“America is not as divided as it often seems”—it took a 4,000-mile bike ride to realize this

I was outside a gas station in Russellville, Arkansas, just after dawn, when I met Charlie, a homeless African American man in his early 40s, who’d been living with drug addiction for decades and had arrived in town, looking for a fresh start. “I’m just trying to make a new life,” he told me. “I’ve been clean for 10 days now.”

For all of America’s dreamers and winners, Charlie seemed to be living on the dingy and dangerous fringes of society. He slept in a tent beside the freeway and had lost an arm due to drug abuse.

The odds were stacked against him. According to America’s National Institute on Drug Abuse, relapse rates range between 40 and 60 percent. He was, however, eager to work, to go to school, and become an artist. “I want to teach people how to draw,” he told me. “I love art, it’s my passion. I have a drawing; do you want to see it?” And with that he grabbed a sketchpad from his bag and flicked to a pencil drawing of a duck sitting on a rippling pond.

Charlie believed, evangelically, in the ‘American’ tenets of hope, freedom, and small-town pride—values I would encounter time and again across a complex nation that is so regularly misunderstood; in part down to shortening attention spans, shrinking newspaper columns, and social media algorithms promoting controversial opinions while relegating nuance.

Donald Trump so often hogs the headlines. While words like “division” and “broken” occupy the sentences beneath. But to really get under the skin of the USA and its people, I’d decided to travel across it—slowly—on a bicycle, and with a camera and microphone in hand.

Because on this more than 4,000-mile journey between Cape Flattery, Washington, and Key West, Florida—the northwestern and southeastern extreme points of the Contiguous United States—I was determined to meet hundreds of people, just like Charlie.

“There’s beauty like this and people riding bikes, and it gives me hope. Maybe we can rally around some of those cultural things and move past some of the pettiness that divides us.”

- Monte Olsen, mountain biker

I wanted to see if the United States was as disunited as it can sometimes seem from afar—polarized by left and right, blue and red. But most importantly, to travel with my heart on my sleeve, poised for real life conversations, rather than with my head buried in a smartphone.

Sure, there were people who warned me of a nation teetering on the edge of civil unrest. For many, politics had become a hot potato, creating malignant rifts within family and friendship groups.

“I’m pretty negative because I don’t see the will to turn things around,” said Nancy Hutto, an 82-year-old, Democrat-voting, widow who lived in the small town of North Bend, Washington, and let me sleep in her cedar cabin, surrounded by elk with coffee-brown antlers. “They’re [Trump voters] nuts. There’s no logic there.”

But then there were those who believed America could find common ground, outside of the political sphere, in its sport, music and wild places.

“There’s beauty like this and people riding bikes, and it gives me hope,” said Monte Olsen, a mountain biker who I met the very next day in the North Cascades Mountain Range, beneath a lush canopy of hemlock and bigleaf maple trees. “Maybe we can rally around some of those cultural things and move past some of the pettiness that divides us.”

I struggled up and over the Rocky Mountains, into epic Western grasslands once filled with herds of bison. These were some of the emptiest roads on the continent, with barely a cowboy for company.

But both Hutto and Olsen would have been relieved by my findings in Casper, Wyoming—aka Oil City, thanks to the black gold flowing beneath the surface…

Here in Casper, I stumbled across the biggest night in the sporting calendar: The Oil Bowl. The football match has been contested between the town’s two biggest high school teams, the Natrona Mustangs and the Kelly Walsh Trojans since 1965.

The puzzled look on my face gave me away as a tourist, but opened me up to offers of spare sofas, cinnamon buns and pickled gherkins. “Are you supporting any player in particular?” I asked a man in his 70s, wearing blue jeans, leather boots, and a red plaid shirt. “Oh no,” he replied. “I’m just local.”

Across 11 geographically, politically and culturally diverse states, I strived to have conversations with real people on the roadside—citizens with opinions just as valid as the politicians and think-tank clones who scream the loudest.

It seems you don’t always have take sides. Moreover, human life doesn’t get much rawer or self-affirming than watching 22 adolescent boys smash the living daylights out of each other. And for the 5,000 mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters in attendance, that match, and what it stood for, felt more powerful than any hint of discord often portrayed at a national scale.

Across 11 geographically, politically and culturally diverse states, I strived to have conversations with real people on the roadside—citizens with opinions just as valid as the politicians and think-tank clones who scream the loudest.

I met a liberal librarian fighting conservative book bans, a convicted drug dealer struggling to reconcile with the political systems that put him there, and a mayor rebuilding his city after a devastating hurricane.

But behind all these complex stories and opinions, one message seemed to return, over and over again: A pride in American small-town values and a desire to unite behind the principals that bring the country together, rather than the disputes that so often tear it apart.

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