TO OUR READERS

By BRUCE HALLETT/PRESIDENT

Upholding an American tradition that stretches from the early pioneers to Mark Twain to the Merry Pranksters, a caravan of TIME journalists set off across the country last week. With due ceremony, they dipped their hands in the waters of the Atlantic Ocean, then boarded a Greyhound bus in Ocean City, Md. They followed no campaign trail, no flood line, no militia uprising, but rather the road itself--U.S. Highway 50. "As reporters, we regularly fly to crisis spots and world capitals," says managing editor Walter Isaacson, who caught up with the bus in Cincinnati on Thursday. "But we don't often make time to look for news that is happening in communities across the nation."

The "Backbone of America" project, as we call it, grew out of the 1996 presidential campaign and our correspondents' frustration at how the candidates--and the press that covered them--were growing increasingly out of touch with the voters. We decided to look for the stories the media were missing on Highway 50 because it was anything but an interstate. A two-lane road for most of its path, it literally becomes Main Street in small town after small town. For two months our journalists have been roaming up and down those Main Streets, taking the pulse of America. And over the course of nearly three weeks, 20 TIME reporters and photographers will wrap up that effort with a 3,100-mile trek over the full length of the road, crossing 16 states and winding up, on May 21, in San Francisco.

Our TIME travelers had barely buckled up before they got their first assignment: to find out whether the economic boom that sent the stock market to a new high last week was filtering down to the grass roots. In Chillicothe, Ohio, Chicago bureau chief James Graff found Jim Whitman, an executive vice president of the Petland retail chain, in high spirits; customers were buying his tropical fish, Dalmatians and flying squirrels in record numbers. In Aurora, W.Va., however, the mood was less sweet. Dale Pase, a park ranger, told staff writer Adam Cohen that 85% of his neighbors could be classified as "working poor."

Whitman's exuberant optimism and Pase's quiet resignation--these are the cadences that our Highway 50 team is listening for. "We're trying to discover what unites and divides the nation, besides the road," says Washington bureau chief Michael Duffy. That search took our journalists last week to high schools, truck shops, bowling alleys and bars. They explored a 2,000-year-old Indian burial mound, a doll factory, an FBI lab and a two-alarm fire. The first dispatch from the Greyhound appears in this week's issue. Look for our full report next month.