Highway A: What I Found When I Followed the Alphabet's First Letter Across America

Somewhere between the second gas station coffee and the third yield sign, it hit me: I wasn't on a road trip. I was on a pilgrimage.

The plan was simple, almost silly. Chart a route across the country using only towns that begin with A — the alphabet's first letter, the Alef, the character mystics have spent millennia calling the breath before all other breaths. Then drive it. See if anything happens.

Something happened.

Starting at the Beginning, Obviously

You can't chase the letter A without asking why it's everywhere. Altoona, Pennsylvania. Amarillo, Texas. Aurora, Colorado. Abilene, twice — once in Kansas, once in Texas, like the name itself couldn't be contained by one state.

Linguists will tell you it's coincidence, phonetics, the easy open vowel. But standing in a diner in Altoona at 7 a.m., watching a waitress pour coffee for a room full of strangers who all said "morning" to each other without looking up, I started to suspect something else. Places named with the first letter feel like places that are still beginning. Still open.

The Alef, in Hebrew tradition, is silent. It's the letter that holds a sound without making one — pure potential before the voice arrives. Maybe that's why A-towns feel the way they do. They're holding a place for whatever comes next.

The Photo Essay: Five A-Towns With an Unexpected Glow

1. Altoona, Pennsylvania. A railroad town that peaked a century ago and never got the memo that it was supposed to be embarrassed about it. The Horseshoe Curve still bends freight trains around a mountain like a signature on a letter. There's a humility here that feels almost devotional — a town that knows it's a chapter, not the whole book.

2. Aurora, Colorado. Named for the dawn, and it leans into it. On the eastern edge of Denver, the sky does things at sunrise that made me pull over on a frontage road just to watch. A city named for light, sitting where the plains begin. You don't need to be a mystic to feel the setup.

3. Abilene, Kansas. The original end of the Chisholm Trail, where cowboys literally finished one journey and millions of others started. The town sits quietly at the junction, a kind of national hinge. Standing where the trail ended, I kept thinking: every ending here was somebody's first day.

4. Amarillo, Texas. Named for the yellow wildflowers that used to carpet the plains, Amarillo is loud, weird, and completely unbothered by your opinion of it. Cadillac Ranch — ten graffiti-covered Cadillacs buried nose-down in a field — might be the most honest monument in America. A thing built to be added to, forever. A beginning that never closes.

5. Ashland, Oregon. A town built around a theater, which means a town built around the idea that stories matter enough to schedule your whole life around them. The Elizabethan Stage opens into the night air with no roof. You watch plays under the stars, and if it rains, the play keeps going. That's not entertainment. That's faith.

Naming as an Act of Creation

Here's the thought I couldn't shake the whole drive home: naming a place is the closest thing most of us will ever do to the act of creation described in ancient texts. Someone stood on a bend of river or a stretch of prairie and said a word, and the word stuck, and generations later people are born, live, and die inside that word.

When those founders reached for a name, so many of them reached for the front of the alphabet. Not because they lacked imagination — because beginnings were what they had. A town is an argument that the future is worth organizing. You don't name a place Abilene or Aurora unless you believe someone is coming after you.

That's the quiet theology of the American road map. Every A-town is a sentence that starts with the same letter as awake, alive, and again.

The Truck Stop Benediction

My last stop was a truck stop outside Amarillo, the kind with a chapel in the back — because of course there was a chapel. Small, wood-paneled, empty except for me and a rack of worn Bibles. On the table, someone had left a note: Drive safe. You're not done yet.

Not done yet. That's the whole message of the first letter, I think. The Alef doesn't conclude. It opens. Every highway out of every A-town runs somewhere you haven't been.

I got back on the road. The sun did its Aurora thing on the horizon. And for a second, just a second, the whole country felt like one long word being spoken — starting, as everything does, with a breath.