EVERYONE IN THIS PIECE HAS BEEN NOTIFIED AND AGREED TO THE USE OF THEIR IMAGE/LIKENESS.

From August 26 to November 23, I hitchhiked through all 50 states with no itinerary worth trusting, no real idea what I was doing, and, for the most part, no fucking clue what I had gotten myself into. The trip started with a strange proposition. I was asked to join a social media influencer on a trip across the country. I didn't have some lifelong dream of hitchhiking through all 50 states. I didn't have a carefully mapped route or some grand theory about what the trip would mean. I was presented with the idea of an adventure, and for whatever reason, I said yes.

I didn't really think about the decision until it was too late to take it back.

Sometimes you make a decision because you've thought it through. Other times, you make one because the idea of doing something completely insane sounds better than staying home. This was the second kind. I saw the possibility of an adventure and grabbed it before I had time to ask myself what the hell an adventure like that would actually look like. Everything I carried fit into a backpack: a Hi8 camcorder, six disposable film cameras, some clothes, and the vague confidence of a person who has not yet experienced the consequences of his own decisions. I could have photographed everything. I wanted to. Every strange person, every gas station, every shitty motel, every highway shoulder, every town I had never heard of before that morning. But I only had six disposable cameras, and suddenly every photograph had a cost. I had to ration every frame. That limitation changed the way I looked at things.

When you know you only have a few shots left, you start asking yourself whether something is actually worth remembering. Sometimes the answer was yes. Sometimes I took the picture anyway. And sometimes I put the camera back in my bag and decided that whatever was happening in front of me could just belong to me. I think that might be one of the most important things I learned on the road: not every moment needs to be documented to matter. Somewhere along the way, I lost two rolls of film. I'm still not entirely sure where they went. Maybe they were left in a motel. That's the nature of shooting film, I guess. You don't get everything back. So these photographs aren't a perfect record of the trip. They aren't in any particular order. I tried my best to arrange them chronologically, but a lot of the photographs between these moments were damaged, lost, or simply never taken.

That's photography for you.

What you're looking at is what's left.

Somewhere in Fargo. This was the first photo I took on the road, according to the records I have at my disposal.

As I will say more than once, the best part of the road was the people we met along the way. Some people you know will only exist in your life for a single strange, beautiful moment. Others somehow slip past that temporary feeling and become something more personal. That’s how I felt meeting Kyle, along with his roommate, Jack. Kyle and Jack were a mutual connection through my travel companion, Wyatt. Wyatt had stayed with them the summer before while caravanning across the country, which is worth mentioning because my travel partner had already crossed the United States three times before we decided to do it together. Omaha was our first real break in the trip. We had been moving nonstop for about three weeks before finally reaching Nebraska, and by the time we got there, I remember wanting nothing more than to find a bed and disappear into it for about twelve hours.

Something I’ve always struggled with is entering a room where everyone else already has a relationship. If I’ve known someone for a long time and they introduce me to their friends, I turtle. I become awkward, quiet, painfully aware of my body. So naturally, this is exactly how I felt meeting Kyle and Jack. But within about five minutes, that awkwardness started to evaporate, and I was thrown into some of the best days of the entire trip. Kyle and Jack took the next few days to really show us Omaha. We wandered around, hung out, drank, talked, and generally did the kind of aimless shit that makes a city feel like a place rather than a dot on a map. For the first time in weeks, we weren't thinking about where we were going next. We were just there. I even went to see the new Darren Aronofsky movie with Kyle. It was, to put it diplomatically, whatever. I did, however, love Zoe Kravitz. Omaha was supposed to be a pit stop. Instead, it became one of those accidental chapters of the trip that stayed with me long after we left.

“You guys aren’t going to kill me... right?”

Those were the first words Jen ever spoke to us, standing on the side of a highway outside Omaha. We had been waiting for a ride for five hours. At that point in the trip, it was the longest we’d gone without getting picked up. Five hours is a long time to stand around on the side of a road pretending you’re patient. It was our first real test of endurance, and patience is something I have never been particularly gifted with. By hour five, I was losing my mind, and probably losing patience with Wyatt too, when the softest voice came from somewhere behind us.

“You guys aren’t going to kill me... right?” We laughed.

