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129 miles from Page, Arizona, to the Flagstaff airport. I dropped Nikita and Leah and the gear at the terminal and went to get the rental van gassed up to drop off at rental return. Adding up all the point-to-point miles plus city driving plus that one time I had to go back to St. Louis because I forgot my laptop (the only real snafu–not bad for three weeks!), the total came to 4951 miles. This is a big country. We saw only a fraction of it.

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“You have to want to come here,” Debbie Winlock told us when we started planning our visit to Page (AZ) Public Library. Named 2023’s best small library in America by Library Journal, this beloved community institution is two hours from the nearest town, nestled in Coconino County in northern Arizona. Page was founded as a government camp to facilitate the construction of the Glen Canyon dam in 1957, a public works project that transformed the Colorado river and created Lake Powell, one of the largest manmade lakes in the United States.

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Another driving day took us outside of U.S. borders and into the heart of the Navajo Nation. The landscape was unlike anything any of us had ever seen before—we held our breath around each turn and over each hill, waiting to see what the earth would offer us. We took a detour—what Nikita calls a side quest—to Monument Valley, arriving just as a storm engulfed the sandstone peaks. Sublime, no other word for it.

Mileage: 481

Soundtrack: Thunderstorm

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We were generously welcomed into the Santa Ana Pueblo Community Library by Cassandra Zamora, a solo librarian who has built an extraordinary library for the 800 tribal members who live in Rebahene, Ranchitos, and Chicale on the Tamaya Indian Reservation. A colorful children’s area hosts storytimes and crafting, a robust collection of board games circulates to the community, and twenty sewing machines can be checked out or used in one of the many sewing classes offered by the library.

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We’ve got a cut! Nikita is finishing up technical work that I don’t really understand, sound and color, credits and titles, but the story is there. I love it. It’s just one of eleventy billion stories we could have told, and just one of the many stories we’ll tell with the footage we’ve gathered over the last thousands of miles. But this one? It’s ready. We can’t wait to premiere it at my president’s program, a testament to the good work libraries do. !

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With Annual around the corner () we are in crunch time for getting video ready to share at my President’s Program. That means watching film again and again and then again, making notes and sharing feedback with Nikita, giving Nikita space to work, giving Leah time to do more archival research, and then watching a next version again and again. It turns out that distilling hours of footage into a few minutes isn’t easy!

After a morning of concentrated effort, we took a break and learned the basics of blowing glass with Elodie Holmes.

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I got an early start, dropping my kid at the airport to head back to Brooklyn following his quick visit to celebrate my birthday (GO ISOTOPES!) and check out the film set. (He was the guy with the clapper during our filming at Las Cruces—a very effective clapper!) I picked up Leah and Nikita, and we headed to Santa Fe for a few days.

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We drove the 46 miles from Las Cruces to El Paso, Texas, to join members of the Border Regional Library Association for lunch at Forti’s. (Enchiladas, red.) Librarians from El Paso Public Library, the University of Texas-El Paso, and surrounding school districts talked with us about issues specific to border communities. Many recalled growing up in an El Paso where passage to and from adjacent Juarez was easy. “We’d go for dinner or to see a dentist,” retired school librarian Jackie Dean said. Students would commute from Juarez to UTEP, and BRLA included many members from the Mexican city.

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The Thomas Branigan Memorial Library in Las Cruces, New Mexico, stuns against the mountain landscape. The exterior is all curves and soft corners, painted brick red with turquoise lettering. We came to Las Cruces at the invitation of Carol Brey. Brey served as the 2004-05 president of the °ÄÃÅÁùºÏ²Ê¿ª½±app, leading during the crisis presented by the USA PATRIOT Act. Passed in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, this legislation expanded the government’s domestic surveillance authority and included specific provisions requiring librarians to share patron borrowing and internet search histories with law enforcement.

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The Road to Annual includes fun parts like eating at Penny’s Diner in Vaughan, New Mexico, and visiting with residents at the all-volunteer library in Corona, population 130. But “Annual” is an operative word for the President and there is a lot to do before we hit San Diego. Leah drove so I could work on getting my speaking schedule set and remarks drafted. I’m looking forward to so much of the conference, but will admit the book award soirees are among my favorites. I’m a big reader, so getting to meet authors and celebrate some of the best writing of the last year is always a highlight.

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We turned left out of Topeka and drove for hours and hours south and west through Oklahoma and into the panhandle of Texas. Our stops were several, food and snacks and another cup of coffee. Leah drove the first half of the day and I drove the second, cruising into the Whataburger at Exit 68B on I-40 West. Nikita told us about his library growing up in Savannah, Georgia. Apparently it’s the very best library on the planet, which is funny because so is mine.

