Day 23 – Waterloo, IL to St. Louis, Missouri

I saw the arch for a couple of hours before I finally made it there. As my walk returned to highway 3 after the rail town of Dupo, I ascended to an overpass and was immediately staring down downtown SLC. While it’s nice to get a glimpse of something so neat, it can also be tortuous, staring it down for what seems like an interminable period, feeling like little progress is being made.

After more than an hour on the highway, I paused at a gas station for a drink and a bathroom. I didn’t appreciate how much gambling is legal in Illinois; slot-style machines have been commonplace in many places along the walk, but this station had a huge lounge devoted to Off-Track Betting. It’s a world I’ve never inhabited, so it was a little eerie to shuffle through a room with two dozen televisions devoted to horse racing, and nearly as many viewers, eyeing the screens with some measure of cold calculation, hunger, and despair.

I was gladly able to leave the highway soon after, forking right onto a road that was closed to traffic due to construction work. Now on the fringes of East St. Louis, I was mostly walking through vacant lots and natural areas, lands that have little developmental value given that they sit in the cluster-zone of freeway interchanges, railroad lines, and minor highways. With the traffic barriers in place, it was actually a very pleasant walk, almost entirely cut off from the sounds of congestion. Around two-thirds of the way through, it occurred to me that this sentiment could cut both ways; I didn’t hear anything, but nobody else would hear me, either. And then I saw the black SUV with tinted windows parked ahead, looming in the middle of the road under an overpass. As I approached, I noticed that the windshield was smashed; it’s sides were badly dented. I looked closer without wanting to see, but quickly realized it had been abandoned here for a while.

At that moment, my phone rang, with a student calling from home. I passed through the traffic barrier, back onto active roads, let loose a laugh, and answered.

——————

Whereas my arrival into Illinois was torrential, my departure was a perfect day–80 degrees, perfectly blue skies, almost no humidity. Instead of sprinting through the crossing, I had a rare opportunity to linger, chatting with Anousha from the Mississippi River Overlook on the Illinois side of the river, staring across at the arch and the St. Louis riverfront. Later, when crossing the Eads Bridge, I paused at each of the designated viewpoints, despite the views being pretty similar at each. I may have had to bullrush into Illinois, but I was going to take Missouri slow.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the nature of accomplishment. Working in a high school, it would be easy to think about high school graduation as the most notable accomplishment in the lives of the young people passing through, at least to that point in their lives. And yet, for the excitement of the moment, I’ve never felt a great sense of pride from most as they navigate that experience; on the contrary, it’s seen more like an inevitability, like a birthday. They just had to make it through four years and graduation would come. Admittedly, this is a reflection of the demographic I work with, and even within this group it often comes down to the wire for one or two, but still–the community will work hard to guide them through.

And in a lot of ways, a long-distance walk is analogous to that. It’s an accretive experience, with each day building off the preceding one. In an experience that involves very literal peaks and valleys, not to mention some mental peaks and valleys involving personal wellbeing each day, it nonetheless can feel quite flat-lined when it comes to significance. Sure, it’s cool to make it to St. Louis and finish Illinois, the interior monologue goes, but I didn’t exactly accomplish something notable–I just put together another day of walking.

It occurs to me that there are at least three types of accomplishment:

1. The slow grind. These are the long walks, the graduations, maybe the retirements (?), the paying off of mortgages. There are no decisive turning points along the way. There might be moments more imbued with meaning than others–the high pain day that one had to push through, the class one despaired of passing, the months of unemployment that stretched the bank account thin–but those don’t alter the incremental nature of the feat. The ultimate moment of completion feels satisfying, but lacks dramatic intensity. The end has been in sight for a while, it has approached with gradual consistency, and it arrives on schedule
2. The flash of lightning and the gradual clearing. These are the short-to-mid term experiences that center on a pivotal moment–a critical decision, a profound flash of insight, a call-back that opens a door–but one that comes in the midst of the experience, instead of the end. From an academic perspective, I think back on the struggle to devise a compelling and interesting thesis. Once I had that, I always felt like the battle was won–I just needed to move the troops through their motions. In this sense, the victory was determined well before it arrived, so the climax occurred earlier. As the conclusion arrived, it might actually be a struggle to finish the job, knowing that the “real” work was behind me. So, the accomplishment that I savored came before the end was actually insight; the rest was playing out the string.
3. The grand triumph. This is what makes sports and other competitive endeavors so awesome, but also so high-stakes and anxiety-inducing. Within a compact timeframe, grand uncertainty reigns over the outcome, loading it with dramatic intensity. Because of that compactness, luck and randomness hold greater sway, meaning that true talent and preparation may not always carry the day. 

What strikes me, as I muddle through these tiers, is that there are different skills or qualities that are spotlighted or demanded in each case. In the first, it’s about endurance and consistency; in the second, the profound flash of insight controls the narrative; in the third, poise in the moment and competitive edge are critical. These are not necessarily mutually exclusive; I strongly believe that flashes of insight are byproducts of sustained, committed engagement. 

The more relevant challenge that I dwell on in all of this–that I dwelled on, as I stood on Eads Bridge–is learning how to savor the Tier 1 accomplishments. Whereas Tier 3 accomplishments–so easily celebrated, savored, and remembered–benefit from significant shares of luck and randomness, those have far less influence in Type 1 cases. You can’t luck your way through hundreds of miles of walking, or four years of academic dedication. It’s twisted, really, how easy it is to feel deeply emotionally invested in the feats that reflect less fully on our dedication and follow-through, and how equally easy it is to be dismissive of our acts of long-term devotion.

I’m working on it.