On election night in 2016, I was alone, huddled in front of my laptop in the converted shipping container I had rented for a few nights in Las Cruces, New Mexico, and watching the results roll in. I don’t remember now what the polls and the pundits had been predicting in the preceding days, but what I can recall easily was the feeling of intense, looming disaster, a constant premonition of what was to come that I couldn’t even escape in my dreams, which had been filled for weeks with nightmares of a Trump victory.
That feeling, however, hadn’t motivated me to do much else but flee—a few months earlier, I had decided to embark on a cross-country road trip in the weeks before and after election day, visiting as many national parks and forests as I could before ending up in California, just in time for what would turn out to be a depressing family gathering for Thanksgiving. Before I arrived in Las Cruces, I had spent my days soaking in outdoor tubs and hiking with my dog, doing my very best to block out the ambient hum of the election. That would turn out to be both dumb as well as impossible—dumb because a better use of my time would have been to channel that anxiety into doorknocking and phone banking, and impossible because I was still in America, and it seemed no matter where I drove, I would pass far too many billboards screaming about Hillary Clinton and Benghazi or Hillary Clinton being a murderer, internet memes that had suddenly appeared in my IRL world.