Theroux’s travels across China provided the audio soundtrack for my trip across Tennessee, punctuated by checking NPR news on the hour. As I passed through Nashville, it occurred to me to spend a little bit of time listening to some of the local radio stations. I listened to music from Nashville until it faded in the distance. Yet the mental soundtrack was provided by Robert Pirsig. What was I doing driving a Toyota Prius across Tennessee after long drives from Connecticut to Virginia to North Carolina? No, my little Prius is pretty different from Pirsig’s motorcycle, but there were parallels.

Theroux often referred to the last time he had been in China and how much things had changed since then. I thought back to my various trips to Tennessee. In 1983, I spent several months hitchhiking across the States and Europe. I hitchhiked down from Kentucky into Tennessee going from one old college buddies place to the next. I was picked up by a trucker who called himself Outlaw Floyd. He thought I was really pretty and could make a good living in San Diego servicing Navy boys. He was heading to San Diego and offered to take me out there and set me up in business. I got off in Knoxville.

I thought of other trips to Knoxville to visit old college buddies and head up into the Smoky Mountains, or of when I came to Knoxville to spend a long weekend at a cabin with a bunch of friends I had met from an online community. I drove past interstate entrance ramps where I was sure I had stood for hours. When I stopped to get gas, I saw a guy standing on the side of the ramp with a sign saying Chattanooga. I was heading to Memphis, but stopped to see if I could at least get him a little closer to his destination. Unfortunately, I-40 and I-75 split very soon after the ramp, so I really couldn’t help him. It was good, though, to see that people still hitchhike and to chat with him briefly.

All of these memories were from long ago, when I was on the road, looking to find something, perhaps ‘the metaphysics of quality’. NewsTrust is supposed to be about finding ‘quality’ journalism. What is quality? Where does quality fit into the future of journalism, into the blueprint for the next newsroom? Hopefully, I will explore some of this over the next couple of days.

In parallel with this, I thought of my struggles in school years ago, and my struggles now with my daughters’ schooling now. The Wikipedia article about Robert Pirsig starts off, “By virtue of being a precocious child with an IQ of 170 at age 9, Pirsig skipped several grades. This, along with a stammer, made for a difficult school experience.”

I arrived in Memphis and settled into my hotel. I am reading various papers in preparation for the conference. I am relaxing from the drive. I struggle to make sure I get good WiFi signal and I rest in the whirlpool. The hotel is large. It feels mostly empty and a little bit shabby. It makes me think about the hotels that Theroux writes about, a big hotel built as part of a politburo five year plan, that hasn’t turned out the way it is supposed to.

The drive, the hitchhikers, the music, the memories, the hotel; perhaps all of these are part of some larger metaphor for my own future, my daughters’ future, the future of journalism, and in fact for the future of this country, of all of us.

What does it all mean? I’m not sure. Things don’t turn out as they are supposed to. Yet I hold on to the hope that difficult experiences will lead all of us to ‘quality’.