James Fallows - Our Towns: A 100,000-Mile Journey into the Heart of America

This book is the story of journeys that took place over more than four years, from preliminary and planning trips late in 2012 through our final cross-country travel at the start of 2017. Our goal has been to portray the people we spoke with and places we visited at specific moments in time.

Time has not stood still in any of these cities, and inevitably circumstances have changed from what we originally saw. Some people we interviewed have changed jobs, retired, gained or lost political office, moved to different parts of the country. At least one of them has died. Many of the businesses we describe have grown and prospered. At least two of them have failed. Cities and their populations have gone through political and cultural changessome for the better, but not all. In a few important cases we have noted these changes, but for the most part we have left our account faithful to what we saw and heard when we were on-scene. This account draws on extensive notes we made each night while on the road, a practice based on the belief that wed remember and capture impressions more vividly during the same day than ever afterward. It also draws on reports we posted along the way on The Atlantics website, and on later follow-up interviews. Reflecting this mix of reporting over an extended period, some of the narrative is left in present tense, describing what we saw at the time: the downtown is recovering. Other parts are in past tense: the mayor told us.

For most of the cities we describe here, we made two or even three reporting visits, initially to get our bearings and then to follow leads or observe specific events. Usually those trips were only a few weeks apart; a few were separated by months. For clarity weve combined the results of the separate trips in our accounts of each town. In one case we discussed findings of a later journeyto Louisville, in 2016in a sequence of earlier reports, because of the thematic connections. For completeness, the map on the front endpaper of the book includes cities that were important to us in our travels, among them a few that are not extensive parts of the final narrative. In some cases, the year-by-year grouping of cities within the text differs from the color-coded travel dates shown on the map; that is so we could better connect related themes in the book. For instance, the long flight from the East Coast to the West that began our West Coast travels occurred at the end of 2014, but for narrative coherence it is presented as the introduction to 2015.

Alternating sections of the book are written by James and Deborah Fallows. A small symbol at the beginning of each section indicates its author: an airplane for Jim, a quill pen for Deb.

Redlands, California, 2018

Introduction

2017: A Last Trip West

Montgomery County traffic, Cirrus Four-three-five Sierra Romeo taking Runway one-four, VFR departure to the west. Montgomery.

DEB FALLOWS

And with that, we were off, flying away from frigid Washington, D.C., and its political postelection turmoil, on a southerly route to California.

We had flown nearly one hundred thousand miles in nearly four years in our small plane, with Jim as pilot and me in the right seat. We began in my home territory of the Upper Midwest, then headed over to Maine and flew south through New England and the Mid-Atlantic states to Georgia and Florida. We swept farther through the Deep South, to Texas and the Southwest, up the Central Valley of California to Oregon and Washington, and closed the loop after leaving Montana. All the while we snaked in and out of the so-called flyover country, through Wyoming, Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, West Virginia, and much more.

We have landed in dozens of towns and cities along the way, anticipating in each of them local stories that would organize themselves into some kind of composed narrative about the backbone and character of the region and maybe beyond that, to help explain the character of the country. We began by looking for towns with positive energy, with signs of rebound from some kind of shock or shift, like a mine or factory that had closed or waves of people whod departed or newcomers whod arrived. We ended up adding towns with down-and-out reputations where we truly feared for what we might find. Life upon landing was never quite what wed planned.

We have stayed in towns for weeks at a time. We have often revisited them, following threads from one person, or one group or town institution or movement, to the next, settling into the local rhythm. We have gone to town plays and musicals, sat in on civic meetings, hung out at coffee shops and brewpubs, spent days at schools, libraries, and ball games, taken tours of downtowns, visited factories, start-ups, and community college classes, taken boat rides and bike rides, swum in local public pools and run on high school tracks, borrowed cars, and stayed in motels, private homes, and one-off eco-hotels. We remained long enough to begin to imagine how much we didnt know, but also to appreciate the unusual opportunity weve had, in seeing a broader sampling of modern Americas realities than most of its citizens will ever have a chance to do.