features.foreignpolicy.com
A
decade ago, while studying at business school in San Francisco, Fadi
BouKaram started feeling homesick for the sunbaked hills of his native
Lebanon. He typed “Lebanon” into Google Maps — and was stunned to find
himself looking not at the Middle East, but at Lebanon, Oregon, a mere
nine-hour drive from his apartment. He was puzzled: There was a U.S.
Lebanon? Could there be more?
Another quick search led him to Lebanon, Pennsylvania. Then to Lebanon,
Kentucky. Altogether, he found more than 50 Lebanons in the United
States. The reason, of course, is that the word “Lebanon” appears more than 70 times in the Old Testament. What, BouKaram wondered, if one day he visited all of them?
Ten years later, this germ of an idea had landed him in a police station
in Albuquerque, New Mexico, chasing a mother-daughter meth-dealing team
that had stolen and gutted his rented recreational vehicle, the one he
had slept in for five months, the one that had carried him 17,800 miles
through 37 states, and left him with a better understanding of the
American heartland than nearly all his coastal elite friends. But more
on that later.
BouKaram, now 38, spent much of his childhood in bomb shelters in the
Beirut suburb of Sabtieh at the height of Lebanon’s civil war in the
1980s. The war, combined with the conflict with Israel, left the country
decrepit in every way. BouKaram got his degree in electrical
engineering and soon landed a job. In 2005, he was so close when former
Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri was assassinated with a car bomb
that his face was cut with glass from the explosion. “I needed a break,”
said BouKaram, who decamped to San Francisco shortly after to study.
After business school, BouKaram returned to the Middle East as a tax
consultant. His job took him from Cairo to Kuwait to Baghdad, often in
an armored car. When in Baghdad, he had to submit a proof of life form
with identification marks of his body in case he were killed. “All this
for taxes?” BouKaram said he thought.
In July 2016, he quit his job and decided to make good on the dream of a
decade before: He would visit all the Lebanons in the United States and
photograph his way through America. His plan was pegged to a
little-known historical event in 1955, when Lebanese President Camille
Chamoun invited
seven representatives from towns called Lebanon in the United States to
see the country. According to BouKaram’s research, they spent two weeks
in Beirut, touring the nation, and were gifted cedar — the national
symbol of Lebanon — saplings to take home and plant in their towns.
BouKaram wanted to see if the seven trees still existed.
The timing was also intentional. He wanted to see America before,
during, and after the 2016 U.S. presidential election, even if that
could be off-putting for a Lebanese-born, San Francisco-educated
“coastal elite.”
“Now is not exactly the best time to be doing a road trip through the United States,” BouKaram told me in February from a parking lot in Illinois, where he was resting on his way to Lebanon, Missouri.
What he found as he began his journey in Seattle and snaked through Montana and North Dakota is a now familiar tale. But for BouKaram, who had only known America’s coasts, it was a huge culture shock. He saw closed businesses, shuttered houses, for-sale signs. “Even the Salvation Army was for sale,” he said. What’s going on here? BouKaram thought.
In all, he photographed 24 and toured 28 Lebanons (his first stop being the Lebanon, Oregon, he stumbled upon in business school), nearly every one of which has reliably voted Republican since the turn of the century. And far from feeling ostracized, BouKaram said he found some of the nicest people he had ever encountered.
“It got to the point where now I’m starting to feel uncomfortable sharing some of these stories with my friends because it’s as if I live in a different country than they’re living in on the coast,” he said.
Ultimately, his work aimed not to express political viewpoints but to subvert the expectations that come with them. He was not interested in the inhabitants of red states and blue states but in the “people who are in the middle,” he said. No, not independents, but those who don’t subscribe to a “prepackaged ideology.”
Back on the road, even the odd scrape had happy endings. One November evening in McCook, Nebraska, BouKaram was having a beer at a seedy local bar — “I’m not going to go to a microbrewery. No hipsters, please.” — when a man approached him and asked him where he was from. Lebanon, he told him.
“You came all the way from Israel to here? How would you feel if I came to your town?” the man demanded. The man started shouting at him, and the bartender had to toss him out. BouKaram was shaken and then stunned when everyone else at the bar hugged him and apologized.
