19 months and another world ago, I walked out of Cincinnati. Today, some 2650 miles later, I walked back into it. I probably could have found a more direct route. But we’re all working hard and sacrificing a lot to get back to where we were.
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In Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Kublai Khan and Marco Polo engage in conversation about a variety of topics, as the Khan seeks insights from the world traveler. At one point, they discuss bridges. The Khan wants to understand the architecture better. Polo, though, opts to describe each component stone, one at a time, each in isolation from the other. “But which is the stone,” the Khan asks, “that supports the bridge?” No single stone fulfills that role, Polo responds, but rather “the line of the arch that they form.” Calvino doesn’t ascribe any particular annoyance to the Khan’s follow-up, but I hear it, when he rebuts: “Why do you speak to me of the stones? It is only the arch that matters to me.”
Annoyingly, confoundingly, pithily, the conversation and chapter conclude with Polo answering that “without stones there is no arch.”
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Nowhere are the individual stones more visible than in the crossing of a city. This realization first hit me when walking across St. Louis, where single intersections operated like magical portals, ushering a fundamental break in reality. Today’s arrival in Cincinnati reinforced it dramatically.
I crossed the first boundary well before Cincinnati. The morning walk from Batavia was a last, lovely stretch of rural Ohio, including an all-too-brief ascent along a trail through the woods, complete with a pack of twelve deer crossing ahead of me. Bridge construction–ok, bridge destruction; the actual rebuilding hasn’t yet started–made a mess of things after that, causing a significant increase in car traffic on a road with little shoulder, but I lowered my head and pushed forward. Trump signs remained in evidence, sprinkled across the driveways through this stretch.
And then I entered Milford.
Milford proudly proclaims itself “Trail Town,” serving as a nexus of eight different long-distance trails that add up to 22,000 miles of route, equally popular among hikers, bikers, and river travelers. It’s filled with well-maintained Victorian houses, all enjoying distinct color schemes. The main street has an ice cream parlor, donut shop, brunch-serving cafés, and more knickknack shops than you could hope to visit in a single day.
And in Milford, the Trump signs have been replaced with Black Lives Matter ones. There was no gradual transition, no buffer zone. (No Biden signs either, for that matter.) For most of the walk I was in one political reality, but now I was in another. There would be no going back.
In Milford, many people wore masks not only in shops and restaurants, but even while walking along the sidewalks through town. All of the people working in shops–that I could see through windows, at least–wore masks. There were some exceptions. One veterans support group had a sign announcing that they were specifically not wearing masks inside. On the whole, though, this was a dramatic shift from what I had encountered previously.
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On this sunny, spring Saturday, with nary a cloud in sight, it seemed like most of Milford’s residents were out on the Little Miami Scenic Trail–jogging, biking, roller-blading, and just generally being healthy and happy in public. This was all too brief, sadly, and before long I was on a sidewalk running alongside road traffic, a situation that would remain in effect for the vast majority of the remaining walk.
After a short stretch through some sprawling, anonymous suburbs, I was suddenly transported to Europe, in the Mariemont village just outside of Cincinnati. Norman and Georgian architecture predominates here, clustered particularly tightly around the central inn and theater. Despite the aesthetic, the planned community is less than 100 years old. Originally planned as a place that would draw families from all socioeconomic backgrounds, it quickly became a home for exclusively wealthy, white families. Plenty of Black Lives Matter signs on display!
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Heading westward, the Buckeye Trail / American Discovery Trail follows Erie Avenue through the Hyde Park neighborhood. The waymarking, it’s worth noting, is excellent all the way through Cincinnati; it would have been easy to navigate by relying solely on the ADT stickers and blue blazes. Much of my attention, though, was captured by the sprawling mansions and large estates through this section.
You won’t find a McDonald’s or Skyline Chili in this section. Rather, there’s little more than the occasional bistro or artisanal coffee shop. We were lucky to find the lone mini-mart, a United Dairy Farmers gas station, where I chugged down a Hawaiian Punch (dispensed accidentally by the over-complicated machine, and then given to me for free by the friendly clerk) as I aired my feet in the parking lot.
