Hoofing it from DC to NYC
“The simple act of walking and taking in what I saw and puzzling over what I encountered as I went. The rhythm and simplicity of it.”
— Neil King Jr.
Most all of my life I have liked to travel. To move about the planet and to see new places and to meet new people. Most of this travel was done on planes, on buses, on boats, on trains or in cars. I learned a lot from my travels and had good times.
Not doing much long-distance travel these days, I get my travel thrills mainly from books; traveling the globe during all periods of history and the future. So, when the prize-winning journalist and editor of the “Wall Street Journal’ Neil King Jr.’s recent book (“American Ramble: A Walk of Memory and Renewal,” Mariner Books, 2023, 334 pgs. with an author’s hand-drawn map at the front of the book that tracks King’s trek from start to finish) about his solitary journey on foot from Washington, D.C., to New York City showed up in my stocking this Christmas, I was anxious to dive in and experience his journey myself. And so, off I went with Neil King in my walking shoes for a 330-mile trek up the East Coast of the U.S. and ready for an adventure.
Praise for the book abounds with writers such as Pulitzer Prize winner Daniel Yergin stating that this book is “packed with keen observations, surprising discoveries and wise reflections. Readers will be rewarded at every turn in the road.” I am reminded of Henry David Thoreau’s travel writing a couple of centuries ago in his book “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers,” and King, with this book, places himself in that heralded lineage.
“Destination stirs excitement,” he writes, “they bestow purpose.”
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So, literally starting at the U.S. Capitol Building and not far from King’s own residence in downtown D.C., he starts his stroll on a March morning in 2021 on foot and with nothing but a knapsack, a blank journal to record his thoughts and travel information, and a strong, comfortable pair of shoes — down sidewalks and narrow streets leading out of town “where the gravest peril was a driver looking at his phone,” he writes.
“I could tell within blocks,” he continues, “that my walk would bend time, time moving more slowly and would make the present more expansive.” This statement reminds me of my own experience living off-the-grid in the woods along the Green River and with only my two feet as a mode of transportation. And so King says goodbye to the statue of Abraham Lincoln on the National Mall and heads out to the northeast.
As he walks “Buddhist like” out of town, his mind is filled with many thoughts about his life and the nature of this journey and his own self-reliance and about freedom as a choice: “Emerson wrote that self-reliance was about the faith to rely on your own instincts and live by your own lights. As I kept going upriver, every inch of me was glad for the movement. You think about who did the original spadework when you walk the roads, the railbeds, the canal towpaths, when you cross the expansive bridges over the biggest rivers or the small but elegant bridges over mere creeks,” he writes.
As he wends his way northward and as city became country and horse farms and previous Quaker settlements, he writes in his journal: “Once what had been a deer path, an Indian trail, a lane to haul carts by, was now a road strictly for cars as I skitter along the shoulder of a road keeping company with candy wrappers and roadkill.”
Soon King is in Maryland, where he visits small towns, farms and spends time in local neighborhood pubs learning about where he is. Back on the road (the “path”) he soon finds himself at the Mason-Dixon Line, where he literally walks the path of “the line” that divides Maryland and Pennsylvania. What follows is a Pennsylvania excursion from York to Conestoga to Lancaster along the Susquehanna River; and then, after an Amish buggy ride adventure, we’ve made our way through Amish country and all the way to Valley Forge on the way to Philadelphia.
Here, and on the outskirts of the city, we are with Quakers in silent meeting and camping out at night in a Quaker cemetery or a cave in a rock cliff. Here amidst all of this history, eating day-old sausage and with holes in his shoes, King writes: “The whole of the walk kept bringing delights beyond bounds of any rightful expectation,” as he moseys on up the road into Bucks County, and then New Hope, Penn., through cold, rain and, eventually, blue skies.
An avid reader and music lover, King cites and quotes others, like Thoreau, Beethoven, Kant and Nietzsche as keen and fervent walkers and whom he refers to as “the sauntering ones.”
”The longer you run or walk and the richer the blood flows, the freer and nimbler the thoughts,” he ponders, as he ruminates about his time and experiences as he hikes into the Delaware Valley and ever northward thinking about how differently people responded to him and his trek with many stops along the way — the bakery, the coffee shop, the hotel bar, the sandwich shop — where people had given him things for free. For the most part, such was King’s experience during his long and multifarious hike as he writes about history, personal stories and details including the unexpected, both positive and negative, as we near the end of the book and his journey and find ourselves approaching the Hudson River with New York City in the near distance.
(Thomas Crowe is a regular contributor to The Smoky Mountain News and Smoky Mountain Living magazine and is the author of the award-winning memoir “Zoro’s Field: My Life in the Appalachian Woods.”)
