How long does it take to walk 225 miles?
In a rebuff to this yearning for speed, Neil King junior, a former reporter for the, chose to walk from his home on Washington’s Capitol Hill to New York’s Central Park. It may be too much to ask those charging along the Acela corridor to pause to visit York, Pennsylvania, or Perth Amboy, New Jersey. But what Mr King discovered on his 26-day walk, recounted in his new book “American Ramble”, should at least make them prize the landscape they are hurrying through, and its people.
Mr King planned his route carefully, arranging places to sleep and local mavens to consult. Yet serendipity had its way with him. Walking through Amish country in Pennsylvania he heard a bat thwack a softball and spotted a girl in a dress and baseball mitt field the fly ball. He watched the game, among pupils at the Farmersville Mennonite School, then, at the prompting of their teacher, told them about his journey.
Mr King’s project—“giving in to the landscape”, he calls it—is not really an American thing. One recalls more readily such British walker-writers as Patrick Leigh Fermor, Bruce Chatwin, Robert Macfarlane or Rory Stewart. Paul Salopek, another American journalist, is ten years into a 24,000-mile walk around the globe.
Mr King is sensitive of his privilege, so much so that on Staten Island, near the end of his journey, his female host, a Polish architect turned innkeeper, impatiently exclaimed: “If you have certain advantages, do me the favour of enjoying them.” And he encountered suspicion along the way. Yet he reports more acts of kindness. “Does this provoke any thoughts?” a man asked about his yard display of Trump regalia, then offered food and drink.
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