In California, we met a young man who had walked from Colorado to the Central Valley to attend the music festival Lightning in a Bottle. He had short, dirty, uneven hair, as if it had been dreaded and then undreaded to adapt to changing cultural attitudes. He carried a long metal pipe, which he told us was a catalytic converter he planned to sell to pay for his ticket home.

My best friend Frances and I were ostensibly in graduate school—media studies. I was supposed to be writing a book of cultural reports, but it wasn’t taking shape. I never excelled at anything academically, and my average intelligence embarrassed me. Frances was filming an experimental documentary about rural isolation and right-wing conspiracy theories. Since I was addicted to prescription stimulants and incapable of working on my own project without them, I spent that summer following Frances around the country while she shot her movie, taking handheld footage of postindustrial towns ravaged by QAnon and synthetic opioids and dead factories. Even if it didn’t make any sense, the footage was beautiful: homeless encampments and cannabis dispensaries blooming in the ruins of the Rust Belt. I was surprised by Frances’s burst of visionary interest in America—she’d spent the last six years insisting that the center of the country was all slaughterhouses—but she had a way of anticipating cultural tides, spotting telegenic potential in decay. I must have known, even then, that Frances’s project was more important than mine. I envied her clarity of vision, the inevitability of her success. I would have followed her anywhere.