From sea to resilient sea

It was a haul, but we finally made it to Washington, coming in with a cold front that has compelled locals and visitors alike to dress as if on an Icelandic expedition as they navigate sidewalks filled with souvenir kiosks and security barriers. It’s supposed to warm a bit for the big day -- the combined body heat of a million-plus people alone ought to be worth a few degrees of warmth.

Ours was by no means the direct route. Times photographer Kirk McKoy and I headed out from Los Angeles six weeks ago, meandering mostly by rental car across this vast land and into the lives of dozens of Americans at this moment of transition.

Plumbers and petroleum barons, Las Vegas imams and New Orleans hurricane survivors, auto dealers, music teachers, truckers and mayors, peaceniks, Vietnam vets, even a self-proclaimed prophet of doom -- we met all of these and more along the way.

The viewpoints, as one might imagine, were all over the map, but there were some common themes.

Again and again, we heard people express their frustration with the present and fears about the future, and then conclude with a message of hope. Americans are a resilient tribe, and in these hard times it’s a virtue that serves them well. Stoicism aside, concern about the economy crept into almost every conversation.

A member of the marching band at a high school outside Detroit mentioned that his dad would not be traveling here to see him perform in the inaugural parade: “He works in the auto business, and he just got laid off the other day. It’s the second time in two years.”

The owner of a barbecue restaurant in Cairo, Ill., asked about racial tensions that in the late 1960s tore his town apart, said that there was no longer room for segregationist attitudes: “Everybody’s money is green, and that is what this town needs these days.”

In Utah, at the end of a strange sort of Bible study led by a Mormon outcast who considers himself a prophet, a transmission mechanic became agitated when we turned the discussion to politics. Squeezed on a couch with other followers, this young man raged about the greed of automakers, the incompetence of financiers:

“And now all of them are coming before Congress to ask for a bailout,” he fumed, voice rising. “They want my money to stay afloat! Well, nobody’s going to bail out the transmission business, are they?”

His secular passion seemed odd only in that he and the others had just spent more than an hour convincing themselves that the Apocalypse was due any day, and certainly before the inauguration, in the form of a nuclear holocaust.

We saw a lot of country -- cutting across the Nevada desert, through the gorgeous red mountains of southern Utah, down Arizona, across the West to Texas, up from New Orleans to the Great Lakes, through the Ohio Valley and finally over the Appalachians to here.

The beauty and vastness of the land is something that can be appreciated only by this kind of crossing. To get out into the country also is to gain a new perspective about where it stands, and I think we came away feeling better about things than when we left Los Angeles.

“What do you think?” I asked Kirk as we moved through Maryland on the trip’s final leg.

“I think a lot of people are hurting,” he said, “but there’s also a lot of hope out there.”

“Hurting and hoping?”

“That’s it. Like my dad says, ‘Don’t need a handout, but I could use a hand-up.’ ”

Kirk and I hadn’t worked together much before, but we got along well. This was a good thing, given the number of long rides we shared, gaping at the scenery and trying to figure out where to stop next. This was a trip with only the barest itinerary -- start West, end East.

We made very few appointments. Instead, we’d drop into a town, scout about a bit, knock on doors. Strangely enough, people would open not only their doors, but often their hearts as well. We came to trust in this openness of Americans.

It seemed as if every small town we visited had a Wal-Mart on its edge, and every Wal-Mart was stuffed with shoppers. Similarly, on every interstate we traveled there was heavy truck traffic.

I remember in particular a Saturday night in Paducah, Ky. I had gone to the sprawling Kentucky Oaks mall in search of a blank cassette for my tape recorder. This was in January, well beyond the Christmas rush and post-holiday sales.

Nonetheless, the parking lot was packed, and so was the mall. Perhaps this was only a reflection of entertainment options in Paducah, but I took it as a reminder that, alarming statistics and doomsday headlines aside, there is still a lot of commerce going on in this country. And if the psychology of fear can somehow be reversed, maybe the numbers will follow.

Which leads us to President-elect Barack Obama, and his message of hope and change.

We met hard-core conservatives who flat-out do not want to grant him even the briefest of political honeymoons.

“What kind of honeymoon did Bush get?” groused an oilman in Midland, Texas.

And yet most people we met expressed some degree of hope that Obama would turn out to be a change agent at a time when the nation certainly could use some change, spare or otherwise.

As we moved closer to the inauguration, and further away from any election night glow, qualifiers began to creep into assessments about how the new president will manage. People would list the litany of crises he will own, come Tuesday: recession, two wars and that relentless beast known as “politics as usual.”

“He will try to bring change,” a security guard from Pakistan told me outside the Las Vegas mosque where he prays. “But can you change the good old boys? The president only has so much power. It’s the system that needs to be changed.

“It is broken, like a wagon wheel. And not just one spoke, do you know what I mean? The axle is our system, and the axle is corrupt, and the axle needs to be changed. Can he change that? I don’t know.”

Though it might be smart for Obama to revisit California Atty. Gen. Jerry Brown’s long-ago mantra about lowering expectations, for many African Americans we talked to he already has exceeded them.

With a uniform lack of cynicism, blacks tried to explain why his victory meant so much to them, conversations that traveled back to slavery and segregation and the ongoing slights they encounter still.

It divided, though, along generations -- older people tended to be the most emotional about the victory’s meaning, middle-aged blacks less so, and the younger ones sometimes were a little bit perplexed why so much attention was paid to skin color at all.

Interestingly, without prompting, many people, black and white, brought up Obama’s biracial background. There were whites who seemed to want to put an asterisk on the moment, to suggest that Obama was not quite the first black president.

There were blacks who would remind us that, back in the day, a single drop of black blood was enough to hold someone in slavery. And there were those who maintained that the whole point of Obama’s victory was that none of this should matter.

Ryan Bowen, a 22-year-old Occidental graduate, himself part black, part Native American, put it this way:

“Race still matters, but Barack is black. He is the blackest person alive right now.” And here he chuckled. “But race is absolutely socially constructed, and in our society we have made him very black.”

We had caught up to Bowen in the middle of New Mexico’s high desert, a lone figure riding his bicycle east on the interstate. He was headed for the inauguration, and he had a long way to go. It already was mid-December, and we wondered whether he could make it.

Well, it turns out that he will pedal into Washington today, leading in triumph a convoy of bicyclists and TV trucks he’s picked up along the way -- a rolling example of what the president-elect calls the audacity of hope.

“And hope,” Bowen had told us back in New Mexico, “is about all that we as a country have right now.”

It’s not a bad place to start.

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peter.king@latimes.com