Consider my friend the Walker, who has for the past seven years been on a walk across America, west to east, done in roughly 100-mile segments, about one a month during the walking season, April through October. She began in late September 2017 outside the hospital in Vancouver, Washington, where she was born, and will finish the monumental project on July 18, 2025, when she walks into Bangor, Maine. She will have spent eight years getting there. Forty-five segments! Nearly 3,600 miles. Wind, snow, black flies, gnats, cold, heat, horrible humidity, rain, and fog: you name it, she’s endured those conditions. “What is her trick to keep going?” you might ask. I think she has a whole bag of tricks, but one that she alludes to often is listening to her body. In general, it’s her feet that clamor the most, and in particular, her left pinkie toe. To people not depending so much on their limbs to get where they want to go, a pinkie toe might seem insignificant. Not when you’re walking. After years of the pinkie’s complaints, the Walker solved the problem with gauze and a padded arch-support band repurposed for her toe. Nothing should stop her now.
The Walker writes a daily blog of her adventures while she’s on the road that goes out to some 50 fans. She describes her flight to the starting point of a particular segment, her rental car pick up, and the drive to the motel that will be her base camp for nine days. She then recounts the highlights of the subsequent days’ marches, tells her readers of problems she’s overcome, and announces milestones. Thus I learned that on September 1, in Fultonville, New York, my friend had reached the 3,200-mile mark. That’s a lot of miles. But the growing surprise is not how far she’s come but how close she is getting to the end. Three hundred and fifty miles remained at the end of that segment. That’s close enough to count as the light at the end of the tunnel. True, my friend still had two state lines to cross, two major rivers to navigate, and the Green Mountains to scale, with about 18,000 feet of altitude change. More than at the end of the tunnel, the light was around bends, over passes, and through various forests. She marched on. Now, at the end of October, after another segment, she has lopped off another 100 miles. Onward she treks.
But even without distance and altitude and sore feet to contend with, there is the first problem of parking the rental car each morning. Sometimes everything works like a charm, and sometimes not. No matter what, she puts in her planned miles, so it all comes out the same in the end, though the details do make a difference. Or do they? The miles add up either way. Six of one, half a dozen of the other.
Ideally, a friend will accompany the Walker for a segment, to meet her each day with a cold beer at the end of her day’s walk and then ferry her back to her parked car. Lunch to follow, then an afternoon in the car scouting the next day’s walk, an early dinner, and finally, pajamas and bed, all to be ready for the coming day on the WAA—the Walk Across America. But even with a helping friend, she’s still got to park the car. First rule, never leave the car where it might disturb someone or, worse, get towed. That’s common sense.
Thus her worry one morning in late August when, on driving to an ideally situated convenience store where she’d planned to leave her car for the day, she noticed a sign saying that parking was for customers only, all others would be towed. A local cop who was gassing up suggested that she ask the manager, which she did, coughing up $3.24 for a Payday candy bar in the process. She got the okay. In her blog, she writes, “Throw in a pre- and post-tinkle in clean, convenient bathrooms and life is good!” That detail shows she listens to more than her feet. It also shows us—those of us who remember the dime candy bars—how time flies.
On returning to retrieve her parked car on another day, the Walker discovered her road filled with emergency vehicles of every color. It was the so-called Convoy for a Cause, the vehicles on the way to the popular local carnival known as the Fonda Fair. “I’m sure every emergency vehicle within a 30-mile radius came down the road with lights and sirens going strong. It was deafening!”
After the fire trucks and ambulances came a seemingly endless procession of semis and dump trucks and snowplows, whose drivers were all blaring their horns, waving at the cheering spectators, and throwing candy to the children. When it seemed the convoy was past, the Walker got in her car and turned onto the road in the same direction, because that was where she needed to go.
“Oops,” she writes. What she had thought was the tail end of the parade was instead a gap, which she now filled. “What’s a girl to do?? Roll with it.” So she drove along, part of the procession, waving at the crowds. They waved back, though she saw some had their doubts about her. “I guess I need to practice my parade wave a bit more. Or at least have candy ready to fling to the children. Note to self for my next parade.”
In the poem “Caminante, No Hay Camino” published in 1903, Antonio Machado writes “Caminante, no hay camino / el Camino se hace caminando.” (There is no path, the path is made by walking.) The Walker, on her Walk Across America, is making her way, not finding it but forging it. The light then, at the end of the tunnel? Machado says that the path is seen when looking back, like the glistening wake in the waves after you have passed. That puts the light all around us, and turns the dark tunnel into the schism between earth and sky. As the Walker wrote of the day in the parade, “It took a while to get past the bottleneck, but I didn’t mind. It was a fun experience.” Takes a while but is fun. Not a bad overview of a day, a stage, a project, or even a life. So. In conclusion, in addition to her feet, her stomach and her bladder, her common sense, and occasionally a friendly police officer, she listens to her heart. She’s never as at peace as when she’s walking. I’ve called her the Walker, but I could abbreviate to WW. What’s that, you ask. Ah! Walker Woman. Or Wonder Walker. Take your pick, half a dozen of one, six of the other.
