“What have I become,

My sweetest friend?

Everyone I know goes away

In the end.

And you could have it all

My empire of dirt

I will let you down

I will make you hurt.”

Johnny Cash sang through the car radio as the sound of his guitar bounced off of the car’s interior. Desolate wastelands stretched for as far as the eye could see. This land used to be filled with forests, and with trees that were the size of skyscrapers, from a child’s perspective. Now, though, all of the trees were dead and gone. President Maxwell made sure of that.

We were out in the middle of nowhere; there weren’t many billboards around. Those that we did pass were identical; they all read:

“KEEP AMERICA GREAT.”

Next to the trademark slogan stood a picture of Maxwell’s sneering face. You could see the evil in those eyes. I didn’t want to look at the billboard anymore so I looked at the sky, which was filled with ashy gray clouds. “That’s fitting,” I thought. It rarely rains anymore so those weren’t really clouds. Instead, they were clumps of smog floating through the air. Pollution had gotten so bad under Maxwell that the smog problem severely affected the entire country. (I’m not some science brainiac so I can’t really explain all of the chemistry behind it. I was always more of an English student, anyway.)

Looking at the smog depressed me so, instead, I looked at the thermometer on the car’s inside mirror. The aqua green lettering told me that it was seventy-seven degrees that day. That would have been fine, if not for the fact that it was a December morning. When I was a kid, I loved to ride around with the windows down in this weather. I couldn’t do that anymore though; air quality had been decreasing steadily for the past sixteen years, so it had become increasingly hazardous to expose yourself to the air more than necessary.

I looked over at the man sitting next to me. For the past twenty years, this man had been like a father to me, although he was only a little over ten years older than me. Bruce had been my mentor, my best friend, and, in some ways, my idol. After I grew close to him, I saw the kind of man that I aspired to be. He was always there for me. He had seen me at my best and my worst. We both saw the world in similar ways. That’s why we both so readily agreed to this pilgrimage. After all, that’s what it was. Bruce and I agreed to leave this way of life behind because, among other reasons, it contradicted every moral fiber of our beings. The way that the country had devolved, under Maxwell, became unbearable. Brian and I agreed to leave (mostly) everything behind and hope for a better life out west.

I looked ahead at what seemed like a thousand miles of open road. Our journey had just begun, but we still had an incredibly long way to go.