It was the lingering afterglow of a journalistic inquiry that had yielded open-hearted stories from ten people on a train — ten people whom I’d randomly chosen to interview on a long ride from St. Louis to Albuquerque and back again. I wanted to check in with somebody else — anybody else, to find out how people were feeling about their lives, their families, their jobs, their future, and the future of our nation in the summer of 2017.