click on the map to read about the trip

I Can't Explain the Beauty is a 90-minute solo performance by David Kodeski that simultaneously chronicles two cross-country journeys: a present-day road trip through the American west from Chicago to San Francisco, and a bus ride from Albany to Los Angeles during the Great Depression. Kodeski alternates between describing each trip, the first undertaken by himself scarcely a month after the events of September 11, 2001, and the second recounted in the entries of a diary he purchased through an online auction.

In addition, a third journey is detailed as Kodeski recounts his attempts to track down information via the internet regarding the author of the diary, a man named Fred Nye. Kodeski seeks to write a one-man show (the one-man show that eventually becomes "I Can't Explain the Beauty"), answering the question of whatever happened to the hopeful 19-year-old tree surgeon who so faithfully describes every single day of 1936 in careful, loving detail.