Neil King Jr.
For months, as I’ve crisscrossed the country talking to folks about a long walk I took from my home near the U.S. Capitol to New York City, the question pops up everywhere: “Did you emerge from the jaunt more optimistic about America’s future, or less?”
It’s a good question to ask; a complex one to answer.
These are bitter days – fraught, frightening, highly uncertain. We all sense a rending underway, a tearing at the common fabric. These United States feel anything but.
Did the 330 miles I traced to New York’s Central Park cut through the heart of America? Well, yes, but also, no. And where is that heart, anyway? Were the people I met along those 26 days an accurate sampling of America’s dizzying diversity? Not exactly.
Americans are more connected than we may think
And yet, the walk taught me things I return to daily, whether sitting at home or traveling the country. It became a long lesson in the shunning of fear and the value of openness. The walk revealed a parallel world – founded in very particular things seen slowly as I went – that remains an enduring counterpoint to the divisiveness and tribalism we see daily on television and our computer screens.
This summer, maybe we should all go out for a long walk and enter some unfamiliar nook of the country and stop to talk to a few people along the way. It could be one of the most patriotic things we ever do.
We Americans are swathed more than ever in the illusion of self-reliance: encased in our cars, guided by our digital devices, entertained by our custom channels of news or music. All this isolation stirs distrust, fear, anxiety and, of course, loneliness.
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These trends are so extreme – plummeting rates of friendship, social engagement, companionship – that the U.S. surgeon general in May issued an 82-page national advisory on “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation.”
My long walk was at heart a journey of connectedness. I wanted to engage with strangers and expand the boundaries of my own sense of belonging. After a year of COVID-imposed isolation, the results were truly startling.
Day after day, mile after mile, the America I encountered consisted of people from backgrounds and worlds dramatically different from my own – different races, classes, ages, religious and political beliefs. Americans like Ted, a Black man in rural Maryland putting out his garbage who spontaneously sermonized that I was out to properly heal myself, and thus the whole country.
Or like Peggy and Tim Brennan, a mother and son who lent me the family kayak to paddle up their local creek and then under the New Jersey Turnpike.
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Strangers became friends as I walked into their lives
What amazes, looking back, is how many of these people I remain in touch with even now, more than two years later. In 26 days, I made well over a dozen friends among the many who offered help or wisdom along the way. People like John and Susan Herder, an elderly couple who guided me to their friends a week down the road; or Michael Helfrich, the Thomas Paine-loving mayor of York, Pennsylvania; or Neal Weaver, a Mennonite teacher in Lancaster County, whose class sang hymns to me on a sparkling spring afternoon.
The list goes on, in state after state.
What I found in walking out my front door, north through one of the most trampled parts of the country, were neighborhoods where kindness, consideration and curiosity still held. I went with a pronounced eagerness to engage and found others similarly eager – hungry, if only for an hour or so, to partake in my adventure.
So, yes, I did emerge from the walk more upbeat about America. A seam of goodness that I found runs through every community in the country, there to behold in plain sight.
The things that distress us now – the polarization, the rising intolerance and factionalism, the propensity for untruths and conspiracies – aren’t figments of a fever dream. They are out there, and they threaten to sap our national vitality.
But the antidote – one antidote, anyway – is engagement and simple, human connection. I hear the same thing from the ever-expanding community of walkers, many met on my trip or in my travels since. Walkers like Ken Johnston, a middle-age, Black Philadelphian who has trod thousands of miles of small roads in America to highlight, say, the travels of Harriet Tubman or Martin Luther King Jr.
Ken and I swapped tales the other day and we weren’t surprised by our many common conclusions. I asked Ken about his recommendations. “If you are afraid in advance,” he said, “then you are missing the reality – which I’ve seen on all of my walks – that there is so much spontaneous kindness and generosity out there.”
His advice? “Go for a walk.”
Neil King Jr. is a longtime Washington, D.C. journalist, formerly with The Wall Street Journal, and author of the recent book“American Ramble: A Walk of Memory and Renewal.“
