Selected Extracts I''ve been fascinated by America since I was a child. I had a cowboy outfit and toy guns, which I put beside my dinner plate so I could shoot at the baddies when the Cisco Kid and the Lone Ranger were on TV. My interest grew through comics, books, music and movies until I discerned - and developed a yearning for - those open spaces and empty roads which speak to a form of freedom not found in England. David Reynolds, Spring 2020 The US Highways, also known as US Routes, were planned and built in the 1920s and early 1930s because cars had become commonplace and because, in the Great Depression, men needed work. They formed a grid of more than a hundred two-lane roads which crossed the country from east to west and north to south. Beginning in the 1950s, they were gradually superseded by multi-lane Interstate Highways, which, with central reservations and slip roads for entering and leaving, encouraged speed, filled up with trucks and bypassed towns. William Least Heat- Moon, author of what is perhaps the best American road book, Blue Highways, wrote sagely, ''Life doesn''t happen along interstates. It''s against the law.

'' Many of the old US Highways, including Route 66, have been decommissioned; parts of them lie buried under interstates or have been allowed to grass over, and, even where a stretch of road survives, their distinctive shield-shaped signs, with the highway''s number, have been removed because short lengths of road are not US Highways. But US Highway 50 is still a US Highway. It does what it was designed to do; it crosses the country, is still pretty much intact and has shields beside it all the way. The Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad I find the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad Visitor Center beside a narrow road surrounded by green fields, woods, ponds and marshland - just a few miles from Bucktown and Harriet''s birthplace. It is a handsome, low, modern building, opened in 2017, funded and run jointly by the National Park Service and the State of Maryland, and set within another tribute to Tubman, the seventeen-acre Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad State Park. On this sunny afternoon, the setting is idyllic, and again hard to square with the evil of slavery. Inside the Center I learn that, when Tubman lived nearby as a girl, as well as doing farm work and standing for hours in freezing water trapping muskrats for their thick winter fur, she worked with her father cutting down trees, turning them into timber and hauling it to local wharves. That work gave her the knowledge and contacts that later enabled her to set up escape routes from here in eastern Maryland to, initially, the free state of Pennsylvania.

It is also hard to accept that this slave system held sway so recently. Slavery was abolished in 1865. Tubman herself escaped to freedom in Philadelphia in Pennsylvania in 1849. Between then and the beginning of the Civil War in 1861, she made thirteen trips during which she led seventy slaves from her old homeland to freedom, many of them to Canada, where they were safer than in the free states of the United States, from which they could be returned to slavery. She also helped another fifty slaves to escape by advising them where to go, how to hide and so on. She became known as ''Moses'' and said many years later, ''I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger.'' I gaze at a cradle made from a hollowed-out tree and imagine it lying on an earth floor in a flimsy shack, a baby asleep, a young mother nearby and a tired father rocking the cradle with his foot. The Center is designed with reverence - is almost a shrine, dimly lit in places, with modern brass sculptures, some of Tubman herself, and a movie that shows a succession of eminent people paying tribute to her character and achievements.

Another movie re-enacts some of her great escapes, including cliff- hanging moments when she and those she is leading came close to being discovered. Old photographs, documents and objects are mixed in with huge modern colour illustrations, some of which have a three-dimensional element - a wooden gate or the prow of ship jutting from them. The civil war between the northern and southern states, the Union and the Confederacy, was fought on the issue of slavery. Harriet Tubman moved south with the Union troops, working first as a nurse and a cook and then as an armed scout and spy. A sculpture here shows her leading the famous Raid on Combahee Ferry, an action that defeated a detachment of the Confederate Army and freed 750 slaves, many of whom joined the Union Army. I spend an hour wandering around and visiting the shop, which has a wall filled with serious books about slavery and the Civil War, alongside Harriet Tubman finger puppets, key rings and rulers. Then I walk across lush grass to a picnic building with tables and a sink with running water. I look out towards a still lake in which clouds and sky are reflected; beyond is a field bordered by trees: ''Countryside preserved,'' as the woman who ran the shop put it, ''as it would have been back in the slave days.

'' A Quiet Sundae in Hillsboro The heat continues into the evening as I drive west towards Hillsboro. The sky is light blue. Wispy clouds lie against the sun in the south. The road is two-lane, traffic-free, a smooth ride across the flood plain of Paint Creek, a tributary of the Scioto, which itself flows south to the Ohio River. To my left, wooded hills rise above fields, and up there, among trees, I glimpse a road, perhaps a lane, winding upwards, like a thread dropped on a carpet. Half a mile on, I turn onto that lane, and find a field of deep green maize as far as the treeline, a white-painted farmhouse and a Dutch barn with a hipped, flyaway roof. I drive on up through woods, bright greens and yellows where the sun falls to my right, bottle greens in the murk to my left. The lane flattens and straightens, maize to both sides, a grand house, smaller houses, all painted white.

A stone needle, smaller than trees nearby, points skywards behind a stone wall: a grave or perhaps a war memorial. I turn the car and return to 50. Now the road is a series of switchbacks and curves. In a hollow beneath trees, black cattle stand sleek and still, waiting perhaps for the cool of night-time. At the crest of a hill sits a low building with a giant ice- cream cone jutting from its gable end. I stop and find an old man behind a sliding window serving an eclectic range of ice creams, sandwiches, burgers and hot dogs. I order a cherry sundae and, after a few grunts and some whistling from inside the window, receive a bowl containing a helter-skelter of soft vanilla ice cream, soused and swimming in cherry sauce. I sit in an outdoor shelter eating this delight with a plastic spoon.

Across from me, a man with three children, two boys and a girl, allows them to punch one another for a couple of minutes before shouting, ''That''s enough!'' The children go quiet and scrape up the remains of their ice creams. All four climb into a beaten up, low-slung, matt-black car, which chugs for a minute like a fleet of Harleys before hurtling out of the car park. As the noise subsides, the only other occupant of th.