State lines converged on my route out of the city, and for much of the day I wasn’t sure whether I was in Iowa or Nebraska. I could have solved my quandary by consulting my map, but it didn’t really matter. I knew I was on the right road, and at the end of the day, that’s all that mattered.

Over the next seven days I followed I-29 due south. The road, for the most part, was in Iowa though at times it crossed state lines into Nebraska, as it did in Omaha.

This part of the country seemed old and good to me, reflected, perhaps, in the area’s claims to fame. Western Iowa gave us Donna Reed (Jimmy Stewart’s low-maintenance wife in It’s a Wonderful Life), the great orchestra leader Glenn Miller, and the performer Andy Williams of “Moon River” fame—a song I only knew because we performed it on our recorders in Miss Rossi’s class in the second grade.

The region didn’t just contribute actors and musicians to the American cultural pot. One of the towns I passed was Onawa, the place where Eskimo Pies were invented by a Danish immigrant named Christian Kent Nelson—a schoolteacher and candy store owner. (A delightfully congruent combination, I thought.) Nelson came up with the idea for the Eskimo Pie in 1920 when a child in his store couldn’t decide between an ice cream or a chocolate bar. He ended up patenting the bar and made an agreement with Russell C. Stover, the candy magnate, to produce the frozen treats under the name Eskimo Pie. At the height of their popularity, more than one million Eskimo Pies were sold in America each day. The American dream is made of such stuff.

As I walked, I felt as if I were discovering a side of America that was lost to the media, or at least ignored, written off as inconsequential. As I would discover over the next few weeks, these small towns are tinder boxes for some of the world’s greatest people and ideas. Residents from metropolises tend to look down on those from smaller populations—even in their big-city failures. I had an employee from Brooklyn who told me that when his driver’s education teacher informed his class that because of all the car robberies their borough had the highest car insurance premiums in the country, some of the students clapped and high-fived each other. Stupid as this mentality is, I don’t think it’s ever been different. People tend to grab onto whatever they can to make themselves feel superior—whether it’s a brand, a football team, or even a locale.

These were not bad days of walking. I passed large, well-organized fields and lilac-strewn countryside, always pleasant to look at, at best, idyllic.