The sun is surprisingly bright at 5:20 in the morning. I sleep for about an hour in the bedspace over the driver's seat and wake with the glare in my eyes, afraid that I have missed everything. But there are still an hour and forty minutes to go. Timothy McVeigh is certainly in the execution facility by now. I can't resist wondering what a person — even this person — thinks about during the last hour and forty minutes of his life.

We have driven more than 600 miles over three days to be here, but we are not going to the penitentiary this morning. We will not be using our last-minute press credentials to stand among the 1,400 other members of the media and wait for news of death.

Instead, we are going to work with Jim.

Jim Thomas

Jim Thomas builds basement walls for a living. He lives virtually across the street from the prison and has rented us space on his front lawn to park the RV (although he eventually gave the money to his neighbor, feeling guilty for undercutting her price and taking our business away). He has kindly agreed to let us tag along with him as he begins his workday at 5:45 a.m. He is rotund, white-bearded and almost Santa Claus jolly, his cheeks sun-red.

It is less than an hour until the execution as we head out Durham Drive, which tees at Route 63, the main penitentiary road. I am riding with Jim in his pickup truck while Andy follows behind in the RV. The prison towers are directly ahead, and I ask Jim about wall building.

He surprises me by launching into a thorough and meticulous description of the process. "First the excavation guy digs out the hole where the home will be," he begins, and I notice the four or five police officers near government vehicles at the end of Jim's road, in front of the low fence that marks the prison perimeter. "Then the footer guys level the ground out, dig the footers, then pour the concrete into the footers."

The small group of protesters who had been stationed directly in front of the gates last night are still there. One of them holds up a sign that says, "If Jesus loves Tim, so do we," as we pass.

"Then the wall crew, which sometimes I'm on, will pour the walls," Jim says. "We put our forms together and then we pour the walls right on the footers. That usually takes a day to build and pour the walls."

He makes a left turn off 63 and heads in a straight line directly away from the prison toward his job site, which is about 10 minutes away. The local TV news trucks are clustered together in front of a red, wooden house partially covered by trees.

"Then the waterproofing guys will come, and they'll waterproof the outside with the resin to keep it from leaking," Jim continues, fixing me with a determined look. He is careful to deliver his explanation with absolute accuracy. "We have a 10-year, lifetime warranty on that."

The penitentiary is visible for one second longer in the rear mirror and then disappears. I am reluctant to leave this scene, which will be the focus of so much attention during the next hour. But brand-new walls are about to be built somewhere in the city.

A group of grubby men stand around in torn jeans and T-shirts outside the small, prefab office building that is the headquarters of Woodco Walls, Inc. They are noisy and unshaven. I am too exhausted to gently introduce the topic at hand and simply ask them what they think about this execution happening right across their town.

One worker, a man in a sleeveless, coral pink T-shirt, takes a second out from eating a cookie to say, "Kill him. I don't mind where they do it just as long as they kill him."

"They should have hung him on a cross out in front of the building and let everybody stone him to death," offers another worker. He is sucking on a cigarette he holds between his thumb and forefinger like a spliff, his face partly hidden beneath a red baseball cap.

"It doesn't bother you that your city has become known for this execution?" I ask.

"No, it don't matter," one man says.

"This is a strange town," another adds.

"The armpit of America," throws in another. It is a phrase Steve Martin used about this place in his movie Planes, Trains and Automobiles, they tell us, with a bitter laughter which makes it clear that Terre Haute is a kind of prison for all of them.

We had perhaps been too romantic in our visions of how this experiment would go. We had imagined a heartening glimpse of people going on with their work and lives while a man was put to death a few miles away. What we find is something else. Although the men seem buoyant for 6:20 on a Monday morning, their ribbing is tinged with what feels unnervingly like angry desperation.

Jim introduces every man that walks onto the job site and gives us a ludicrously detailed description of what each does. From the way they tease him — and their asides to us — it is clear Jim is something of a joke among them. And he is so eager to please us. He guides us out to the gravel lot where the wall forms are stacked on flatbed trucks. He lists all the various sizes, pointing them out proudly. The list goes on and on. And on.

