I should probably write something about the last couple days of walking.
Endings are weird. When I finish a pilgrimage, it’s usually a loaded, melancholy affair. As it’s a pilgrimage, the final destination is a sacred spot, deeply invested with meaning. Religious or not, the entire walk has been oriented towards that destination. In most cases these days, I’m also walking with students, and arrival is a triumphant moment for them, nearly always the first time they’ve accomplished something like this. All of that said, arrival marks the conclusion of that experience, the breakdown of the group, and an imminent return to the real world. And even if you have things to look forward to in the real world, it’s hard to let go of the joy of pilgrimage.
By contrast, arrival in Denver on this trip marked more of an armistice than a peace agreement. I was happy to see Denver and stay with a friend there, but it otherwise holds no greater meaning to me. I haven’t completed anything; as planned, the walk on the ADT continues in late-February, and that will be the more symbolically-charged trip, going coast to coast. This is the completion of the ugly duckling part of the walk, the one that always required extra explanation and was rarely fully understood. Completists can only be properly understood by other completists. While I have work obligations to return to, they’re mostly the fun parts of the job, and I have plenty of time to pursue personal projects over the next four months, so re-entry poses few of the downsides it typically does. I was happy walking and I’m happy to be done. On the whole, I feel a measured contentment, which is not the reaction most people are looking for when they ask me how I’m feeling about being done. Because again, I’m not done. I’m just taking a long break.
The last two days of walking were better than I anticipated. I broke step with the ADT at multiple places to accelerate towards Denver. I needed to shave off a day to make it back to Portland in time for an important event, and this proved fortuitous given that the weather dropped 60 degrees and a not insignificant amount of snow the night after I finished. I was pleased with all of the adjustments that I made. From northern Colorado Springs, I followed a trail along the eastern side of the freeway, eventually crossing under and joining the ADT’s official alignment with the New Santa Fe Trail, skirting the edge of the Air Force Academy’s lands. The trail brought me into Monument, where I had a massive second breakfast, and then continued into Larkspur. This was a fantastic walk, up and over gently sloping hills. For the final approach to Larkspur and then the departure afterward, I once again broke with the ADT. On each occasion, the official route looped westward and then back east, for reasons I couldn’t grasp when dirt roads proceeded straight. The approach to Larkspur, in particular, was really nice.
I spent the night in Castle Rock, and that was certainly the least appealing part of the walk. Both arrival and departure from the town followed highways with a lot of traffic. However, once I cleared Castle Rock, I began the approach to Daniels Park, and I’m grateful that my alternative approach brought me through here. Technically within the Denver city limits, it must be the highest part of the urban area–a broad, open mesa with dramatic views of the entire surrounding area. I caught my first views of Denver from here, the whole city unfolding beneath my feet. They also have bison living in the park, so that was an exciting discovery. From Daniels Park, I followed mostly pedestrian/bike tracks as far as Littleton, and then it was a lot of city walking until I connected with the South Platte River. That led me to the completion of the southern route of the ADT, right where the South Platte River and Bear Creek intersect in Sheridan. I smiled, took a picture, and walked on.
And now begins the most challenging part of any trip: the dozens of well-intended people eagerly asking “how was it?” in a context demanding a 30-second soundbite. I can’t hold it against them–I’m guilty of the same–and it would be much worse if there was a collective shrug to my return and nobody had the slightest interest in what happened. It’s an impossible thing, though, to collapse 65 over-filled days into a discrete takeaway; it basically screams for two platitudes and a nod. Part of me always wants to respond by directing people to the blog–”conveniently enough, I’ve written nearly 60,000 words about that very topic!”–but that feels anti-social.
Perhaps the most challenging part of responding to that question, though, is my recognition that the experience still needs weeks to steep and settle, for the most salient and lasting elements to emerge. It’s premature to write the post-mortem when the body is still warm.
For now, though, I suppose these are four feeble attempts at encapsulating the experience:
1) While there are certainly some recurring features and characteristics that hold true through the full walk, I’m struck by the distinct elements of each state that I spent significant time in. This is hardly scientific, of course; while I spent a considerable amount of time in each place, I only followed a single line and missed the vast majority of each state. Nonetheless, Indiana stands out for its massive estates, its sprawling lawns and ponds, and it’s strident concerns about trespassing. In Illinois, my experience was far more rural, with the bulk of my time spent on the River-to-River trail. The small towns I encountered, though, were marked by the ravages of economic decline, and people were much rarer to come by. Instead, I felt lonely in Illinois, with my company consisting of chiggers and thunderstorms. (With some distance, I look back at this section as the one that I should have savored far more, and likely would have if the timing were different.) Missouri was the green tunnel of the Katy Trail, with small towns lining the way offering B&B services geared towards cyclists. The walking was easy, if mind-numbing. The world opened back up in Kansas, with dramatic skies, and each town was marked by the grain elevators of the local co-op. The grid structure of roads in Kansas, everything broken down to square-mile chunks, made it hard to lose oneself in the walking. But, it was here that the historical experience of the Santa Fe Trail really became the dominant narrative. Finally, Colorado brought the Rockies and some of the most dramatic geology of the walk. There was bleed-over between each state, of course, but on the whole they each had a distinct character.
