American Scramble 1

Leaving DC

American Ramble, p. 20

Walking to New York gave me more time to plan and to think about the project. This process was further influenced by Neil King’s American Ramble, which I reread before and during the trip. AR is a sort of boomer fantasia, similar in many ways to Megalopolis (more on this comparison in future posts). A work that offers itself up as a final reckoning with America towards the end of one’s life, but is more of a sprawling white flag. Give Neil his due though, he was a better writer than me and a great weaver of American fables. 

My original plan was to follow Neil’s route, which was appealing for its emphasis on rural areas. The problem was that along his route you need to either camp rough or shell out for Airbnbs, some expensive (this is what Neil did). Ultimately, I followed the East Coast Greenway with two notable departures from the trail to access Annapolis and Staten Island. Neil and I still overlapped a lot though, and I’ll highlight those moments as they occurred. 

Neil’s wasn’t the only walking story I encountered in my preparation. At least two people I’ve found engaged in genuine walks across the earth. Their names are Paul Salopek and Tom Turcich. This is a regular internet pattern: you think you come up with something cool and interesting and are immediately bravery mogged by someone whose scope of ambition is truly inspiring. Oh well, we plod for God and salute real masters like these. 

You also encounter sadder stories. There are at least two instances in the last decade of conceptual walks across America ending in death. In 2016, a delightful seeming guy named Mark Baumer was walking across the country barefoot to raise awareness about climate change. On the 101st day of his journey, after 700 miles he was hit by a car and killed. Baumer was wearing a fluorescent vest and was far off the shoulder. Here’s a brief description of Baumer:

Then there was Richard Swanson: a middle-aged man who wanted to walk from Seattle to Brazil for the World Cup, dribbling a football the whole way. He didn’t make it out of the Pacific Northwest. Baumer is the more tragic story, a young innocent killed in his prime, but Swanson is far more relatable to me.

“A lot of time to ponder what matters.” Hmm. I won’t deny that there is a meditative aspect to long walks, but one of the big appeals is that you can’t ruminate the same way you would at home. Even low level activity solves this somehow. Bog Beef said this on a podcast once. Something like, “The truly poor are usually too busy to be depressed.” Along with Zantae’s project and that video Golden Boy tweeted, the statement was one of my primary inspirations. 

As I said to a friend, “You want to be moving enough that thoughts about your life are banished to the background, but not so much that you’re actually exercising.” Put that statement on the Ploddington flag.

It’s easy to read about these road deaths and think it won’t happen to you. However, life and Christianity have disabused me of this kind of thinking. Even from a more secular perspective, if I had to argue to a room of Hollywood producers who was a more compelling protagonist, who could not be sacrificed for plot less the viewers revolt, both Richard and Mark have a better case for indispensable main character than I do. This isn’t false modesty or some sort of self-deprecating neurosis. I know stories and I just think this is true. But maybe, just maybe, in whatever phase of the Kali Yuga we are in, it’s actually safer to be a side player? Like maybe the forces of Satan and entropy are conspiring to fell heroes in the midst of their upward journey to further demoralize the species. But if you’re just the comic relief, not so much hero’s journeying as flailing at random, maybe they wouldn’t bother?

I have reservations even talking like this. There are family members and people who care about me who read the blog and will surely not be amused by speculations about danger. I don’t think the New York walk was particularly dangerous. The East Coast Greenway, the path I ended up following instead of Neil King’s route, is more than half on trail and limits road exposure way more than my Richmond walk. Still - at least notional danger and significant adversity are part of the point. To recover from decades of squandered success or outright failure by doing something hard. To do something that will make you feel strong again. 

American Ramble, p. 29

There are less deadly sad stories as well. If you join the main r/walking community or any number of associated Reddit groups you will see insane shit. It’s not very useful either. When you ask questions about how not to die, you get answers like “You can never not be vulnerable so make sure you’re visible.” Ok, makes sense. Seems sort of resigned though.

