My colleague N has driven past the dam more times than he could count. To him, it’s just the bridge in town. I asked him to pull over anyway. Water spilled over the dam in a clean white sheet, and the trees behind it were lit up in red, orange, and yellow. It turned out to be one of the best photos of the entire trip. It was the same bridge for both of us, just seen through different eyes.

As luck would have it, Hurricane Isaias was working its way north, the second major weather system of this trip to rearrange my plans. Saturday looked great, with lows in the 40s and highs in the 60s. Sunday through Tuesday did not. Off-and-on rain would settle over the New York area on Sunday, then move to the Providence area Monday and Tuesday. I didn’t want to ride through any major cities in a rainstorm, so I made the hard call to cut time with friends here short, get through New York on Saturday, and figure out the rest next week. Before I left New England, however, I wanted to see N. I also wanted the Massachusetts and Rhode Island welcome signs. I’d ridden past both in the dark on the way into Providence.

N and I helped build the business we worked in. We were both long-time employees in tech, and we watched that business change over a decade together. That kind of shared history is its own bond. I’d always respected N for his craft at work, and over lunch it was clear that same craft carries into the rest of his life. Lunch ran long, which was the best part.

All day, I kept seeing American flags. Some were enormous, the kind car dealers fly back home. Smaller ones filled in everywhere else. This part of New England is politically mixed at best, if left leaning like California. I hadn’t expected to see the flag flown so big and so often. In California, a flag that size usually comes a political statement. Here, I couldn’t tell which it was, and I started to suspect it was neither.

At lunch, I tried to put words to what I was seeing and didn’t do a great job. There’s a patriotism here that I don’t see at home, but I couldn’t quite say what it was. N picked up on what I was getting at right away. “We’re patriots for the country here,” he said.

He didn’t mean a party or a candidate. He meant the country. This is the corner of America where our whole democracy started, and Lexington and Concord aren’t far up the road. Not long before, I’d stood on Liberty Island thinking about everything that one word holds. Then, in Providence, I’d read “Speak to the past and it shall teach thee” carved into a building at Brown.

Liberty, the flag, and the right to disagree with each other and still share both are the fundamental ideas of our democracy. Here, they felt less abstract and a direct part of everyday culture here. It was the same flag I’d known in California, just seen through different eyes.

Afterward, we wandered through an antique store in an old wooden mill building. It had postcards from all over, and I found the one I still needed for Dad: Connecticut. It wasn’t a new card. It showed Savin Rock’s White City in New Haven, an amusement park with one-cent vaudeville and men in straw boaters standing out front. The park opened in 1903 and closed decades ago. I’d been collecting the places I was seeing. This was someone else’s view of a place, from more than a century ago.

I picked up the Massachusetts sign on the way into Uxbridge. On the way out, I went back through Rhode Island on purpose to get that sign with Connecticut being the last state in New England to capture a photo of it’s welcome sign. Today was a three-state day.

The ride down I-95 started out well, then turned into grinding traffic between New London and New Haven. I’d been looking forward to Pepe’s, home of the best pizza in the world, but the line wrapped around the building. There I was in New Haven with a postcard of New Haven in my bag, and I couldn’t get a slice. I settled for Panda Express at the service plaza in Milford and kept moving. Man, the bar suddenly got low.

When I came into New Jersey the first time, I thought New York 17 was the sketchiest road of the trip. I was wrong. In Milford, Connecticut 15 becomes the Merritt Parkway, and I was terrified. It was dark. Trees with long branches crowded the median, and on-ramps ended in stop signs, so cars merged from a dead stop, wanting to dart out in front of me. The road twisted, climbed, and dropped the whole way, two narrow lanes in each direction with no room for error. People in the right lane were going 10 miles under the 50 mile an hour speed limit, and people in the left lane were going 40 or more over it.

I was in the left lane, steadily passing the slow traffic on the right, so I wasn’t hogging it. That didn’t matter. Cars kept flying up behind me and flashing their lights (at least that’s easy to see at night). It wasn’t one or two cars, either. Traffic was a constant, aggressive shuffle, everyone shifting left, then right, then left again. Then a small SUV towing a U-Haul trailer, which isn’t even allowed on the Merritt, was rolling along in the right lane when someone flew up the on-ramp’s shoulder and cut in front of it. The SUV braked hard, and I moved over in the left lane to give it room. Crossing into New York didn’t help. The Merritt becomes the Hutchinson River Parkway, which was just as frightening, and the pavement was worse. The criticism of New York pavement was as given, Back home, Highway 17 over the Santa Cruz Mountains has a reputation as California’s most dangerous freeway. The Merritt is its East Coast twin, if not a clear win. At least the pavement on CA-17 is solid.

My friends in New Jersey had warned me about the Bronx. I-95 runs right through it, and between the traffic and the neighborhoods, they didn’t think it was where I wanted to be on a loaded motorcycle at night. So I went around, over the Tappan Zee, now the Mario Cuomo Bridge. It was lit up in green, which felt like a welcome after the parkways. Across the line, New Jersey had its overhead signs lit up with rain warnings. I took the hint and eased off.

Then I needed a bathroom, and I’d seen this movie before. A week earlier in Massachusetts, a McDonald’s on a blue amenities sign had sent me down a hill, through two long lights, and into a locked restroom, and I left with a Coke I couldn’t drink. Now the same kind of sign promised a McDonald’s at the next exit. I took it, wandered into suburban New Jersey, and never found it. I passed a few gas stations, all closed. I decided I could hold it. Then I decided I couldn’t. Finally, I was blessed with a QuickChek. Last time, I’d left mad. This time, I bought a soda on the way out as a thank-you.

On paper, the ride north and the ride south had a lot in common: darkness, aggressive traffic, roads I didn’t know, and surprises at inopportune times. Heading north, it had felt like one long stretch of rain and dark that never let up. Heading south, I had a better plan, the fall color was finally showing up, and I was giving myself more grace and slack. The dark didn’t feel like the enemy anymore.

I pulled into my buddy’s place around 10:30, a day before he flew out. It was good to be back.

Back in Rome, NY, I’d wanted rain to prove I’d made the right call. On Sunday, it poured. This time, I didn’t need the proof.

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