in Americaland, none better than the other except in the minds of the people living there. You can’t separate the people from the land, they are interchangeable. From the four corners of the earth people came. They came for individual reasons, but mostly they came to test the American concept, to validate the promise of opportunity. And in virtually all instances that opportunity was defined by land—a patch of dirt, an expanse of trees, a green valley, a rocky hilltop that could be theirs and that was all but unattainable in the rest of the civilized world. This American geography today forms the bedrock that holds our ancestors’ bodies and our children’s future. Mount Katahdin in Maine is the spot where the very first rays of sunshine touch the USA every day … “Through the night with the light from above.”