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recruit a companion with some kind of useful skill. I knew that Paul was tooimportant to the livelihood of everyone at the farm. He knew the land better than anyone, and he had learned so much from Abraham through the years that our community would have been doomed without his expertise. All of our knowledge about how to survive, everything we manufactured, and everything we grew came from the two of them. I had no doubt that without them, most of us would have died long before, and the rest would still have been struggling to survive. Mike and Gabe were the best hunters behind Paul, and the growing population needed all three of them and many more to keep everyone fed. We had expanded to the size of a small village by then, and our population was well into the hundreds, much larger than when we had started with just Paul’s and Abraham’s farms. Daniel and John had the fields and livestock, and none of the newer arrivals possessed the same combination of physical endurance and farming knowledge that the two of them had gained from the old man. The number of their apprentices grew as our population did. Noah tended all of our horses, and he had become an invaluable groom and trainer to our growing herd of mustangs. Beyond them, I could think of no other person who wouldn’t be more of a burden than an asset. I would be traveling alone.
    Word of my impending journey began to spread throughout the community. Talking to Abraham, I started to realize just how trying that journey would be. We no longer had cars, so I would be traveling by horse, and I couldn’t expect to cover much more than thirty miles eachday. The route we had planned, however, was close to nine thousand miles. Taking into account time spent at other settlements, assuming I could find them, it would be nearly a year before I would see home again. It was a shocking realization. A knot began to grow in my stomach.
    We drew the journey out on an old map that we had taken from one of the cars the year before, figuring that the major population centers of the past would be the best places to look for new settlements nearby.
    New Orleans.
    Miami.
    Washington, DC.
    New York.
    Chicago.
    Seattle.
    San Francisco.
    Los Angeles.
    Phoenix.
    Denver.
    My course traced a line around three-quarters of the perimeter of what used to be the United States of America and then straight through the Midwest and back to our Ozark home. I would experience a range of climates from hot and dry to cold and wet, and I would see landscapes from flat to mountainous and fertile to arid. I would visit more places in the next year than I had over my entire life combined, and I would certainly see them all in a way in which they had never been seen before, either by me or anyone else. Most importantly, hopefully, I would meetmany people who shared our burden and our need for a new beginning. And a new beginning it would be. It was a new world, just as literally as it had been when Amerigo Vespucci had coined the term over five hundred years before, and I was in a position to pioneer a whole new culture and way of life to go with it.
    I would like to say that leaving Maria was the most difficult part. When I was a single man, there would have been no hesitation before embarking on such an adventure. Before I entered what people had called the “real world” of adult responsibility, I used to take thousand-mile road trips on a day’s notice. But things were different. There was a person relying on me, trusting me to keep her safe and to provide for her, but I was too ambitious and selfish to be concerned with that. Instead, I looked upon her as a burden—a hindrance to my potential. What if I didn’t make it back? She might never know what had happened—or how or where. For her, there would never be closure. She would spend every day of the rest of her life waiting for me, still hoping I would come riding in with some extraordinary and heroic explanation of where I had been. I knew that