Their van has acquired an impressive dent (wounded in a parking garage), and some of their luggage, two laptops and a camera were ripped off in a smash-and-grab in San Francisco.
But Sunday in Seattle, as this team of three wrapped up an odyssey of more than 13,000 miles in search of America's identity, they were ready to head home with far more than they started out with.
From Sept. 18 until Dec. 11, professor Loren Ghiglione from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism crisscrossed the country with a student from the J-school and a recent graduate, in a journey he dubbed "Traveling with Twain in Search of America's Identity."
They followed author Mark Twain's footsteps on trips made in the 1850s and 1860s, heading east first, retracing his steps to New York and Philadelphia; then south, along the Mississippi River to New Orleans; then west to Nevada and California.
On their last day in Seattle, the team was still on the hunt for interviews, including a stop to visit Julie Pham, managing editor of the Northwest Vietnamese News, who related how her parents came to America when she was only 1 month old. This year her family is celebrating the 25th anniversary of the newspaper, located in Rainier Valley and serving the Vietnamese community.
That interview was one of at least 100 by the team, gathering stories of identity in America — stories of immigration, race and sexual identity. And along the way, as with all good road trips, this trio — Dan Tham, 21, of Salt Lake City, whose family immigrated here from Vietnam in 1979; Alyssa Karas, 22, a self-described European mutt from Pennsylvania, who recently graduated from Medill; and their 70-year-old fearless leader searching out his own Italian-American ancestors, learned plenty about themselves, too.
The result was their lively blog, and down the road, perhaps a book, and maybe a documentary. And for each of them, a far richer sense of their country. The team had a T-shirt made that was something of a motto for the journey. It was, fittingly, a quote from Twain: "Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-minded thinking."
They set off in a tricked-out van loaded with 10 file boxes of research on some of the places they would visit — some 45 cities and towns in 25 states, to learn what they could of the American story in 2011, following the path of one of the country's most famous bards.
"It was an old-fashioned reporter's idea, to make sure you know firsthand what you are talking about," Ghiglione said. "To make sure you have a sense of America's identity today. The only way I know how to do that is go out and talk to people and listen."
And listen they did, in places as varied as Ground Zero in New York City, a homeless encampment in St. Louis, Louisiana's maximum-security prison at Angola and the Kickapoo Indian Reservation in Kansas.
All along the way, Karas stoked the team's blog and Twitter feed, Ghiglione filled a dozen notebooks and Tham kept the video rolling — his take on making boiled fish stew over a smoky hearth in an 1831 mansion in New Orleans is not to be missed.
They did much of their interviewing by cold calling, knocking on doors, walking into tribal offices or stopping people on the street. "What's your story?" was typically the team's opening line. Along the way, they were saddened to see cities hollowed out by the recession. But they were cheered, too, at encountering a mixed-race couple in the Deep South reporting a deep sense of welcome in their community.
Surprises included the discovery of a thriving Somali community in Lexington, Neb. "Would you believe it?" Ghiglione said. New communities, they would come to learn, were often the first beachheads of renewal in towns fallen on hard times, as immigrants bought up the failed and abandoned to invest anew in their own idea of an American future.
If any unifying narrative emerged, it was perhaps how much story each person carries, if only asked. "People have so much pride in who they are," Tham said. "I never knew my parents' story of immigrating here; I never asked or cared," Tham said. "First thing I do when I get home, I am asking them."