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Seven years ago, we met because of an email.

Steve’s email arrived on the very day I admitted, for the first time out loud, how lonely my journey across America had become.

For almost three years, I had been sitting in strangers’ living rooms listening to their stories. Stories about loss, addiction, illness, and tragedy. Stories about people who managed to survive things I’m not sure I could survive myself. Stories that stayed with me long after I drove away and still haunt me today.

The irony was that the more connected I felt to humanity, the more isolated I felt in my own life. It wasn’t until one afternoon, when I was overwhelmed and run down from the journey, that I finally said it out loud.

“I wanted to create something that could help people feel less alone,” I told a friend. “But in the process, I’ve made myself feel more alone than I’ve ever felt in my life.” The second I said it, I started to cry. A second later, my phone vibrated.

It was an email with the subject line Kindred spirits. I almost deleted it. At that point, my inbox was overflowing for the first time since I got on the road. A few days earlier, the Washington Post had published a story about my journey across America, and emails had started pouring in faster than I could read them all. But something about those two words made me stop.

Kindred spirits? I started reading.

“Hi, Mary.

A friend sent me the Washington Post article about your journey, and I’m happy to learn of both. He also noted that we are kindred spirits, and I agree.

I also left home in February 2016 for the road and spent three years driving through every state...”

I read the sentence twice. He had gotten on the road nine months before I had. He had traveled to all fifty states, too. And it had taken him three years. As I kept reading, I learned that shortly after he got off the road, his mother had died of cancer. I had gotten on the road because mine had.

He told me he got on the road to make sense of how we as a country got to 2016. Along the way, he cooked 259 meals and visited 157 towns and cities. “I wanted to introduce myself, if nothing else, to let you know that someone else had done a similar journey throughout a similar time frame,” he said. And then ended with one word.

“Spooky.”

I immediately forwarded his email to my sisters. “OH MY GOD WHAT?” one replied. The other asked the question I was already wondering myself.

“Is this person real?”

At a moment when I felt more alone than I ever had on the journey, an email arrived from the one person on earth who seemed to understand exactly what it had been like to live it. I felt relief just knowing he existed.

I immediately hit reply.

“Are we secretly best friends who have just never met?”

I asked him if we could connect, and he replied with his cell a few minutes later. Two days later, I called him. We talked for hours. As we finished up our call, he asked if I would accept a passenger in my car. Besides my father and a very close friend, no one had been in the car with me in the last two years. The trip felt so sacred it was hard to imagine throwing someone else in the mix. Especially when you were staying in total strangers’ homes, you couldn’t just ask for a plus one to join you. But I was desperate for his friendship. For his understanding. So I said yes, with one caveat. “We would have to stay with the people who hosted you,” I told him. I couldn’t vouch for him to people offering to host me. But in my mind, it still followed my theme; the people were strangers to me. But to him, they already knew him, so they would be more likely to let a friend of his come to their home, too.

I gave him the route I was planning, and he told me he had a spot in Pittsburgh, Morgantown, Annapolis…” and then he paused. “Oh, and I have one in this cool town in West Virginia I think you’re really going to enjoy. It’s called Thomas.”

I froze. Why was that name so familiar? And then I realized. A few months earlier I had been in a coffee shop in South Dakota when I saw a painting on the wall. It showed a girl sailing through the sky in a tiny boat led by a string of birds. Underneath the drawing it read:

“To be sure, the adventure had been magnificent to the point of exhaustion. Yet still, nothing they had come across could hold a candle to how they felt about the simple help they had been offered along the way.”

I bought the drawing. And then that Christmas, I bought a different drawing with his beautiful words for each of my family members. I had researched the artist, Seth, and written to him to tell him how much his words had impacted me. He said that if I was ever in the area, I should walk on into his studio and we might meet. I never thought we would. His studio, Seth had told me, was in Thomas, West Virginia.

“Oh my gosh,” I told Steve, “I actually do want to go there! There is an artist I really love that is there; have you ever heard of Art of Seth?”

He started laughing, “Yes,” he said. “Seth’s girlfriend was my host.”

I nearly dropped the phone. Three days earlier, I hadn’t even known Steve existed. Now he was flying across the country to spend two weeks in my car and introduce me to one of my favorite artists.

On July 28, 2019, I pulled into a coffee shop in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to meet a man I had known for exactly fifteen days and was about to spend the next two weeks trapped in my car with. When I told some of my friends, they thought I was crazy. And to be honest, I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect either. Inviting a stranger into the space that had become my home for the past three years felt risky.

But by that point, uncertainty had become my normal.

Three years earlier, I had climbed into my car with no idea where this journey would lead me. Saying yes to letting Steve in didn’t feel crazy at all. It felt like the kind of decision the road had been teaching me to make all along. Trust, I’d learned, wasn’t about certainty. It was about choosing to believe in people anyway.

And I am so glad I believed in Steve. Somewhere between Pittsburgh and Maryland, after hours and hours of conversation and only one actual argument, Steve stopped feeling like a stranger who had emailed me. He felt like family.

We began speaking almost every day; he became one of the first calls I made when life felt confusing. He always checked in. He always called back. He always showed up. I hoped I became that kind of friend for him, too.

Two years later, when he spontaneously bought a van, I booked a ticket and joined him for the first two weeks of his maiden voyage. A few months later, I flew to him again for another two weeks of van life.

I’d best describe our relationship by comparing it to Steve Martin and John Candy in Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. He is the Neil Page to my Del Griffith. Quiet and composed to my wild nature. Steve is one of the smartest and most curious people I know.

While I grew up in a small beach town at the end of Long Island, Steve entered the world in the final weeks of the Vietnam War. He was born in Saigon just forty days before the city fell. His family narrowly missed the U.S. evacuation and remained in Vietnam for another eight years before France granted them political asylum. Paris became the first place they called home in freedom.

I think it is why Steve and I connected. We were both trying to understand the world through other people’s stories. The difference was that Steve took the time to understand mine. He finished his journey before we met, but he was able to be part of mine when he joined me in the car for those two weeks. I could talk to him about anything.

This summer, I get to do the same for him.

In a few hours, I’ll board a plane to meet him in Paris. We’re going in search of a series of documents connected to his family’s history. Specifically, military records of his paternal grandfather, who served in the French colonial army in Indochina. Decades ago, those records gave the French government reason to intervene diplomatically and help Steve’s family leave Vietnam for a new life in France. His family’s archives have revealed pieces of the story. Now we’re hoping the French archives might reveal the rest.

Steve was ten years old when he left Paris for the United States. More than forty years later, he’ll return. Seven years ago, I invited Steve into my car, and he became part of my journey.

Tonight, I get to board a plane to be part of his.

I’ll be writing from Paris for the next 7 weeks.

You can find Steve’s writing here: Le Mobile Feast