Home is the Journey: On Anxiety, Ansel Adams, and Finally Seeing America

For most of my adult life, "real" travel meant a passport stamp. Long-haul flights, foreign currencies, menus I couldn't quite read, and that exhaustion-mixed-with-aliveness that only international travel delivers. I've been fortunate to experience it. Hong Kong is my original home; however, I've lived in America for most of my adult life, and for too long, I quietly looked down on the idea of "just" seeing America, as if the country you already live in doesn't quite count.

I don't think that anymore.

Something shifted. Flight delays, IT outages, high-profile aviation incidents, FAA staffing shortfalls, air traffic control systems running on technology that was already aging when I was in school. I'm not afraid of flying; I know the statistics. But the friction of international travel feels different now. Higher stakes. Less forgiving. And then there's the subtler anxiety, the one I'm almost embarrassed to name: whether you'll be welcomed abroad, whether you'll be stranded if something goes sideways, whether, in a world moving as fast and strangely as this one, the flight home is guaranteed. I know U.S. citizenship is a powerful document. And yet, it turns out I'm not alone. Nearly half of Americans are reconsidering overseas travel right now, citing concerns about government policies, perceptions of American tourists abroad, and the very real possibility of delays or cancellations that could leave them stranded far from home. The world feels complicated in a way that makes the simple idea, stay home, go deep, and suddenly very appealing.

I'm doing it. I have about a dozen states left. For the next few years, I'm finishing the map.

I'm starting with the American West as Ansel Adams taught me to see it. Adams is my favorite photographer, and my home is filled with large, framed photographs of the national parks. I acquired those while working overtime in litigation. I couldn’t travel to these places as I often felt my time was limited. It’s funny how this is now beginning to make sense.

I am connecting the dots from the past, just like what Steve Jobs said. In 1941, the National Park Service commissioned Adams to photograph America's national parks, to show what the country was worth protecting. Adams traveled to Yellowstone and Grand Teton in the summer of 1942 and made some of the most enduring photographs ever taken on American soil. I've spent years looking at those images in books and museums. Now, in the year America turns 250, I'm finally going to the places themselves.

Starting from Salt Lake City, Utah, immediately going to Yellowstone, where geysers erupt on schedule, hot springs sit open to the sky like something from another planet, and bison treat the road as their personal right-of-way. Adams stood at Artist Point above the Lower Falls and waited for the light to do something specific. I want to understand that patience firsthand.

Then east through the Black Hills to Mount Rushmore, four presidents carved into a granite mountain the Lakota Sioux call Six Grandfathers. Monumental and complicated, grandeur and difficult history woven together, inseparable. That's what I want from this whole 50-state project: not a postcard version of the country, but the full tonal range. The brightest whites and the darkest shadows, the way they define each other in a good black-and-white print.

And finally, Grand Teton. Adams stood at the Snake River Overlook on Highway 89 in 1942 and took a photograph that later sold for nearly a million dollars and traveled into deep space aboard Voyager, one of 116 images chosen to represent Earth's beauty to the universe. A black and white photograph of a Wyoming river valley. I'm going to stand where he stood and try to see what he saw.

But underneath all of this is something more personal. Cheungma is aging, and I don't know how many more years we'll be able to travel together. Since March of this year, I have lost two family members in Hong Kong, and it has been nine years since my father’s passing. The pull toward home, toward this enormous, contradictory, beautiful country we share, feels like something worth listening to right now.

America turns 250 this July 4th. The parks are celebrating. The light is waiting. Fifty states. One country. It’s about time we cherish what we have and prioritize what matters to us.