He is gracious and maintains his warm smile when we tell him we have decided not to spend much more time there. The crew is driving about 30 miles north to the day's construction site, and we realize we will be on the road at the time of the execution. That doesn't feel right. We have no idea where we will go with only half an hour remaining, but we climb back aboard the RV and begin cruising the deserted streets of Terre Haute.

It is a fast food town. It is a hubcap and gunshop town. Fireworks stores dot the concrete landscape. Everything is closed and we begin to grow panicky, throwing out bad ideas. But finally we spot a Bob Evans restaurant, where a dozen or more cars are parked. It is exactly what we didn't know we were looking for.

Three men are sitting at the breakfast counter, and we slide onto the stools between them. Andy places the camera casually on the countertop and turns it on. We don't make a show of it, and two waitresses, who had stiffened at the site of the equipment, visibly relax as they decide we are only tourists, not reporters. We have not eaten a single meal, in the way we understand the word, since we have been on the road. The lazy light and the sweet smell of pancakes are inexpressibly comforting, and we order breakfast like starving children. It is 10 minutes to seven.

The man to my right turns to me out of the blue and says, "Be something if Bush would call up and give him a stay, wouldn't it?" then adds with a knowing smile, "but I don't think that's going to happen."

Another man sitting at the counter turns to the stranger who has just sat down beside him and says quietly, "I guess they must be strapping him in about now."

Martin, on my right, tells me about the motorcycle shop he owns not too far from the penitentiary. "I drove out there this morning and it was quite peaceful over there," he says. He is wearing darkly tinted glasses that cover half his face. The visible skin is liver-spotted and loose. He has an unplaceable, slurry drawl.

"I saw some guy out there in a wedding dress," says a man who has appeared on the other side of him. Almost all the stools are full now.

I ask Martin how he feels about having the federal execution facility right in the town he tells me he was born and raised in.

"Oh, I don't think it hurts anything," he says. "Because of the employment reasons, it's a good thing to have it over there."

"It's about that time"

The men to Andy's left are also discussing the execution. "I guess it's about that time," one of them says. Everyone glances at the clock above the open kitchen window. It is seven. And then it is two after. Nothing changes. We drink our coffee. Andy's five-course breakfast arrives, and we laugh about it. At about 12 after, the manager, a tall middle-aged man in brown polyester pants approaches two of the waitresses and simply says, "He's dead. The Associated Press said it."

After breakfast, we drive to the Sir Speedy down the street to use the computer. The young man managing the store provides us with more details. "He looked over at the reporters," he says, "and then at the ceiling. He turned white and then yellow." And this is how the details of McVeigh's death are gradually related to us as we make our way back across town, through the mouths of the citizens, every single one of whom seems to know exactly what has happened without having been there. We, too, know.

Although I don't regret our decision to spend the morning outside the gates of the prison, something tells me it is time to go back to ground zero. I don't want to leave this experience without stepping inside the perimeter one more time. We return the RV to its grassy space in Jim's yard and tread back down the highway toward the main gates. It has become quite hot, and we squint at the guard towers, shimmering and unstable now behind the distant fences.

A hearse under police escort speeds away from the prison

"Oh my God," Andy says suddenly, and I follow his gaze.

Coming through the prison gates are two police cars with their lights flashing silently. Between them is a black hearse, shiny under the sun. The three cars speed away and are gone before we can make the movements necessary to get a photo. It had not occurred to us there would be rolls of news footage available later because there seemed to be no one witnessing this but us.

We visit the Court TV production trailer briefly, just past the guard post, and Andy decides to stay to feed back some of our video. I leave him there and slip back through the penitentiary gates. I slash through the weeds on the side of the highway, passing again in front of the compound toward the comfort of Durham Drive. I find I am crying. I don't know what I have just seen.

Read the next journal entry from the trip home