Last week in Oahu I rented a moped. Not a WRX, not a Mustang — a moped. Flip-flops, salt on my skin, the engine buzzing by the Pacific. That ride closed the circle: I’ve now driven in all fifty U.S. states.
This didn’t start as a bucket list. There was no checklist taped to the dash. It started when I was twenty-one, broke, and driving a beat-up 1978 Toyota Corolla 5-speed with a friend. No money, no plan — just the road and a taste for getting out of town.
We dove into Manhattan at rush hour, swallowed by yellow cabs, and rolled past the United Nations like we belonged. In Tennessee we washed windshields in the rain to cover gas. In Iowa we watched the first green shoots push through the dirt. In New Orleans we spent our last twelve bucks at the Cat’s Meow, and the next morning we bought a squeegee and kept going.
The road gave us everything: an Upstate New York theater playing Misery, a Chicago tollbooth flashing in the mirror, a hundred pickup games in towns we never learned the names of. Fort Lauderdale stalled the alternator and forced a two-day wait. The Everglades left us stranded one dark night with water moving just beyond the ditch. Santa Fe felt high and quiet as we hung out in the university dorms watching a boxing match. The Grand Canyon was bottomless. The Oregon coast went on forever. We snuck into the State Department in Washington, DC, and I can say I went to Harvard and MIT — in the same day.
Two and a half months. Twenty-four thousand miles. Nights sleeping in the Corolla at rest stops — the steering wheel for a pillow. Texas could swallow you whole. Maine smelled of salt and woodsmoke. California freeways were a different animal. We went to Bethlehem and Allentown after the Billy Joel song, and were toured around Philadelphia by a New Jersey firefighter. We zig-zagged until exhaustion blurred the days and all that mattered was the hum of tires and the next town on the horizon.
In 1999 I drove to Alaska — a place as wide as the sky.
And then, decades later, Hawaii. The fiftieth state. Not in some fantasy muscle car. Just a moped, small and right, riding the coast.
Driving all fifty states wasn’t about seeing them. It was about surviving them. Getting lost, getting found, meeting people who taught me something without trying to. It was about turning a map into a mirror — a reflection of a kid who preferred stories over comfort.
I got them. Every damn mile.
— Brent Antonson
Canadian. Still driving.