Which is why I was back there. I knew by then that I would be traveling across the country, and I wanted to begin at my Plymouth Rock, retailed and barricaded as it was. More than 10 years ago I had decided that I would one day travel the country, walking and breathing every state, a sort of fulfillment of my new citizenship. I didn't know when or how that journey would take place. It turned out to be now.
Immigrants like to journey back through their genealogy and return to the land of their ancestors.
I am reversing course. I want to journey out from my past into the land I have chosen to be mine and immerse myself in its multi-meridian moods. In the next 51 weeks I will draw a portrait of the nation as it is today, but it will be an intensely personal portrait, my landmarks in every state having more to do with impressions than monuments. I picture myself writing my children's cultural genealogy, with the ink, or ink-jet, of an immigrant. And I don't pretend to set down universal truths.