On Tuesday, there was little to do but leave Terre Haute. By noon, we already seemed to be the only reporters left in town. They had moved on to other stories, other towns.

And the locals had turned their focus to another execution. As home to the only federal death row, Terre Haute would not have to wait another 38 years for its next one. On Tuesday, convicted killer Juan Raul Garza will be led into the same execution chamber.

The night before in a bar called the Black Angus, a group of men were already talking about Garza's fate. "Yep, June 19," several of the men said in unison. They seemed mildly amused. No one we had met there expressed any concern about living so near the country’s most famous death house.

Until I had seen the hearse leaving the prison the day before, I had not wondered what happens to the bodies of executed men. But of course, those men have families, and like other families, they have their own ways of dealing with their dead. McVeigh’s body would be cremated, we had heard, and the ashes turned over to his lawyers for scattering in an undisclosed location. We decided to visit the funeral home.

I stood in the pastel hush of Maddox-Wood Funeral Home and Crematory next to a fireplace decorated with wooden birds and fake flowers while a plump grandmotherly woman tried to find the manager. "Mike," she said when she finally got him on the phone, "there's a young lady here who wants to speak to you about Mr. McVeigh."

It turned out that Maddox-Wood had merely processed the papers needed to facilitate a cremation elsewhere. They had turned the documents over to McVeigh’s lawyers, and no one knew what had happened next. I hadn’t the stomach to trace the story further. And did it matter? I returned to the RV, glad simply to have had the chance to hear the receptionist say, "Mr. McVeigh." In a way, she had answered the question I had come there to ask: Was managing the death of Timothy McVeigh the same as managing that of any other person? Yes.

Before hitting the highway, we spent nearly an hour wandering around in search of Terre Haute souvenirs to bring back to our colleagues in New York. We found none. Not a single key chain or silver spoon.

"No one ever wanted them before McVeigh," a teenager in the college bookstore told us. "Now everybody wants them."

We were perplexed. What sort of town couldn’t even provide visitors with miniature thimbles bearing its name?

A town with the world's largest polyethylene plant, apparently. With the world's fastest aluminum rolling mill. A town that makes steel and plastics. Compact discs and gourmet bakeware. Home to the world's largest mail order company, Columbia House, as any indebted, music-loving teen knows. The average distance between Terre Haute and every consumer in the country is 821 miles, the lowest of any city.

Well, we were ready to be outside the dead center of the U.S. consumer population and, above all, far from the federal death row. With Andy still behind the wheel ("I kind of like it"), we renewed our acquaintance with Interstate 70 and began the trip back to New York.

The last evidence of the execution appeared about 15 miles outside the city, when we passed the bus that had carried the anti-death penalty activists we had spoken to Sunday. JOURNEY OF HOPE was painted on its side. Except for the driver, the bus was now empty.

We headed northeast to Fort Wayne, famous for its line of commercial-grade paper towel dispensers, and then back into Ohio.

By Wednesday, the execution had disappeared almost entirely from the papers. The Toledo Blade carried only one story, a three-paragraph item about a woman who had been arrested in Indiana on the way to the execution. She was wearing a wedding dress and claiming to be McVeigh’s wife. The police eventually released her, not knowing what else to do. Other small Ohio papers had gone completely silent on the subject.

The world's tiniest RV

We had spent Tuesday night in a little campground in Whitehouse, Ohio, just outside Toledo. We camped next to a small manmade swimming pond, which served a second purpose, completely to the surprise of its designers apparently, as the local mosquito breeding ground. On one side of us was the tiniest RV I have ever seen, about eight feet long and six feet tall, with a little wooden porch, and a teeny-weeny mailbox, not big enough to hold a regular letter. On the other side of us, a man named Jim Raymond was camped in a much larger, practically luxurious RV with his wife and three granddaughters and a Siamese cat named Ching, who snoozed in the van’s side window.

Before he retired to Florida, Jim had sold cosmetic accessories to department stores up and down the East Coast. When I told him I was from Virginia, he said, "Oh yes. Thalheimer’s. Miller & Rhodes." Andy named Lancaster, Pa., as his home town, and Jim struggled for the names of department stores there.

"They just stuck a needle in his arm and put him to sleep. What kind of punishment is that?" Jim said when the subject of McVeigh inevitably arose. "You put him in a six-by-nine cell for the rest of his life without parole. Forever. Now that’s punishment." I looked from Jim to his neighbor’s miniature RV in view just behind him.

Passing through Toledo Wednesday morning, we listened to a grief counselor on the radio. She was loosely applying her theories to the bombing and the execution, among other subjects. "Closure doesn’t exist," she said. "You have to carry it all with you. It’s all part of learning to claim your inner grownup." We listened to news of President Bush’s trip across Europe, their governments’ criticism of him and us.

We wanted to think about something else. We wanted to ditch the RV. We took a ferry out to Put-in-Bay on South Bass Island, a lovely harbor town with an antique merry-go-round and a year-round population of 400. Its primary mode of transportation: golf carts. I discovered, when we went to rent one, that I didn’t have my driver’s license with me. A brief, frantic mental rewind revealed that I had left the license in the K-mart do-it-yourself scanner, the machine that had produced the fake press pass that gained me entry into the federal penitentiary. In seconds, Andy had the K-mart image center on the phone confirming this.

As I drove, license-less, around the island at a maximum speed of 12 miles per hour, Andy made a series of calls to arrange to have the license Fed-Exed to the airport in Buffalo, where, had we not rented the golf cart, I would have shown up for our flight Thursday to discover I had no ID.

Coming back on the ferry later that day, the world’s third tallest peace memorial (Perry’s Monument) receding into the greater blue of Lake Erie, I looked around at the other passengers, many of whom seemed to have spent a good deal of time at the local winery sampling the vintages, and I felt the subject of McVeigh going away. It was just over.

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