Jen went on to explain that she had always dreamed of picking up a hitchhiker, but had somehow never found the right time or circumstance to do it. She said we had a welcoming presence, that we seemed like the kind of people who weren’t capable of murder. Jen was an Iowa native, married, with two kids. She loved musical theater, ice cream, and the Iowa Hawkeyes. Almost immediately after we got in the car, she told us she was taking us to her hometown of Sioux City, Iowa, where she currently lived. It was about an hour and a half from the speedway where she picked us up. We had started figuring out that gas stations were our best bet for finding rides, which is one of those sentences that sounds completely insane if you’ve never hitchhiked across the country. Jen opened up to us almost immediately, and we did the same with her. There was something deeply maternal about her. Wyatt and I had been missing that, even if we hadn’t really admitted it to ourselves yet.

When you’re young, you spend so much time wanting to get away from your parents. You can’t wait to be independent and make your own decisions. Then you spend a few weeks on the road, tired and lonely and very far from home, and suddenly all you want is for somebody to tell you to eat something and make sure you got there safely. Jen wanted to take us to her favorite sandwich shop in Sioux City and buy us lunch. We told her we were interested, as long as we bought her lunch instead. She agreed. While we sat in the restaurant, we started talking about where we would go next, where we might stay, how the hell we were going to find another ride. I could tell Jen didn't like the idea of us leaving so soon. She still had things she wanted to show us. I'm glad she did. She insisted that we come with her to pick up her daughter from play practice. Then she took us to the Blue Bunny factory, where we got a tour and, naturally, some ice cream. A five-hour wait on the side of a highway had somehow turned into spending the afternoon with a complete stranger and her family. People are scary. I mean, I’ll be the first one to tell you that. People are scary, man. Real scary. We spend so much of our lives being warned about strangers, taught not to trust them, taught that the person standing beside you on the side of the road might be the one you should be afraid of. But it’s moments like this that remind me they don’t have to be scary at all. Jen didn't know us. We didn't know her. And somehow, for a few hours, that didn't matter.She just saw two tired kids on the side of a highway and decided to take them home.

I loved being in the sticks on this trip. The sticks meaning the middle of fucking nowhere. On most days, the biggest thing I would notice was the way of life for the locals. I remember being especially interested when we were in farmland, areas where the nearest grocery store was a Walmart a mile outside of town and the nearest anything else was probably another twenty minutes down the road. My mom, a fellow traveler back in her day, always told me growing up to notice the way other people live because, well, it's important for perspective. I think I finally understood what she meant on this trip. There was something about seeing how people lived when there wasn't a city around them. Life just looked different. I remember feeling more than exhausted on this particular day. We had spent the previous fourteen hours with a pair of rock climbers headed to Arkansas for a climbing competition. They were amazing to us and had been incredibly generous, but after fourteen straight hours of house music, I was ready for some silence. Eventually, we ended up outside Kansas City, where they planned to drop us off. I remember being completely out of it , sitting there and looking out at the landscape, and deciding to take a picture. I have a vivid memory of pulling the trigger on the camera and hearing that little mechanical click from the disposable. I don't remember exactly what made me take it. I just remember wanting to.

***Catalyst For An Argument ; California (?) 2025***

It’s not all sunshine and rainbows. This is Jack. And if you can’t tell, he’s wearing a Freemason ring. We’ll get to that later. To be honest, I vividly remember taking this photograph. I remember the conversation and what happened after, but I couldn't tell you for the life of me where the hell it happened. I remember it being somewhere around the middle of the trip, which, considering we crossed 50 states in 91 days, narrows it down to absolutely nothing. But here's what I can tell you. Wyatt and I were standing on the side of a very popular interstate after hours of waiting for a ride. At this point, we had developed a routine for waiting. First came optimism, then boredom, then frustration, and eventually we would start doing stupid shit just to make the time go by faster. We would act like idiots, yell at passing cars, make jokes, dance around, whatever it took to keep from staring down the highway wondering if we were ever going to leave. Eventually, a man pulled over. He had a thick British accent and his car smelled like fresh tobacco. Not cigarettes. Tobacco. There is a difference. He had a very mellow energy about him and seemed genuinely interested in our adventure. He wasn't asking us a million questions or acting like we were crazy. He just seemed curious about what we were doing. Which brings me to something I should probably have mentioned earlier. We carried around a large cardboard sign, reinforced with plywood, with a map of the United States drawn across it. Every time we entered a new state, we'd have the person who drove us across the border fill in that state. It became this weird little piece of evidence that we were actually doing what we said we were doing. More importantly, it gave people a reason to pick us up. Maybe the sign told them, “Well, they've already made it this far. They haven't killed anybody yet.” It makes me wonder how many people saw that sign, thought about stopping, and then decided against it. How many cars slowed down just enough for the driver to consider it before continuing on? How many people watched us disappear in their rearview mirror and wondered what the hell we were doing? I'll never know. But back to Jack. Jack was eager to learn more about us. He told us, over some sips from his flask, about an adventure he had taken a few years back, similar vibes but in Australia. He said he would be more than happy to put us up for the night and take us ten miles in the morning, but at that point we wanted to cover more ground and get out of whatever state we were in. We told him we'd take his number, and if we didn't hear back, we'd reach out to him. I found his Freemason ring to be very interesting. The Freemasons are a centuries-old fraternal organization built around fellowship, tradition, moral values, and ritual. There is also a lot of symbolism and secrecy surrounding them, which is probably part of what makes them so interesting. We never heard back from him..

