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surveying the surrounding geography, which was ironed flat by a mile-thick glacier that rolled through about 20,000 years ago. Now the landscape imposes rigid Newtonian laws on anything that messes with its uniformity—if you see the mild rise of an interstate overpass (like the one within eyeshot of the parking lot), a small man-made pond of inverse dimension will be found nearby, a couple hundred yards away.
    The mall is a 300,000-square-foot retail space anchored by a JCPenney at one end and a Sears at the other. Faithfully observing Owen’s speed limit, I walked at a relaxed pace from the entrance of one store to the other. The journey took exactly two minutes, three seconds.
    Following Galton’s advice, I was sensitive to my first impressions. Evidence of recent economic troubles screamed for immediate attention. Of thirty-eight leasable spaces, sixteen were vacant. But instead of giving off a hollow, abandoned vibe, the mall felt mildly claustrophobic. A dozen separate vendors had set up cafeteria tables in the main concourse, hawking everything from hunting knives to pewter dragons to collectible dolls. You could still find nice stuff in the remaining stores, but these tables represented a lower rung on the retail ladder, and they were clearly taking over.
    In place of the landmarks of my youth, like the video-game arcade and the ice cream parlor, I saw a General Nutrition Center and something called “Community Blood Services.” Before I made it to Sears, I began to feel as if I were strolling through a world robbed of joy.
    But I checked myself. I returned, took a seat on a grated metal bench in the middle of the concourse, and reached into my backpack for my Kindle full of PDFs. Martineau was waiting to remind me to turn my attention outward. She urges her readers to assess the “character of the Pride” of a region—figure out what inspires them to make public proclamations, and you’re on the way to cracking their moral code.
    A T-shirt table in the middle of the mall attracted my eye. The first shirt I saw featured the letters
GPS,
with smaller letters around them. With exploration on the brain, I naturally gravitated toward it. It read,
If Lost, Use GPS—God’s Plan of Salvation.
    I remembered that Jackson, in his chapter about exploring the religion of an unknown locale, advises explorers to look for hints that might answer this question: “What do they hold necessary to be done in this life to receive happiness in the next?” I found some clues on the T-shirt table.
To Get to Heaven, You Need to Get the Hell Knocked Out of You.
    In my pocket notebook, under a few lines of first impressions, I wrote: “Christianity rules here, and it seems to be a combative, hard-won strain.” The author of
Hints to Travellers
advises that explorers label all field notations as “good,” “very good,” “doubtful,” etc. I confidently scribbled “v. good” in the margin.
    I now think of the first page of that notebook as a necessary warm-up, full of disposable insights. Few who visit could fail to note that whenever this midwestern town doesn’t wear its faith on its sleeve, it often wears it emblazoned across its chest. But it was around this time, as I wandered away from the T-shirts, that the tireless focus these books help to instill started to reveal less obvious patterns.
    Jackson insists that the ways a society engraves letters, for example, are “cognate and characteristic of the national mind, and are therefore, as such alone, highly worthy of the traveller’s attention.” I ducked into the Kirlins Hallmark store and found that cursive fonts, particularly those designed to suggest the lightest of pen strokes, could be found on almost all of the sympathy cards. Bold, blocky letters—many inscribed with a caveman sort of imprecision—almost always meant the cards were either meant to be funny or else were