Mileage: 557

Soundtrack: ,

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The library in Rossville, Kansas, serves a population of just over 1000 residents as well as people from surrounding towns who flock to Rossville Community Library to take advantage of its services and resources. The library boasts some of the strongest Wi-Fi in the area (“You’ll see people on the swing shift parked here at 2am”), a book club that has been meeting monthly for seventeen years, an after school “Snack Attack” program, even children’s bingo, the boisterous and heavily-attended event that pushed our interviews to a building next door.

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I drove from Columbia to St. Louis to pick up my laptop and then drove back to Columbia. Happy to get “forgot my laptop” out of the way!

We met Erin Magner and Angela Scott at the entrance of Daniel Boone Regional Library in Columbia, Missouri, and they ushered us inside to get set up to interview a number of community partners. Libraries are fantastic collaborators, building connections between organizations that expand the power and reach of everyone. We talked with Daniel Cox, a longtime volunteer with DBRL’s Voluntary Income Tax Assistance program.

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We met Tom Bober at Clayton High School in Clayton, Missouri, at 9:30 a.m. Ours were the only two cars in the parking lot, a situation that would drastically change a couple hours later when families bearing flowers streamed in to celebrate young children at a local dance recital. Missouri school librarians like Bober have been working under extremely challenging conditions since the passage of SB 775 in 2022. The law criminalizes “explicit sexual materials” in schools and libraries, language that “hits those constitutional law words ‘vague’ and ‘overbroad,” according to Gillian Wilcox, Deputy Director for Litigation at ACLU Missouri.

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We headed west on I-64 toward our next stop just outside of St. Louis, Missouri. I’m a sucker for a National Parks Passport stamp, so when we saw the sign for President Abraham Lincoln’s Boyhood Home, I took exit 57A, drove for ten minutes, and promptly got lost and couldn’t find a parking lot. (This will surprise no one who knows me.) We tucked the van under a tree on a stretch of gravel next to the road and walked twenty minutes down a path past the Lincoln family farm to the visitor center.

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I started the day talking libraries with Aaron Stone at WVOW radio in Logan, West Virginia. It was a great conversation touching on the fantastic work being done at Buffalo Creek Memorial Library and in libraries across West Virginia. So many things happen online these days–it was great to walk up a couple flights of stairs, get in studio, put on a headset, and watch Stone run his audio board. It really felt like doing radio.

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“If we don't have the answer, we’ll find someone who does,” says Elizabeth Tackett, former director of the Buffalo Creek Memorial Library. “If we can’t solve the problem, we’ll figure out who can.” That’s the spirit of coal country. “Everyone here is family,” director Eddie Tackett tells us.

700 people live in Man and roughly 15,000 in the surrounding area. The library is “the beating heart” of this community, board president Gretchen Donahue tells us.

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Today was another long driving day south and west through Maryland and into southern West Virginia. We had a meetup in Charleston at noon so left Virginia early enough to miss beltway traffic. The mountains of Maryland and West Virginia aren’t like the ones back home where I grew up in Idaho. These mountains roll. We ebbed and flowed on the concrete for hundreds of miles through driving rain and the gaps between storms.

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I have been low-key worrying about this stretch of I-95 for months. Will there be traffic, will it take too long. It turns out there’s traffic, and it takes long enough, for sure, we didn’t need it to be any longer than that, wow.

We woke up in Rhode Island and said goodnight in Virginia, halfway to our next library.

Mileage: 478

Soundtrack: Big Thief,

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When we asked Jessica David, President of the Cranston Public Library Association, about her first library memories, she described a feeling of abundance. “As a child, I could leave the library with an armful of books, and no one would stop me.” The library belonged to David, along with everything inside it, the books as much hers as anyone else’s. For David, her avid use of the library comes with a responsibility to defend it and expand it. The crucial role advocates like David play in growing libraries and their communities was just part of the story we captured on film in Cranston today.

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It isn’t easy getting out of New York City. Joining a million other drivers in traffic can feel like entering a drive test simulator, dogs and bikes and kids chasing balls into the road while you dart around double-parked cars. And it isn’t any easier when you’re driving a van big enough to hold a full suite of documentary film equipment. (Note to my parallel-parking self: you’re longer than you think!) We took it slow and after an hour and change our nose was pointed north on I-95 toward the first stop on our Road to Annual: Cranston (R.I.) Public Library.

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