Amid the Recession's Debris, Resilience, Hope and Family Remain

This is the last installment of Half a Tank, a four-month quest to find people whose lives have been altered by a flattened economy.

When we first met Danny Glass, he was sitting in a tent, half-naked, too weak to put on pants.

He knew he was dying.

"Can I ask a favor?" he said to Michael Williamson, the Washington Post photographer with whom I traveled across the country this summer. "Can I use one of those photos for my obituary?"

That was in June. Flash forward to a couple of weeks ago: Michael and I stand in that same tangle of woods behind a motor vehicles office in Woodbridge, but we see no Danny, just the rain-soaked remnants of his belongings: a stained couch cushion he used as a mattress. A plastic water bowl for a dog he surrendered to a better home. A hospital wristband with his name on one side and the words "fall risk" on the other.

Michael and I don't know whether to feel relief or sadness. We don't know whether Danny is dead or in the clean bed he hadn't had in a long while.

About four months had passed since we began a road trip across the country and into the lives of hundreds of Americans affected by the recession. We would drive more than 20,000 miles, down highways and through back roads, talking to everyone from an Elvis impersonator in Memphis to an asphalt paver in Las Vegas.

On our lowest days, we pulled ticks from our hair and cried in a darkened car, weighed down by what we'd just witnessed. On our best, we laughed with a couple we picked up on the side of the road and marveled at the resiliency of those who had lost everything except hope.

We would pass through 30 states without getting a ticket, stay in more cheap motels than Tom Bodett -- including one with barbed wire outside the door -- and find stories of hardship wherever we stopped.

In Tennessee, we'd meet a young couple unable to afford a $186 engagement ring from Wal-Mart. In Florida, we'd find a recently laid-off UPS worker on a bed of concrete outside a church, writing a letter to his mother. And in Colorado, we'd spend an evening with a 36-year-old industrial designer who'd lost her job, two homes and a sense of who she was.

But all that would come later.

When Michael and I met Danny, we had no idea what was ahead of us. We didn't know whether we'd find a country dinged by the financial crisis or crippled by it. All we knew was that for the newly homeless -- men and women forced by foreclosures and unemployment to seek out borrowed couches, crowded shelters and unfamiliar streets -- Danny was an example of life at its lowest. If there was a bottom to hit, he was there, sitting inches from a mountain of empty Thunderbird bottles, the contents of which had eaten away at his liver.