They can't say Wyatt Moss didn't try.

This is the person I hitchhiked to all 50 states with, someone who has influenced me in more ways than most people ever have. This is Wyatt. Wyatt is an Atlanta native and an ideas man. One time on the trip, Wyatt had coffee for the first time ever and spent the next hour firing off ideas for content. That pretty much sums him up. To put it simply, he is a content creator, but honestly, he is so much more than that. I first found out about Wyatt after seeing one of his videos on Instagram during my sophomore year of college, about five years ago now. We kept in touch here and there, back before he really blew up, and somehow that eventually turned into me agreeing to spend 91 days hitchhiking across the country with him. Wyatt's biggest success at the time came from his series in the summer of 2024, where he ran a marathon in all 50 states. Yes, he actually did it. And as I'm writing this, he's currently halfway through doing it again. He is a different breed. I know that phrase has been beaten to death by the internet to the point where it barely means anything anymore, but with Wyatt, I genuinely mean it. The guy does not stop. He keeps going. There is always another idea, another challenge, another place he wants to see, another thing he wants to prove to himself. I will admit, and I know he would too, that it wasn't always sunshine and rainbows between us. Spend three months with anyone and eventually you're going to get on each other's nerves. We were two very different people from two very different places and upbringings, and we're both incredibly opinionated, so there were plenty of moments where we struggled to see eye to eye or understand where the other person was coming from. But at the end of the day, we had each other's backs. We both wanted to finish what we started, and we both wanted to finish strong. More than that, Wyatt gave me the opportunity to do things I probably never would have done otherwise. I flew a plane. I summited the Grand Tetons. I came face to face with members of the FLDS. I found myself in places and situations that I wouldn't have even known how to get into without him. He is crazy, but crazy in the best way possible. No one has ever pushed me the way Wyatt did. He made me uncomfortable, challenged me, and constantly pushed me toward things I wasn't sure I was capable of doing. Wyatt is also deeply religious, and throughout the trip we would often talk about faith, God, religion, and what any of it actually means in the modern world. We didn't always agree, but those conversations opened doors in my brain that I didn't even know were there. He made me think differently and question things I had taken for granted. I think that's one of the biggest things I took from traveling with him. The trip wasn't just about the 50 states. It was about everything I experienced while trying to keep up with him. Whatever happens from here, I know I'll always be able to look back at those 91 days and say that I did something completely fucking insane with a guy who refused to stop moving.

These folks waited hours to be let into the state park to watch the sunrise over the Golden Gate Bridge.

Something that was interesting to me was my ability to feel like I was home when I was not. I think when most people think of hitchhiking, it's Kerouac or McCandless, but I don't feel like my experience mirrored theirs at all. We had it easy. We had the ability to stay at a hotel when we wanted to, the ability to get good groceries (you’ll understand this reference later), and most importantly, the ability to have my cell phone, a genuine supercomputer in my pocket. It made me feel like I was always a phone call away from some sort of familiarity. And music. Dude, are you serious? Music was the greatest thing on this trip. Listening to it, finding it, showing it to other people. I mean, it was and is a common language amongst all of us, and having that ability was amazing. This specific photo is of my friend Kit. We talked on the phone or FaceTimed in every state I was in. She was a bedrock of confidence and comfort. Talking to her felt like we were just hanging out, even with thousands of miles between us, and she had a way of reminding me of the scale of the adventure I was on, something that was surprisingly easy to forget when every day started to feel like the last . I remember feeling excited knowing that, when the trip was over, I would be moving to the same city as her. After spending so long constantly moving, the thought of finally being somewhere familiar, with someone familiar, felt like something to hold onto. Funny, now writing this, we’re about a week away from her leaving the city we shared and moving on to another one.

