PENDLETON, N.Y. — We picked up the recreational vehicle in Collins, N.Y., about 40 miles from where Timothy McVeigh was born. It is a 2000 model, equipped with electricity, running water, two beds, a working kitchen, and more cabinets and cupboards than we could hope to fill in our five days on the road. We are planning to drive it the 600 miles to Terre Haute, Ind., where McVeigh is scheduled to be executed at 8 a.m. ET Monday morning.

From his birthplace to his death place, and all points in between. Along the way, we will talk to people, ask them about the execution, about the death penalty, about their lives. It will be a journey through the heartland. In an RV. It is an American odyssey, wrong side out, and it is probably crazy and maybe in poor taste, but we have had this idea. This idea.

It arose spontaneously and organically during a staff meeting just yesterday. A group of editors and writers talking about the execution, making provisions. What if we... We could really... It just might... Could we? And less than 24 hours later, Andy Brooks, a Web site producer, and I were being given the tour of the inside of our recreational vehicle by a muscular, tattooed mechanic named Greg, whose T-shirt sleeves had been hacked off. When we told him we wouldn't be doing any cooking in the RV, he looked at me and said, "You don't cook? How do you ever expect to get married?" He was also the first to inform us that Bill McVeigh, the terrorist's father, had left town for the weekend, making it very clear to the media earlier that day that they needn't call on him because he wouldn't be home.

With or without Mr. McVeigh, our main destination for the afternoon was Pendleton, the town just north of Buffalo where McVeigh grew up and attended high school. We were briefly waylaid on our route by the Original American Kazoo Factory and museum (est. 1907) — which displayed on its roof what must surely be the world's largest kazoo — and by a gas station minimart where a sign at the register read, "Limit two butters per person," but by five or so we were heading north to Pendleton, Andy at the wheel and me wrangling with the maps.

The smallness of this almost-town was apparent long before we ever barreled into it in our 25-foot Shasta Sprite, the Ford V-10 engine roaring and the curtain rods rattling against the weatherproof windows. It did not appear on the giant road atlas we had purchased earlier, and it was barely a dot on our backup state map. When I called a Kinkos in neighboring Tonawanda to ask for directions there from Pendleton — to e-mail photos we had taken earlier — the woman who answered the phone had never even heard of McVeigh’s birthplace, though she worked not three miles away.

We drove around and around the town's perimeter, a fortress of strip malls and shiny, new discount stores, without being able to find our way into it and finally had to stop at a gas station for directions. The pimply teenage girl behind the register insisted that Pendleton was just "over there" and made an indistinct hand gesture that seemed to indicate both north and south simultaneously. I asked if she could point me toward the central part of the town.

"Like where?" she asked, curling her upper lip to reveal two neat rows of braces.

"Just the main part?" I asked hopefully.

"Uh..."

Apparently, Pendleton has no main part, no center. And after 40 more minutes of left turns and right turns down long, curving roads dividing seas of tall grass, past the occasional farmer's stand and antique car dealer and one vast lot of multicolored lawn ornaments, we spotted a green water tower with PENDLETON painted across it and knew we had arrived.

Lawn ornaments in McVeigh's hometown

Beneath the tower was a baseball field and next to that a squat, one-room structure that a hand-carved sign advertised as the Pendleton Historical Society. Is there anything in this town's history, I wondered, that could possibly compare with having harbored, raised and nurtured America's deadliest terrorist?

A peek through the window (the office was closed) provided no answers. I could make out only a stack of Styrofoam cups on a counter and four rows of folding chairs. It was a dark, tired-looking room with outdated paneling. We had arrived too late to talk to anyone here today. And maybe we were just too late in general. We were the last stragglers in a long and hungry stampede of reporters, who had herded to this small place looking for an explanation, for a scoop, for sound bytes, who had camped out in front of Bill McVeigh's modest ranch house just a minute's drive down the road. Andy began shooting video of the water tower, and I asked myself for the fourth or fifth time today, What are we doing here?

I am wrong about Pendleton, of course. It has more to its credit — or blame — than McVeigh. Joyce Carol Oates once lived here, for one example. "To grow up in Pendleton, N.Y.," she said, "is to know oneself distinctly marginal; wherever the fountainheads of significance, let alone power, they are surely not here." A Web site editor read this quote to me over the phone as we were racing (so far as that word can be applied to our new vehicle) down Route 290, hoping to make Pendleton before dark, and it came back to me as I stood under the water tower scanning the sparse surroundings. Did McVeigh feel marginalized here? Enough to kill?

