Roland Merullo is the author of 21 novels and seven books of nonfiction. With his older daughter he writes a Substack newsletter called Hi Zan, Hi Pa. He can be reached at RolandMerullo.com.
This is the third of a four-part weekly series. Part 1: It’s night in America | Part 2: The heroes we live with | Part 3: Searching for class in America’s promised land | Part 4: The damage, the decency, and the long way West.
In his legendary song “Thunder Road,” Bruce Springsteen sings, “We’re riding out tonight to case the promised land,” and that’s what my wife, Amanda, and I are doing on our monthlong cross-country journey. We’re trying to see America, not through the lens of 2025’s disheartening headlines but by exploring these dark times face-to-face.
The third leg of our Night in America trip took us across central Nebraska, through a slice of northern Colorado, and into Wyoming.
We’d long wanted to attend a megachurch service, so on a chilly Sunday morning in Lincoln, Neb., we stepped into the 1,800-seat Indian Hills Community Church. The service began with the singing of hymns and Christmas carols and the offering of friendly neighbor-to-neighbor greetings, and then a muscular middle-aged man called Pastor Jesse took the stage.
For an hour and fifteen minutes, Pastor Jesse went meticulously through one chapter of the Book of Ruth, verse by verse, in a manner reminiscent of a graduate school lecture. Between stretches of analysis, we heard a lot about life everlasting, the forgiveness of sins, and the love of Jesus Christ, but nothing that sounded like a modern-day call to kindness and empathy.
We visited Indian Hills Community Church in the same way we’ve approached every encounter on this trip: with the intention of broadening our own understanding of this nation. We weren’t in the Nebraska megachurch to mock the way others worship. If a tinge of derision has crept into my description of the service, it’s because, as we were driving away, Amanda looked up Pastor Jesse online and found an appalling essay he’d written about Pride Month. The man who railed about sinful pride apparently believed he knew which souls would be granted eternal life and “homosexuals” (his quotation marks) weren’t among them.
After putting some distance between us and the Lincoln suburbs, we ventured off the superhighway onto US State 30, straight and flat, which took us through the college town of Kearney and then out into emptiness. To our left ran a railroad line where mile-long freight trains rolled. To our right spread seemingly endless stretches of uninhabited corn fields, chopped-off stalks pushing up through a frosting of snow.
Every now and again we’d pass a tiny hamlet — a grain elevator, a handful of simple houses, maybe a general store. We turned off the road into Lexington, population 11,000, and stretched our legs on the cold main street. To our astonishment, the first place we stumbled upon was a Cuban grocery store, with a Guatemalan grocery store and two shops selling African goods on the other side of the street. We were perplexed by Lexington’s diversity until Amanda read that there was a Tyson meatpacking plant nearby.
The plant will be leaving town in a month, taking 3,200 jobs with it, and we wondered what would become of the Somalis, Guatemalans, Mexicans, and others who’d traveled so far to take the onerous, dangerous, low-paying jobs so many American workers disdained. And what would become of Lexington when they were gone?
We’re trying, as we move westward, to keep one eye on local stories like Lexington’s and one on the national scene. During this part of the trip, we read President Trump’s callous post on Rob Reiner, who, with his wife Michele Singer Reiner, had been stabbed to death, allegedly by their troubled son.
I grew up in a socioeconomic orbit where the word “class” was used to describe a certain mode of behavior. You had “class” if, after losing a sporting event, you congratulated your opponents. You had “class” if you didn’t reminisce about previous lovers in front of a present one. You had “class” if, even when you were hurting for money, you brought a gift over to the house of a bereaved family.
Trump’s use of the presidential platform to attack Rob Reiner seemed to me the exact opposite of classy behavior.
We spent the night in Ogallala, near Nebraska’s western edge, because we wanted to attend a cattle auction there scheduled for the next morning. For two hours, we sat above an indoor ring, watching hefty men in cowboy hats bidding on “preg-checked” (i.e. certifiably pregnant) cows. The stockmen were building herds, not yet sending these animals to the butcher, and in some cases they were writing checks for a quarter of a million dollars for 60 heads.
I spoke at length with an affable former professional rodeo man named J.W. Goode, there with his “lady” to try and start their own herd. Before risking his relatively small stash of $30,000, Goode checked the cows’ hooves to make sure the animals could walk around and feed themselves on a ranch, their teats to make sure their calves could easily feed, their hips to guard against breach births, and their eyes because, well, “you wouldn’t want a lady with crooked eyes, would you?”
The rapid-fire auctioneer, the big-boned cowboys taking pinches of chaw, bids made by the lackadaisical raising of an index finger — we don’t often make the connection, but this is where our hamburgers and steaks come from, this intricate knowledge of genetics, this ability to rope a cow and tend to its injuries, and this willingness to put out huge sums of money in the hope that beef prices will remain high and not too many members of your herd will be lost to pneumonia or broken legs.
Our next stop was Colorado — Fort Collins — which offered a very different view of Western life. “FoCo” is home to Colorado State University and has yoga studios, an abundance of eateries and cafes, and soaring house prices. Homes as small as 900 square feet were listed for half a million dollars, and we encountered two of the consequences of that: a gathering of twenty-somethings who despaired about ever owning a home and a small but visible population of homeless men.
I had the chance to speak with one of them as he was painstakingly drawing a sign that said, “I HOPE YOU HAVE A WONDERFUL DAY.” Russell had lost his job in an autobody shop, lost his identification, lost his Section 8 housing, stopped drinking hard liquor, and was hoping to find work repairing bicycles. I bought him a sandwich and a Coke, gave him a little money, and left the conversation with an understanding of how all but impossible it would be for him to lift himself out of poverty.
Meanwhile, Vice President JD Vance was blaming out-of-reach house prices on “illegals” as if the people who’d walked to the United States from Guatemala or Venezuela had been carrying $50,000 down payments in their knapsacks. As if American banks could check the migrants’ credit scores with a quick call to Guatemala City or Caracas.
A rich man blaming the poor for one of the nation’s most pressing problems. More lack of class.
On the way out of Fort Collins, I stopped in a gun shop for an interesting conversation with the man behind the counter, Ryan Berg, who thought the answer to school shootings was armed guards and believed automatic weapons were necessary for hunting. He’d voted for Trump, he told me, and when I asked if there was anything he didn’t like about the president, he nodded and said, “Yeah, some of the shit he says.”
We headed north-northwest on Route 287, crossed into Laramie, Wyo., and visited the memorial to Matthew Shepard on the University of Wyoming campus. In 1998, Shepard, a gay student at the university, was tortured and murdered by two local men who are now serving life sentences. Matthew Shepard’s parents hadn’t buried his remains for 20 years after the killing, fearing that their son’s gravesite would be desecrated.
Hearing that sad story, Bishop Mariann Budde (the same woman who, during her Inauguration Day sermon, famously challenged Trump to be kind to immigrants), arranged for Shepard’s ashes to be laid to rest in the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.
That’s class.