Also common on the walking Reddit are stories from people who are clearly in recovery or some other form of crisis. Someone will post, seemingly sincerely (I know a growing contingent believes that all outrageous Reddit stories are fake) that they are trying to kick heroin and are walking thirty miles a day and all their toenails have fallen out. “Is this ok?” “Is this sustainable?” People don’t know what they’re doing, myself certainly included. 

It’s sort of sweet though - the way every Reddit community is really a sort of McGuyver-style approach to DIY mental health. “Will getting really into peppers save me?” Only one way to find out. 

My friend Katherine Dee, who is pretty good at predicting cultural cycles and future digital memes, has said she predicts the emergence of “meatspace gurus.” I hope I don’t summarize her incorrectly, but I take this phrase to mean that coming out of COVID, lots of people were looking for ways to more fully engage with non-digital space. Those singles running clubs are a part of this. There are also a number of walking-specific memes that have emerged in this vein. 

The age featured in this meme is one of many direct insults from the universe to me. A cynical observer might say, well aren’t all these meatspace gurus conspicuously documenting all their offline efforts on various forms of social media? Isn’t this true of Ploddington? Yes, but shut up!

The beginning of the New York walk was pretty funny. I was at a friend’s house on the night of September 10th watching the debates. “They’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats.” Something about the debate agitated me. I wasn’t mad at either candidate, not upset with the results. It was more like, you’re being plunged into another discursive internet cycle that you absolutely cannot escape. I longed for the woods. I didn’t sleep and at around 5:30 I drank a bunch of coffee, packed my shit, and headed out the door. 

The first day was glorious and starting so early is always the best. There are trails through Anacostia, along the river northwest out of DC that are beautiful and seemingly seldom used. I already gave a big speech about my rejection of the digital pull, but after maybe 8 miles in silence I’m listening to a podcast where a comedian neurotically recounts all his recent terrible dates. I think that while I can relate, he has poor boundaries. My therapist would be proud. After sequences of thoughts like this, I wonder how far I’d have to walk to actually escape. To escape these modes of thinking that constitute my inner life and just be. Wherever you go, there you are. Brutal.

I do an insane and inadvisable amount of walking that first day, but it’s hard to articulate how excited I was. Committing to three weeks on the road is uniquely stimulating. Three weeks of ignoring phone calls and barely applying for jobs. Three weeks of checking in when I want to. No one could even find me (this would be disproven by various Twitter anons responding to posted pictures with my exact location, lmao). Three weeks where no one is asking me if I’ve met anyone or found a job I’m excited to apply to. 

After nearly thirty miles, I end up at something called Rip’s Country Inn near Bowie. It is really something - an apparently good restaurant in front of an absolute shithole motel. You check in through a thick window of glass, and there’s three generations, an entire family, the owners I guess, romping around on the other side with music blasting. I’d only ever seen this kind of glass separator in liquor stores in Baltimore. The place is still 70 dollars. I think if I’m going to risk death, it should be closer to fifty. That seems more fair. Market rate, etc.

The lady who checks me in, I think the mother of various rugrats behind her who are pulling on her dress and asking for things, is annoyed that I made an online reservation through a third party. This is a pattern at the worst motels, where presumably various wastrels show up on the day and pay in cash for a week or whatever. She complains that Expedia hasn’t given her what she needs and I shrug. Eventually, we work it out. 

Almost as soon as I get to my room, I hear a lesbian couple fighting violently in the room next to me. The fight is about money, and the comic phrase “I bought the fucking lasagna, bitch,” is repeated again and again. They are throwing things and I wonder about calling the cops. There is also a small child in the room. Crying inconsolably of course. Despite the din, I fall asleep because I’m exhausted. It’s maybe 9:30.

I bolt awake around 4 with major pain in my feet. This is day one, lol. I check on my phone if the gas station just north of the motel is open. It is. I’ll go and get a bag of ice for my feet. As I exit my room, I see that one of the lesbians, the butch one I guess, is sleeping in the front seat of their truck. She wakes and smiles at me slyly. I smile back, genuinely relieved this is how the domestic squabble resolved. She winks and I go and get my ice.

American Ramble, p. 42

We aren’t going to save America. We don’t have that kind of aura. But I will smile at you for not killing your wife over pasta. It’s a start.