A tiny roadhouse bar called Brauer's was the only other occupied building nearby. Andy maneuvered the RV into a space in the gravel parking lot next to another, larger RV ("Do you think someone stole our idea? Is everybody driving to Terre Haute in an RV?") and we went inside, where six or seven patrons sat at the short wooden bar. Formica tables with metal stools lined one wall, and a jukebox stood silently in the corner. In a second room visible through the doorway they were serving the Fine Food advertised on the sign outside.

"No....Comment..." the bartender said with practiced finality when Andy told him we were working on a story about McVeigh. "We've had enough reporters around here. Since the beginning." He waved the subject off with one hand and moved away. A burly, sunburned man in a sleeveless button-down shot a tired glance in our direction. We sat down at the bar and ordered beers, catching their fatigue. We had come a long way to talk to people about almost nothing but McVeigh, but suddenly I didn't want to talk about him either.

A man sitting to my right began to explain to me the numbers game being played out on a TV screen above the bar. It was something like Keno. You select up to 10 numbers for a dollar a card. If any of your numbers match those the computer selected, you win. He had already won $80 that evening. He had rough hands, dark weathered skin and a youthful, mischievous smile. A pack of Marlboro Reds sat on the bar in front of him among his winning cards. He owned his own trucking company, and we learned that it costs $3,000 to replace all the tires on an 18-wheeler. Less if you buy them in Canada, which he sometimes did.

"If the wheels are on the truck when you drive it back across, they're not exactly going to ask you about them," he said.

A petite, though somehow tough-looking woman in a plaid flannel shirt wandered into the bar and took a seat next to the burly, suntanned man, who nodded his recognition to her. He later told us she was his wife of 23 years, and she confirmed this with a wry half-smile.

We explained our project to them. The drive. The RV. The interviews. The execution. We down played it, hoping for their understanding. They expressed their sympathy for Bill McVeigh, who, it came out, was once a Brauer's regular.

"Bill used to come in here all the time and drink with us," one man said. "But he doesn't anymore."

"It's not his fault what happened," someone else said, and others added murmurs of assent.

Now he spends his days fending off the reporters, they explained, somehow managing not to implicate us in their disgust, and in exchange we nodded sympathetically.

The conversation waned, and we all stared into our beers. "What a way to put Pendleton on the map," the suntanned man added sadly, and the subject was closed.

Our jumbo-sized pinwheel and RV

It was after eight when we left the bar, though we had stayed only half an hour, and already beginning to grow dark. We decided to do what any New Yorker would do when released into the suburbs. We went to Target. It had suddenly dawned on us that we were going to have to sleep in this thing, this house/car, this obscenity. We had not thought to bring sheets or blankets or pillows. We grabbed madly at items on the Target shelves, needing everything and consumed by a desire to spend. Without more than a cursory "What do you think? This?" "Yes, definitely" we bought a jumbo-sized pinwheel to plant in the ground in front of the RV. We find this hilarious. We think it will attract strange and fascinating people to us. They will line up outside the RV while we are sleeping. We decided to expense it as a "Public Relations Implement."

We piled our booty into the Shasta Sprite, and I paused for the requisite second to wonder at our merriment. It is easy to forget where we are going.

Later, as we are driving up Route 190 toward the KOA that would be our parking spot for the night — Andy is wielding the steering wheel like a weapon and I am struggling with the map, just as if there were a couple of rowdy kids in the back and we are all heading to Yellowstone — Andy blurts out, "I know what is so great about what we are doing!"

"What?" I ask, because I am certain there is something and it is just waiting there, ready to be named.

"It's great because this is exactly how McVeigh would have done it. We're self-contained in this thing. Independent. We don't need anyone for anything."

He seems to be right. Earlier, on the plane, I had been reading about McVeigh, the survivalist. In their book American Terrorist Lou Michel and Dan Herbeck describe McVeigh's early obsession with preparing for disaster, how upset he had been when the basement flooded in the house he shared with his father and how he had made provisions to prevent it from happening again. The RV does at first seem to be the ultimate survivalist vehicle. But then I remember the hassles of the day — the search for an Internet connection, for a place to recharge our cell phones, for a camping spot so the RV can be plugged in — and the theory begins to lose its charm.

We find the KOA, just a few miles south of Niagara Falls, and an enthusiastic boy of about 17 shows us to our parking spot. We pass giant vehicle after giant vehicle, some accompanied by the dim glow of small campfires. It is dark, and the only sounds, once we turn the engine off, are the ringing, bell-like voices of bats. I crawl into the bedspace over the driver's seat and Andy takes the room in the back. Whenever he turns over, the vehicle shakes. I lie awake for hours, white-brained with insomnia, squishing mosquitoes on my thumb. What are we doing here? Tomorrow we must make ourselves useful in some way. We will drive toward Ohio.

Read next journal entry from Mansfield, Ohio