I think that’s why this photo means so much to me. Kit was a little piece of home in the middle of a trip where almost nothing was familiar. She reminded me that no matter how far I went, there were still people who knew me, cared about me, and were waiting somewhere beyond the next state line.

People are the most important thing. Everything else is just scenery.

Anyway, I love this photo. It felt like I needed to talk about it.

***Smoking Cigarettes With The Windows Rolled Up ; 2025***

Forgive me, for I do not remember the man's name I am about to write about, but cut me some slack. I don't think I have, or ever will, meet the amount of strangers I met in such a short period of time again. Names got lost just as we did. I remember spending about five or so hours at the Golden Gate Bridge. I had never seen it before, and we were both tired from waking up so early to see it. Thanks, Jack, Wyatt's friend who took us there so early. It felt very surreal. This was something I had seen my whole life on film and in photos, and now I was standing there. I had never been to SF, and I just thought we should kind of chill for a while. We got a coffee, and Wyatt wanted to go on a run across the bridge and then some, which gave me time to smoke a cigarette I had in my backpack and just look at the bridge and Alcatraz. I propped the sign up while sitting on a bench in case anyone was around.

Finally, this man pulled up to me, and I vividly remember him saying, “You see that plane up there?” Confused, I hesitated and looked up to see a drone-like passenger plane. He then went on to tell me it was some rich tech CEO who flies around a lot. He asked me about my trip. After explaining everything to him, he told us he could take us up north about an hour and a half. Now, we were very, very good at gauging people, whether they were going to be creeps or not, and most of them were the opposite of that. I remember feeling some distrust toward him at first. He seemed too eager to just be stumbling upon me, especially because Wyatt was not there. He even waited for Wyatt. Finally, when Wyatt came back from his run, manic as usual, we packed up. I will say this about Wyatt: he was great at having a “let’s roll, no questions” attitude. I felt like I was contributing to finding a ride. When we got in the car, Wyatt knocked out immediately in the backseat. Thanks, man! Now I’m up here with God knows who. But I was with an interesting man, and I knew I would be safe when his wife called as we were pulling out of the park to hit the highway. His wife was a lovely woman who was calling to see when he would arrive at work. I began to piece together that they were in different time zones. Anyway, she was so sweet to him. He broke the news that we were in the car, and there was a moment of silence before she began to laugh. I got the feeling he was always trying to find something crazy to do. After the phone call, and after he told me about his daughter's upcoming wedding, I knew I could trust him. We then began an hour-and-a-half car ride, which I recorded entirely on Hi8 VHS tape and will hopefully be putting into a larger project about this someday. For the meantime, it was a fascinating conversation. He was an ER doctor in California, but his career was in tribal medicine and reservation medical care, working on reservations to provide healthcare. The funniest part about all of this was that while he was telling me these amazing stories about medicine, health, and his work, he was smoking Marlboro Golds back to back to back. It was awesome. He was fascinating, a madman who told us about his time hitchhiking in the 1970s. It was different then, he told us. Wyatt woke up about halfway through, and the rest of the ride was pretty much just looking out the windows. He brought us to a gas station next to an In-N-Out and left us.

This photo was him signing our sign.

Dude, I love this photo so much I was so happy when I saw it for the first time.

This is the same day as the Golden Gate Bridge.

I love this photo, and I loved taking it. This was California, toward the very end of the voyage, when the trip had started to feel less like an adventure and more like something we were desperately trying to finish. This night was random, strange, and a lot of fun. We got picked up by Chia in Willits, California. Like Jen, she had always wanted to pick up a hitchhiker. It had apparently been a goal of hers for years, which I found hilarious. There was something funny about how many people had apparently spent their lives thinking, “One day, I’m going to pick up a stranger on the side of the road,” and then two idiots with backpacks finally appeared. Chia was a teacher and had a great attitude toward life. This was one of those moments on the trip where we really got to experience a small slice of someone else’s life. We were completely gassed, and Chia offered us a place to stay. We decided it would be best to just stay with her, regain whatever energy we had left, and worry about the road in the morning. At this point, Wyatt and I were done. Completely fucking done. We wanted nothing more than to go home. Instead, Chia took us around her hometown of Fort Bragg, California, about as far west as you can get in the state, sitting right on the Pacific Ocean. I’ve always loved living near the ocean because it makes the rest of the world feel closer. You can stand there and know that somewhere beyond the horizon are places you haven't seen yet. Maybe that sounds stupid, but I’ve always felt it. We stopped at these beautiful cascading rocks where the ocean crashed against them. I remember having an incredibly strong urge to smoke weed while we were there. It just felt right. After hours of exploring, we went to the movies and saw Now You See Me 3, which was, arguably, one of the worst things I have ever seen. Truly awful. But whatever. At that point, I didn't really care. I was exhausted, thousands of miles from where I had started, and sitting in a movie theater in Fort Bragg with a woman who, just hours earlier, had been a complete stranger. After the movie, we walked back to Chia’s apartment. I stepped outside to smoke a cigarette and looked down the street to see this amazing view. I remember thinking it had the same kind of feeling as a Paul Thomas Anderson film. I took the photo and went back inside. It is one of those pictures I know I will have forever.

