Andrew Fedorov

Every year in late December, my childhood home transformed into a vision of American bliss. We’d gather to ornament a tree, drape string lights around the house, and sit down to an elaborate feast. Not long after dawn the next day, while our little sister still slept, my brother and I would impatiently sneak downstairs to see our gifts, which we understood to have been delivered by a kindly old man. It could have been a scene out of A Christmas Story. Except we weren’t celebrating Christmas.

Most summers since I was 17, I’ve gone hitchhiking. In California, at 19, I rode with a stuntman who estimated he’d sustained 50 concussions. A few years later, in Utah, a young man said God told him to pick me up; the next morning, a mother coming off a night shift told me she regretted her disinterest in the Church. In Wyoming, an oil-field geologist steamed about his divorce after months alone in a trailer. “You’re the first person I’ve talked to,” he said.