It all starts with the cops rolling up. I pretty much knew it would happen. Late on night seven, before leaving Minneapolis, I have writing to finish and I’m too tired to concentrate in a bar. Parked on a noisy road, I move up looking for a side street. Up a huge hill, switchbacking the other way, and suddenly the houses became mansions, the side streets promenades with retro spherical street lamps hanging from iron arches. So, this is Rich St Paul. 

Park up in a nice street in America for any length of time, and somebody will dime-drop. The vibe is palpable. Which I kind of want to dare them to. I figure it will take thirty minutes; I get two hours. And while it turns out fine, it is still stupid. I can bluff my way past most cops by being white, big, and male. They’re people, they’re often pleasant. But there is always the risk that if they are moved to become unpleasant, they can take that to any extreme without repercussion. Draw one guy’s impulsive dislike, and your best case is sitting on the curb for an hour while he tears the car apart. But I’m impatient and stubborn and annoyed at the prospect in advance, so I roll the dice.

It’s only on visiting the US that you realise there are cops everywhere. We’re used to them being wall-to-wall on American TV, but they’re as prominent in real life. Most of them are in cars, most of them with nothing to do, some of them looking for something to do. The most modest towns have squadrons cruising the streets. They park up at train stations, strip malls, beaches, they camp along the highway, they have spots reserved for them with a pulsing blue light at the front of Walmart lots. They don’t drive Blues Brothers squad cars anymore, either, they’re all in steroid-pumped beast trucks, with chin-high grilles and mounted spotlights so ruthless they cause involuntary dysentery. 

So I know what’s up when an engine hums up behind me and it’s like the MCG lights just turned on. I take a moment to stay calm, then keep typing. They always take ages to get out of their seat, and my window is open. It’s best not to look like you’re changing anything. “How you doing?” he says, eventually sauntering up. Muscled sandy young guy, cheery. “Good, just doing some work.”.

“We had a couple of calls from people who I guess didn’t recognise you. You from around here?”

“Actually, I’m from Australia.”

And that was that. He’s delighted, the questions came. Whoa, Australia? What are you doing here? Great! Where have you been to so far? 

If there was any doubt I was harmless, that is solved by admitting that I’ve spent the day in the library archives. So we chat travel tips, and the best spots to see next, and he says he’ll call those anxious residents back and tell them to relax. “Welcome to Minnesota!” is his farewell.

His main recommendation is Winona, a town along a valley down the river a couple of hours southeast. Why not say yes? I take my time to finish writing, making sure not to let the residents think I’ve been chased off, then drive out of town and sleep until dawn to time my drive. It’s a spectacle. Soundtrack: Lorde, Pure Heroine. Sunlight: gradual. The Mississippi at this point is the scale of a normal river, not the one-way ocean that it becomes down south. But it still bucks back and forth, fattening into almost lakes before returning to its river ways. Squirrels dart across the road (“Squirle!” my brain keeps saying, unable to shake Travis Kelce’s spelling.) Rock bluffs kick up on our side, banks crest and fall on the other. There is that indefinable calm of being near a body of water. 

It’s a good way to start a few hundred miles to Chicago. It waits over the horizon, a city that as a symbol has such potency, before you ever get to its reality. Chicago is music, civil rights, the Grand Central Station of the Underground Railroad. It’s the DNC, Obama, the Bulls. It’s also the most popular shibboleth for Republican race-baiting. Talk about gun control and they’ll talk about Chicago shootings. Talk about crime or urban decay and they’ll talk about gangs in Chicago suburbs. You hear a lot less about the disparity with its great wealth: picture the suburbs that Ferris Bueller goes running across. Ferris and the Blues Brothers: two of my Hall of Valhalla favourites are Chicago movies. I monitor the GPS until I’m 106 miles away. Hit it.

One interesting note is that through rural Minnesota, Wisconsin, now Illinois, I see very few Trump signs. In 2016, on the roads through the Deep South all the way up to Virginia, the countryside was thick with them. Even in 2022 out of cycle, across Idaho and Montana, there were more than there are here. 

The city rises up to meet me. The day has become glorious and warm. Sarah heads an organisation called Win Without War, lobbying against military intervention and armament spread. A daunting goal at a time with an entrenched land war in Europe and another spiralling in the Middle East. And a bold calling in the United States of America, that has been at war one way or another for a century. Does that make it the best country in the world for this work, or the worst? 

She’s illuminating in terms of understanding by scale. Right now most of everybody’s focus is on a presidential campaign that is largely being run as a personality contest. But you have to remember the scale of the apparatus that they’re vying to be in charge of, and the impossibility of taking charge of it all in a meaningful way. US government programs are collectively so vast that nobody elected to that job can possibly have a detailed understanding of everything under their notional power. Plenty of departments and programs they’ll probably never hear of at all.