This is Susie Hicks.

While waiting for a ride in New Mexico, we met Susie. She was eager to pick us up, and it was pretty clear we definitely weren't the first hitchhikers she had ever picked up. In other parts of the United States, hitchhiking is a lot more common than it is back in New England, where I'm from, and Susie seemed to understand the whole thing immediately. She was excited when she met us. She told us she was an Iraq War veteran turned country music superstar, her words, not mine, and she was more than happy to show us her new song. She played it for us within the first ten minutes of being in the car. Let's just say it wasn't the last time we heard the song. We had a good trek ahead of us, and she told us she was willing to take us as far as we needed to go. We decided that simply getting out of New Mexico would be a good start, so she drove us for about three hours. The conversations ranged from politics to music to her idea of “ethical engineering,” whatever the fuck that meant, lovingly. I remember her being incredibly warm and open with us. She told us about her relationships, her struggles, her life, and everything in between. She was telling two complete strangers things that you don't usually tell people you just met. I don't remember exactly where she dropped us off. I don't remember what highway we were on, and I don't remember most of what we talked about during those three hours. But I remember Susie. And I remember that fucking song.

You ever been to the Santa Barbara Zoo while withdrawing from nicotine? Well, you're missing out. Sorry this is so California-based, ugh! This here is one of my favorite stories and one of my favorite people from the trip. Standing in front of a health food store is about the most California place you can hitchhike from, and it was fruitful, to say the least. Wyatt had told me we would have a place to stay while we were in Santa Barbara, but getting there was the hard part. We started hitchhiking in the afternoon, and Santa Barbara was a bit out of the way from where we were. Finally, we found a ride from the health food store to another gas station, where Chris and his wife picked us up. Wyatt had met them on one of his previous trips completely by chance, and they had told him he was welcome back anytime. I remember getting into the car exhausted and not really wanting to talk to anyone. All I had on my mind was a joint. As sad as that sounds, sometimes the simple things are the things you want the most. Our plan was to stay with Chris and his wife for the evening, and in the morning Chris would take us into Santa Barbara proper, where we'd likely have a better chance of finding a ride. A lot of the time Wyatt would just tell me the plan and I'd say, “Okay.” It was a lot easier that way. I trusted Wyatt, though. I don't want that to get confused. After about a thirty-minute drive, we pulled into their driveway and entered the house. I loved it immediately because it felt like home. There were three kids, all grown and moved out by this point, all boys, which was similar to my situation growing up, so I felt an immediate connection to them and a sense of comfort. When we entered the house, Wyatt went for his daily mile, which, as I write this, he now has a streak of upwards of 2,000 days. There I was, standing in the kitchen with Chris and his wife. Chris was a retired firefighter, and my father is also a firefighter, so when I say I related to them, I really mean it. After a minute or two of small talk, Chris looked at me and asked, “You get high?” It was such a dad way of asking someone if they smoke weed that I almost laughed. I said yes. He then told me that he usually likes to take a rip before bed and asked if I was interested. I had been trying not to smoke in front of Wyatt because I didn't want him to think I wasn't focused, and that wasn't why we were doing the trip. But after months of nothing, I was truly desperate. As quickly as I could, I followed Chris into the backyard and then into his garage, where he grew his own weed and smoked out of a cartoonishly large bong. I mean, this thing was fucking enormous. The biggest bong I had ever seen. The funniest part was that Chris had given me absolutely no indication during the first hour of knowing him that this was the kind of man he was. But I guess that's California. The photograph below was taken inside his garage, showing his newest batch growing.

