I returned to Seattle on Saturday after a week on the road – or rather mostly in the air, flying back and forth among some pretty obscure places around America’s vast midsection. It’s good to be home and, even more, to be looking forward to spending next weekend nowhere but here, in my own house.

Last week’s whirlwind tour gave me tantalising glimpses of places I know I’ll need and want to revisit next fall when I travel to write my planned book Home Free: An American Road Trip. After I wrote here a week ago about spending an afternoon in Martinsville, Indiana, rather nostalgically setting it up as a representative Midwestern small town, a black friend informed me that Martinsville used to be a hotbed of the Ku Klux Klan. That would explain, I suppose, the 98.62 per cent of Martinsville’s residents listed as white on the town’s website.

Similarly, my friend John Singleton took me to task for failing to do justice to Houston two weeks ago. “Personalising the freeway issue, by naming it ‘Houston,’ is a bit hasty,” John argued.

"… Houston is, actually, the anti-Seattle, ground zero for our refineries and terminals, home and hub for a global model that is going to dry up. Those freeways move millions to and from an amazingly diverse economic base, but one which began with petroleum, and thus Houston’s links – both direct and indirect – to much of what you write about (including an educated and thriving Pakistani upper class) makes it pertinent. In that sense, those freeways seem like an easy jab – or as in the case of William Least Heat Moon’s Blue Highways, the main argument to get off of them to see the real world."

I might argue in my defense in both cases that journalism is a first draft of history, sometimes a very rough draft, and that my first impressions are just that, thus inevitably incomplete and provisional. But I’m not here to argue. (Of course now, especially after reading John’s challenge, I must strive on my road trip and in my book to do a measure of justice to Houston.) What I’m here to do in these weekly dispatches is to seek and tease out the topics, themes and locations that I’ll be in a position to treat with fuller attention and respect a year from now, when I’m traveling around America on the ground researching Home Free. Which makes it feel all the more auspicious to have received this nice note from Brent Kent, whom I don’t know, on my Facebook page:

"Ethan, I am from Martinsville, Indiana. Contact me the next time you are passing through, and I will happily give you an introduction. When I escaped, I toured the heartland from the Atlantic to the Pacific on my bicycle, spent some time in Palestine after college, and always find excuses to come back home."

Come to think of it, Brent’s experience and personal choices read like my own in a nutshell. I’ve lately been telling my fellow Americans that, nearly 20 years ago, I (figuratively) ran screaming away from a country I found intolerably self-regarding and boring; that I didn’t return to live here until 2006, and even then to as geographically and culturally peripheral a city as exists in the contiguous lower forty-eight states; and that I’m belatedly discovering that America became a much more interesting country during my years away – or maybe that it was interesting all along, but I just didn’t know it.

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