Take the military budget alone. Expanding every year, in recent years coming in at somewhere over $800billion, which Congress then likes topping up with further tens of billions for particular extras. But with so much money going out, nobody really knows what is spent on what. The procurement process is entirely haphazard, hosing away rivers of cash without account, and after decades of never really trying, the Pentagon has still never passed an audit.

Various people have used various methods – mostly involving rice, for some reason – to demonstrate how human brains can’t functionally process the size of the difference between one million of something and one billion. Our heads basically short out after imagining it times ten. So multiply that degree of difficulty again for a number approaching one trillion, and perhaps it’s no wonder that the department itself doesn’t know what it gets spent on. The one silver lining is that within that excess, there are marginal wins to be had.

A week from now, former Senator Bob Menendez was due to be sentenced for taking gold bars from the Egyptian government in exchange for getting them free weapons through his Senate committee. The sentencing has been postponed three months but he’s already been found guilty. That corruption allowed Win Without War to apply enough pressure to have hundreds of millions of dollars in arms withheld from Egypt’s regime. It’s a tiny percentage of US spending, but an objectively huge amount of money and weaponry. To anyone who now won’t be harmed by those armaments, the difference is their world.

Or take a much smaller example in Evanston, the suburb we’re talking in. Since cannabis got legalised in Illinois, local authorities used their city tax on sales to fund reparations. Black residents who had been subject to housing discrimination during the Jim Crow era, or their current descendants who still lived in the city, were entitled to payments. It started as a small program in 2020 but has been gradually growing, and naturally a bunch of Republicans are now suing to destroy it. But it’s remarkable to see it happening at all, in a corner of the larger city that is constantly traduced as a place of hopelessness.

There is an invocation here against despair. Some years ago in Melbourne, Ta-Nehisi Coates explained this in a way that stayed with me. In the framing of injustice against Black people in America, if I can paraphrase, he said that American slavery began 400 years ago. Generation after generation of his ancestors lived whole lives under it. So, he asked, what right did he have to expect to be there at the end of the struggle? To expect it to be solved in his lifetime? We only have the right to contribute to the struggle. And if that struggle does one day reach resolution, whichever generation is present, there will always be the next struggle for equality and decency, in a world where humans always find conflict. I ask Sarah about that framing.

“I think we underestimate the amount of change that can happen in our lifetimes,” she says. “There were people in this country whose family were slaves who then got to see the first Black president. Or, my great grandma was married at nine years old, and I got to meet her. The idea that I can do what I do, and that happening in three generations, is kind of wild. Are we over the hump? No. Do we have a lot of work to do? Yes. Does everything always seem impossible until it’s not? Also yes.”

It’s getting dark, so it’s time to crawl the van down the shore of Lake Michigan towards the city for tunes. Chicago is physically huge, such a bulk of buildings downtown, one of the few cities that feels on a tier with LA and New York. The House of Blues seems to be a victim of its own success, booked half the nights of the week for private events. So I head to another blues bar, which still feels halfway like a tourist trap, but as the tunes play and the night wears on a true atmosphere breaks out.

The various players have their style down. Sharp suits and flat brims, mountain man felt hats and long beards. The names: Studebaker John, Doctor Duke Tumatoe [sic]. One word of suggestion on the matter of legal cannabis: when vaporiser pens are being passed around haphazardly, you have no idea what’s coming at you, and the tiniest foray might just greet you like a full-handed slap upside the head. Some also suggest that there is a point at which you may start a detailed internal thesis about whether you in fact exist inside a giant gummy, given that all your joints feel warm and encased in jelly, and the light filtering through in a burnished orange makes the world look gelatinous. Music thuds through your body like longbow arrows with LED feathers. You may not be coherent but you can still make friends with everyone.

Austin and Jackie are Americans who live in Sydney, currently dividing their attention between the band and a phone showing the Yankees make the World Series for the first time in 15 years. There is a lot of jumping around for both. Rodrice and Scheherazade have a long chat based on the familiar insistence that I’m the guy from Home Alone. (Another Chicago cinema classic.) Amber wants to ditch her job and be a freelance journalist, proving that tendency by giving me a grilling about the profession that I am not at that moment best placed to adequately answer. But she can talk for both of us. Her election analysis, pithy and hard to entirely refute: “People are way dumber than people give them credit for.”

As a group of random people fold together into dance, you could say an authentic music has been commercialised, or you could say this is breadth of communion. Keeping up the spirit to stay in the fight. I had planned to do some more driving after the bar, but that is no longer a viable option, so it’s a matter of taking my chances on a Chicago side street, listening to the wind, watching the shifting pattern of leaves cast in street-lit shadow through the window. Some part of the world is still bopping, and on this trip, that same theme of togetherness keeps coming up. Headphones on, Elwood at the House of Blues. “Please remember that no matter who you are, and what you do to live, thrive, and survive, there are still some things that make us all the same. You, me, them, everybody. Everybody.”

You can support Geoff’s trip here.