During the summer of 2019, not long before COVID shut the country down, I spent three and a half days driving from Connecticut, where I live, to Kansas City, where I grew up, and three and a half days driving back. My routes in both directions were lazy and circuitous, and they included not even one mile of interstate highway. I ate roast turkey with all the trimmings at a restaurant in upstate New York that offers Thanksgiving dinner every day of the year; stood at the northern end of a puddle representing the Dead Sea in a grassy park created, a century and a half ago, as a walk-over relief map of the Holy Land; saw surprisingly many sex-toy superstores near billboards promoting belief in Jesus Christ; and visited the birthplace of the Western novelist Zane Grey, who, it turns out, was also a minor-league baseball player and a practicing dentist, and whose real first name was Pearl. Mainly, though, I spent long hours alone in my car thinking about our remarkable country.…