States of Mind
A Search for Faith, Hope, Inspiration, Harmony, Unity, Friendship, Love, Pride, Wisdom, Honor, Comfort, Joy, Bliss, Freedom, Justice, Glory, Triumph, and Truth or Consequences in America
Brad Herzog

John F. Blair, Publisher
978-0-89587-187-9
$19.95 hardcover
6 x 9
402 pages, black-and-white photos
Published in 1999
Bio/Memoir

This isn't 1964, and these aren't the Merry Pranksters.

By age 27, Brad Herzog was a published author. He was well educated, newly married, upwardly mobile, the product of a good family. But when he took stock of himself, he saw someone trading a life for a living, a chronicler of the world whose universe was a view of a Chicago parking lot.

He was a cynic, and he wondered why. Did he and Generation X represent America as it approached the millennium, or did they merely misjudge it? Herzog believed the answer could be found far from the headlines and talk shows, in the nooks and crannies of the nation. So he and his wife, Amy, emptied their bank account, compacted their lives into a 34-foot Winnebago, and set a course for America.

States of Mind is the account of their 10-month philosophical, historical, and conversational journey across the country. What began as a literal search for the small places on the map turned into a figurative examination of the small places of the heart, a quest for virtues lost amid negativity and disillusionment.
 
Is there harmony in Harmony, California? Is there honor in Honor, Michigan? The mission was a search for answers.
 
Their travels took them to Triumph, Louisiana, where they discovered a community twice destroyed by hurricanes and twice rebuilt. In Justice, West Virginia, they found half a population descended from the Hatfields and the McCoys. Hope, Mississippi, near the site of the murders of Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney, offered a mixed bag of reflections on America's racial divide.

States of Mind is a four-hour sail with storyteller Bill Zuber in Friendship, Maine. It is a bear hug and a two-hour diatribe from six-foot-eight, 340-pound "Chicken" Owen Foster in Pride, Alabama. It is a hailstorm, a grasshopper plague, and a debate with a priest and a pastor in Faith, South Dakota.

It is a book that conjures the humor of Travels with Charley, the generational angst of On the Road, the introspection of Blue Highways. But having grown from that tradition, it is finally a journey all its own.