CONTINUED: We smoked and talked about everything from firefighting to California property taxes to the evil land developers who, according to Chris, were slowly ruining the state. He had stories for everything, and I was more than happy to sit there and listen. Eventually, he told me he needed to go to bed but that I was more than welcome to keep smoking. So I did what any responsible young man hitchhiking across the country would do: I stayed up all night in their living room watching reruns of Curb Your Enthusiasm, completely fucking high, with snacks at my disposal. At some point I even DoorDashed Jack in the Box. This is America! It was honestly nice. After weeks of sleeping wherever we could and never really knowing where we'd end up, I was sitting on a couch in a stranger's house, eating fast food and watching television. I felt like I was home. Eventually, I passed out on the couch and was woken up by Wyatt the next morning. I grabbed a quick shower, which was a luxury on the road and something I had started to appreciate a lot more than I ever thought I would, packed my things, and we were off. Chris drove us about an hour into Santa Barbara, where he worked at the Santa Barbara Zoo. His job? Conductor of the little train that loops around the zoo. Probably the greatest retirement job on Earth. We got to spend the morning at the zoo, wandering around and riding the train a few times. It was a great way to start the day, and I remember feeling genuinely sad when it was time to leave. Chris had gone from a complete stranger to someone who had fed us, given us a place to sleep, smoked with me in his garage, driven us into town, and then let us hang around his workplace. We said our goodbyes at the zoo and thanked Chris before heading out toward the main drag, which would eventually lead us onto the Pacific Coast Highway. We had no idea where we'd sleep that night or who we'd meet next. We just had to keep moving. The following photographs are from our walk around Santa Barbara.

You close your fist
The clock continues

Journal Entry in Oregon

One of my favorite things to do is walk around a new city. I always preach that you should explore any place, even your own, like a tourist. While moseying around Chicago on one of our chill days, I needed some time alone, so I walked and walked and walked. At one point, I needed a lighter for extracurriculars and asked the first person I met. That happened to be Mason and his fiancée, Abby. They were happy to share their flame with me, and one thing led to another. We ended up talking about the adventure I was on. They were eager with questions, but honestly, at that point in the trip, the last thing I wanted to do was tell the same story I had been telling for months. I told them that, and somehow, that honesty opened a new door and a new friendship. They met while attending Purdue University. Their first interaction happened when Abby accidentally walked into the men's room at a bar, and apparently, the rest is history. They asked me if I was hungry and offered to buy me lunch. I had to say yes. For the next four hours, I followed them around the city they called home as they showed me their favorite spots and told me stories about Chicago. We ended up getting some bomb-ass dim sum, and somewhere along the way, I forgot that I had only met these people a few hours earlier. That's one of my favorite things about walking around a new city. You never really know what you're going to find. I took this photo right before leaving them, knowing there was a good chance I would never see them again.

***Flagstaff Arizona ; 2025 (digital)***

Meet Lily! I took this photo at a hotel. Lily’s parents are photographers too, and they were really interested in our trip and what we were doing. We ended up talking for a while, and I later sent them a print of this photo. They told me they hung it in their living room in San Francisco, which I love. Out of all the places these photographs have ended up, there’s something especially cool about knowing this one is sitting on a wall in someone’s home.

Walter and Jeanie

One morning, I remember both Wyatt and I having this feeling of dread. We still had multiple weeks left, and things weren't getting any easier. The rides weren't coming as quickly, we were getting more tired, and the novelty of standing on the side of a highway was starting to wear off. There is only so much excitement you can get out of holding a cardboard sign. We were outside of San Jose, California, staying at some little motel on the side of the road, and that morning we walked out to the highway and started waiting. Two hours passed. At that point, we weren't being picky. We were trying to get as far north as possible. Hell, if somebody had offered to take us to Alaska, we probably would've said yes before asking what time we'd get there. Then a gray Tesla pulled over. Inside were Walter and Jeanie, a Silicon Valley tech couple who had been spending the weekend in Santa Barbara and had decided to take a few scenic routes on their way back. Somehow, those routes led them directly to two exhausted hitchhikers standing beside the road. We got incredibly lucky. Walter and Jeanie were smart, curious, and genuinely interested in us. They wanted to know what the hell we were doing and why. Walter worked in tech for a company that had helped shape what LinkedIn eventually became, and Jeanie was an established architect. They told us about their travels, and these two had traveled. They had stories from all over the world, including a trip to Moscow during the Soviet era, which was pretty fucking cool to hear about while sitting in the backseat of a Tesla. At some point, they took us to this completely random chocolate shop tucked into the basement of a warehouse. I have no idea how they found the place. I don't know what was in that chocolate, but I can tell you right now it was the best chocolate I've ever eaten. Maybe I was just hungry. I don't care. It was fucking incredible. After that, they drove us to a friend's house, and honestly, it almost felt like they were showing us off. Like they had found these two hitchhikers on the side of the road and wanted to bring us around and show their friends. And I loved it. We spent about six hours with Walter and Jeanie before they finally dropped us off, and by the end of it, they felt like people we had known much longer than a few hours. The photographs here are from those hours. The first was taken right before they left us. The second is Walter and Jeanie in the parking lot, blowing their noses, which is exactly the kind of completely mundane moment I love photographing. The third is them packing their things into the car shortly after we first met them. None of these photographs are particularly monumental, but to me they are.