2) Walking in the US is monotonous in a way that it isn’t in Europe. It’s the scale, Walking in Europe, if you have a 20-mile day, you’ll likely hit one decently-sized town and a couple of villages. You’ll encounter plenty of farms or grazing areas if you’re outside of a significant urban area, but many will be smaller scale. There are exceptions to this, of course, but the diversity of the walk is likely to be a dominant characteristic. By contrast, it’s not uncommon in this part of the US to walk for 20 miles, to see only soybean, or corn, or wheat, with the occasional pack of cows mixed in, and to encounter only sprinkled farmhouses along the way. This makes it, for me at least, a greater mental challenge, as it’s easy to disengage from the surrounding scenery. I think I learned how to appreciate the difference, to find the interest and beauty in the redundant, but it certainly doesn’t come as easily. That said, I definitely developed a deeper enthusiasm for the pay-off. I leave this trip with a level of affinity for the small-town gas station/mini-mart, especially when they have a few tables and chairs inside. I learned to anticipate these, in particular, in the early morning when local farmers would be gathered around coffee, chatting about the day ahead. There’s a level of community that Starbucks advertises as a third place that I rarely see in that context, but I consistently did in these.
3) This was my first experience that had a consistent, daily focus on producing content for an online setting. The commitment to write about each day was a mental challenge on par with the walk. It was hard to force myself to do this every day, tired from the walk, and it was equally difficult to accept that I’d be pushing flawed work out to the world. While I had the bandwidth to write, I just couldn’t commit the energy to editing and refining, so I wrote and published, letting each post go without further consideration. This was uncomfortable. Also odd was the recognition that the online output was influencing my daily choices at times. There were moments when I finished a walk and felt like I lacked a good topic to write about, or interesting pictures to post, and that drove me out to walk around town and pursue something more. There are a lot of downsides to the social media-based existence; clearly, it’s harmful to the health of young people, in particular, as they constantly compare themselves to the artificially-glamorized lives of their peers. It was interesting, though, to see how it pushed me, at times, to pursue a richer experience. Instead of letting the day go, lounging around and frittering the afternoon away, I went back for seconds. There have to be ways to flip social media from a source of judgment and personal condemnation to one of inspiration, to live more richly.
4) When people learned I was from Portland, Oregon, they immediately assumed I was a strident liberal. More interesting, though, is the fact that they assumed, as a corollary of that, that I would automatically view them as racists or bad people. Consistently, in one conversation after another, people voluntarily interjected that belief into the flow of their remarks, almost like a preemptive strike. And look, there were times where they said things that, if we wanted to technically rate their comments, certainly veered into the realm of racism. There’s a difference, though, I think, between the explicit racism of a distinct minority of this country, who I’ll set aside for now, and the implicit racism that is hard-wired into most/all of us raised in a racialized context. We inherit this, we imbibe this, and we are left to either wrestle with it, elevating it to a conscious level of awareness, or to bury it and allow it subconscious influence over our actions and perceptions. I am fortunate that I have been in positions that have alternately encouraged, forced, and empowered me to face it; a significant number of white Americans, in particular, have not had the same opportunities. Some, by contrast, have been raised in more pernicious or challenging contexts.
To evoke the R-word in conversation with others across the US is to end the conversation and further reinforce the defensive walls already in place. Instead, extending the discussion, seeking clarification and context, often exposes the core decency at the heart of each person, along with the accompanying sources of fear or uncertainty. In an age in which we profess the validity of emotions, we have to extend that to those on the “other side,” and to support our peers in exploring those. And we have to apply the same approach to our own.
The overriding takeaway from this experience for me was the generosity of so many people along the way, and the kindness of those I engaged in conversation. If we wanted to make a list of areas of strident disagreement, we could; if we wanted to part ways in anger, we could find fertile cause. But common ground also exists, in every single case, and if we want to build a future together, that’s a good place to start. It’s not to permanently ignore those tensions, but rather to build the shared understanding and good faith that is a prerequisite for returning to those later.
Anyway, that’s it for now. I’ll have one more post to review my gear on this trip, and then I’ll be finished with daily ADT posts until late-February.