The next morning, he found a Post-it note from the bartender, who had paid for his drinks, on his windshield.
“Fadi,” she wrote, “There’s a lot of hatred in this world, and I’m sorry for that.… I hope you meet more good souls than bad on your journey. Safe travels, Alissa.”
A few bad souls were still out there, of a sort. On March 3, BouKaram was in an Albuquerque hotel, mapping the route to his final destination, when his RV was stolen. He was left with the clothes he was wearing, his computer, and an overnight bag — everything else from a five-month odyssey was gone.
Police weren’t hopeful; Albuquerque is notorious for crime, especially auto theft. But 12 hours later, he got a call: They had found his RV and his belongings. And they had found the women responsible, a mother and daughter.
BouKaram arrived at the scene and saw a pickup truck full of his bags. The RV was gutted and had been transformed into a makeshift drug lab. Tubes of lipstick and what BouKaram described as “really questionable sex toys” littered the empty space. All his photography equipment had been inventoried, with hopeful appraisals for what it might fetch.
“She wanted a place to live, and she didn’t harm me,” he said. He would have dropped the charges against the two if he could’ve, but since it was a rented RV, he had no choice.
BouKaram’s trip was rife with unexpected discoveries. The story of the cedars of Lebanon, for one, took a strange turn in Lebanon, Oregon, when he discovered the town’s proclaimed “cedar” was actually a juniper tree. After doing some digging, BouKaram found that when the representatives returned from their trip in 1955, the saplings were quarantined and fumigated. Only one survived. The rest were secretly replaced with junipers. The lone surviving cedar still stands in Lebanon, Ohio, next to an abandoned railroad.
In another way, BouKaram’s trip was as much about his own history as his country’s. “The Lebanon I grew up in is not a Lebanon I’m fond of because of the war,” he said. “So going to all these places was me searching and looking to see what a Lebanon would look like without a war.” While he found poverty, drug addiction, and suffering in these towns, he also developed a newfound faith in the characters he was once warned about.
“It’s made me more optimistic to find out that so many of them are kind people regardless of what their political beliefs are,” he said.
BouKaram is now back in Lebanon living in his old apartment. He hopes to come back to America soon but has become a decidedly noncoastal elite. His dream city now is Birmingham, Alabama — and not just for all the friendly folks he met on the road.
“The price of real estate there! Oh, Jesus.”
To see more photos and read about BouKaram's trip in his own words, visit his trip blog or follow him on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.
1. Lebanon, Oregon | Oct. 19, 2016 |
2. Lebanon Township, North Dakota | Oct. 30, 2016 |
3. Lebanon, South Dakota | Nov. 1, 2016 |
4. Lebanon, Nebraska | Nov. 6, 2016 |
5. Lebanon, Kansas | Nov. 9, 2016 |
6. Lebanon, Wisconsin (Dodge County) | Nov. 14, 2016 |
7. Lebanon, Wisconsin (Waupaca County) | Nov. 17, 2016 |
8. Lebanon Township, Michigan | Nov. 20, 2016 |
9. Lebanon, Maine | Nov. 26, 2016 |
10. Lebanon, New Hampshire | Nov. 29, 2016 |
11. New Lebanon, New York | Dec. 6, 2016 |
12. Mount Lebanon, New York | Dec. 8, 2016 |
13. Lebanon, Connecticut | Dec. 12, 2016 |
14. Lebanon, New Jersey | Dec. 21, 2016 |
15. Lebanon, Pennsylvania | Dec. 24, 2016 |
16. Lebanon, Kentucky | Jan. 1, 2017 |
17. Lebanon Junction, Kentucky | Jan. 4, 2017 |
18. Lebanon, Tennessee | Jan. 6, 2017 |
19. Lebanon, Virginia | Jan. 14, 2017 |
20. Lebanon, Ohio | Jan. 25, 2017 |
21. Lebanon, Indiana | Jan. 30, 2017 |
22. Lebanon, Illinois | Feb. 3, 2017 |
23. Lebanon, Missouri | Feb. 6, 2017 |
24. Lebanon, Oklahoma | Feb. 8, 2017 |