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I broke with the Buckeye and ADT soon after, in order to make a brief detour to visit Harriet Beecher Stowe’s house. The American abolitionist deserves consideration as one of the most influential authors of all time; I’ve seen persuasive arguments that her book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, accelerated the country’s movement towards the Civil War.
This detour marked another portal crossing. Suddenly and completely, I had moved from White Cincinnati to Black Cincinnati. Where couples had walked together along Erie and Madison, here larger groups congregated outside, talking and laughing. Older brick and Victorian buildings, packed a bit more tightly together, showed their years. The racial segregation seemed near absolute; for the better part of a half-hour, Fritz and I were the only White people in sight. I don’t know that we would have seen any of this if not for the mini-detour.
As we passed through the neighborhood, beautiful, highly customized vehicles rolled past, blaring music. And then a whole procession of dirt bikes, motorcycles, and ATVs blew past us in unison, popping wheelies and cheering as they enjoyed themselves. All around us, cherry blossoms erupted, announcing that spring really and truly had arrived.
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The neighborhoods gave way to Eden Park, which was stuffed full of families enjoying the sunny afternoon. There were picnics and parties and lovers and strollers, all relaxing in the grass, sunning by the ponds, and admiring the views of the Ohio River well below. While far more Black than White, this was the first place where it seemed like Cincinnatians of all backgrounds congregated.
On tired legs, we climbed to the southern terminus of the Buckeye Trail, ascended Mt. Adams, and then transitioned into our tour of Cincinnati’s highway engineering. We descended from one overpass to another, then crossed a ramp over a series of other highways. Back on solid ground, we instead passed under a host of overpasses, pushing steadily onward through this urban jungle until we finally emerged on the Ohio River and could see the sky once more.
This was the final push–just a mile or two along the riverfront walkway, proceeding past the Great American Ballpark before arriving at the Roebling Suspension Bridge, where I first picked up the ADT 19 months ago.
All of the Cincinnatians who weren’t at Eden Park were here, taking full advantage of the grand opening of the city’s new “DORA” district, which opens up a big chunk of the riverfront area to outdoor drinking. The pedestrian areas were stuffed with merry-makers, leading to this headline in today’s Cincinnati Enquirer: “They Know the Risk.”
None of that mattered to me. Slaloming through, I climbed one last flight of stairs and doubled back around to the bridge, slapping my hand down on its end-post and pausing for a look into Kentucky.
And then it was time for a shower.
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One of the biggest challenges when the walk was interrupted was sorting out what to do with these experiences. As I wrote when I set out on this most recent stint, I knew what the story was for the through-hike, even before I set out upon it. A through-hike has a built-in narrative. A pilgrimage has a built-in narrative. The destination shapes the journey; the arch imposes meaning on every stone. Each day represents a critical part of the larger whole.
But what happens when you lose the whole? How to prevent those experiences, those memories, from just collapsing into a loose pile of stones?
“It’s the journey, not the destination” is the kind of aphorism that people offer with an air of wisdom, despite it being nearly useless. If the destination didn’t really matter to a pilgrimage, people would get the same experience just walking an equivalent distance from their front door to… wherever. The chosen, intentional destination provides the arch, the organizing principle around which the journey finds its meaning.
Ultimately, I hold to the belief that the greater relevance of this experience to me, in my life, is contingent upon my eventual completion of the walk to the Pacific. I realize there are people who will read that and view it as a deficiency of some sort, a failure to appreciate what is, as opposed to what is not. But a story has a beginning, a middle, and a satisfying ending. This is not my ending.
However, it is an ending. And it’s an ending that I can live with for a while, as this walk provides the keystone that completes the arch between the Atlantic Ocean and the Rockies, between Delaware and Denver. That’s an accomplishment that is as satisfying as it is incomplete. It will hold these stones together, for a time.
And somewhere down the road, I will return to the road, and look to assemble some more stones.