Standing on a pier in Houston, Texas, I met this family fishing. They were just hanging out, casting lines, talking, and waiting to see if anything would bite. I asked if I could take their picture, and they were more than happy to let me. They were incredibly friendly and seemed completely unbothered by some random guy walking up with a disposable camera asking to photograph them. I don't remember what they were talking about or whether they actually caught anything, but I remember the scene pretty clearly.

Me holding a sign on the 101.

Erik Mattenson is a papier-mâché artist in Louisiana, and he has even worked with Bread & Puppet, the large political theater movement known for its enormous handmade puppets, masks, and papier-mâché figures. Bread & Puppet has been making politically charged theater since the 1960s, using handmade art as a way to talk about war, capitalism & power. Their whole philosophy is basically that art shouldn't belong exclusively to museums, galleries, or rich people. It should be cheap. I met Erik at a restaurant in Baton Rouge, and somehow, as tends to happen on these trips, a normal meal turned into me following a complete stranger back to his workshop. He showed me around and explained how he worked, how these strange little sculptures and figures went from paper and paste into something with a personality of its own. There was something really beautiful about seeing the process up close. Papier-mâché is such a simple material. Paper, glue, time, and a little imagination, and somehow you can turn that into a person, an animal, a monster, a political statement, whatever the hell you want. Erik's workshop felt like a place where all of those things were possible at once. I loved that. After spending so much of the trip surrounded by concrete, highways, gas stations, and the machinery of getting from one place to another, there was something refreshing about being in a room where the raw materials were basically trash and the end result could become anything.

Wyatt walks down the stairs on the way to pick up a load of laundry which was a luxury on this trip.

***Music Box Theatre Jackson Mississippi ; 2025***

While we were at Iron Creek Lake in Spearfish, South Dakota, we met Jon and his family. We were up there swimming and taking some time to relax, which we really hadn't done much of before this point in the trip. We met Jon while he was fishing with his family and friends, and after we told him what we were doing, they were eager to invite us to stay with them. Jon told us about an Airbnb he had been renovating to make some money during the slower seasons since he wasn't there year-round. We agreed, and they told us they would meet us in town around 6 p.m., so we had some time to kill. We went swimming for a while longer and eventually made our way back into town. Finally, after about an hour of waiting around, Jon and his family pulled up in their side-by-sides and took us through the back roads to their house, which was more like a mansion. Jon was newly divorced and living with one of his sons, although he had three children. We met Alexis and Eric, and over the course of the night we ended up talking for hours. We had met these people that same day, and suddenly we were sitting around drinking together like we'd known each other for years. We stayed up until around 3 a.m. drinking and laughing. It was probably the drunkest I got during the entire trip. Looking back, I don't think I need to make this night sound like anything more than it was. We just spent a night with a family we'd met that afternoon, but something about it felt right. It felt like we were supposed to be there. I don't mean that in some deeply religious sense, or that I think some higher power was carefully arranging our itinerary. It just felt like one of those moments where everything happened to line up, for one night we became part of their lives. Alexis and Eric stayed in contact with us for the rest of the trip, and somehow, even now, we still keep in touch. That's one of the things I didn't expect when I started this trip. I thought I was going to collect states. Instead, I met people who I still talk to today. The only photograph I took that night was of Jon's workbench. I wish I had taken more.

Nothing special, really. Just a basketball hoop in Arkansas.

Alaska; none on film :(

This photo was taken in Honolulu about three hours before we left for the airport to fly back to Boston. There was a market going on downtown, and I think Wyatt and I had agreed that this Friday after Thanksgiving would be our day to take some time for ourselves, walk around, think, and just be alone. Before this, we had rented mopeds and ridden around the entire island of Oahu. It was a magical day, one of those things I know I'll remember forever. Thank you, Wyatt. I remember feeling extremely sentimental that day. Extremely nervous. Extremely anxious. I mean, I had basically put my entire life on hold for months, and in about ten or eleven hours, I was going to be right back in it. That was terrifying to me. The idea of going from hitchhiking through all 50 states to suddenly being home, back in my normal life, was a scary thought. At the same time, I felt motivated. I had just done something I never thought I would do in a million years. For months, this strange life had become normal. I had gotten comfortable with waking up without knowing where I would sleep, standing on highways waiting for strangers, meeting people for a few hours and then never seeing them again. And now, all of a sudden, it was going to be over. I remember feeling sappy about it. Being in Hawaii made that feeling even stranger because we stayed with Sky, a good friend of Wyatt's who we had stayed with the last time we were there. I had actually joined Wyatt on his 50th and final marathon in Hawaii, and I shot the whole thing for him, so this was our second time together on the island. Sky was incredibly welcoming. He showed us around again, let us rent surfboards, and let us borrow his moped, of course, lol. He had this life that seemed almost fictional to me. He teaches surfing in Hawaii. He rides around on the beach. He wakes up and somehow this is just his life. It felt like he and I were living in completely different realities, but it was nice to connect with him through that. I remember being in Hawaii in this strange haze. I smoked, walked around, got in the ocean, surfed, and generally did whatever I could to avoid thinking too hard about what was coming next. Maybe that was the point. There wasn't much left to figure out. The trip was over. The flight home was waiting. And eventually, we had to get on it. I remember that flight being incredibly emotional. I was still trying to understand what I had actually done. Then came the Honolulu airport. Walking away from Wyatt felt like something out of a movie. We had spent months together, days together, basically every waking second together, and then suddenly we were standing in an airport turning in opposite directions to go home. That's it. See you later. It was over. After everything, it was over. I'm glad we did Hawaii last.

TO PUT A BOW ON IT.

You just read about what an accomplishment this was, so I'm not going to close on that. I don't really want this to be a story about an accomplishment anyway because it was essentially glamping. If there's one message I want to leave you with, it's simple: explore your world.

I think we're living in a time when people are increasingly scared of the world around us, and rightfully so. The world is a fucking scary place. There are scary things happening. There are scary people. It's not all sunshine and rainbows, no matter who wants to tell you that. But experiencing that world, the good and the bad, is part of being alive. My favorite quote of all time is, “To see is to live.” I think that's so true. If you want to live a life worth talking about, worth remembering, worth actually being a part of, you have to see how other people live. See how your neighbors live. See how people on the other side of the country live. See how people you disagree with live. Explore your own city like a tourist. Walk down a street you've never walked down. Go somewhere you've never been. Talk to somebody you normally wouldn't talk to. You don't have to hitchhike across 50 states to do this. There are so many people I met on this trip that I didn't even write about. Paul and Aaron. Ken Fanger. Hell, I could probably write an entire book about just those three people. There are stories I haven't told and probably never will. Not because I'm trying to be pretentious or mysterious, but because there is something special about keeping certain things for yourself. Some memories belong only to the people who were there. I think we've lost some of that. Everything gets photographed, posted, archived, uploaded, explained. Sometimes I think it's nice to have something that exists only in your own memory. A night that nobody else knows happened. A conversation that only you remember. A person who passed through your life for six hours and somehow stayed there forever.

I think it's important to travel. I think it's important to see how other people live their lives. Because if you stay inside the same bubble your entire life, eventually you start believing the bubble is the whole world. I grew up in a small town where there wasn't always a whole lot going on. The same people, the same places, the same routines. And there is nothing inherently wrong with that. There is comfort in it. But comfort can become complacency very easily. You get used to where you are.what else you could learn, what else you might become.

You get one life. One weird, short, confusing opportunity to be here, and there are people who spend the entire thing afraid to leave what they already know. Yeah, I'll say it. I think that's ignorant.

If you spend your whole life in the same place, meeting the same people, having the same conversations, doing the same things, never challenging yourself or seeing anything outside of your little corner of the world, then what's the point of this? That's what these photographs are. They're not a complete record of the trip. They're not even close. They're just the pieces I managed to hold onto. I think it's important to explore the world. I think it's equally important to explore yourself. Sometimes those two things happen at the same time. There isn't some overarching meaning to this piece. There isn't some great historical statement I'm trying to make. This isn't Vice News. This isn't an investigation. This is a personal journal. It's a collection of photographs, stories, people, places, and memories that I wanted to put somewhere before they disappeared.

I just wanted to share what I had.

So if there's one thing I want you to walk away with, it's this:

See the world how you want to see it.

And then go see it.

And This Is Where You’ll Find Me

Road Trip Through a Dreamland