American Ramble by Neil King Jr.

This trip was different. On a fresh morning in late March, I stepped past the threshold of our front door, tugged the garden gate closed behind me, and set off to walk to the city of New York. A slow stroll, I liked to say, down a fast lane. An easy walk along a founding swath of the country that most travelers want to put behind them. A congested landscape usually seen as a blur, along a corridor named for a train, the Acela, whose name in turn is a faster form of accelerate. Ad + celerare, from the Latin: toward something, whatever it is, swiftly; to hasten the occurrence of a thing you want over.

No hastening anything on this trip. I wanted nothing over.

In 2021, journalist Neil King, Jr. set off from his home in Washington, D.C. to walk all the way to New York City. The journey, as he describes it in his book American Ramble, was conceived after a frightening bout with esophageal cancer that left his voice strained--a lasting mark that colors each interaction with the people he meets on his journey. Cancer, King found, contracted time and space, made things slow down, and each day seem precious and full of wonders. In a way, a journey on foot, as opposed to the machines of modern convenience, does the same thing. What would it be like, King wonders, to walk through the most heavily trafficked corridor in America, not by automobile or train, but on foot?

It's not a fair comparison, but throughout American Ramble I couldn't help but think of William Least Heat-Moon's Blue Highways, perhaps because I was so impressed by that book that I still have it on the brain. But I do think they have in common a kind of take-things-as-they-come approach: for Heat-Moon, the program is not a list of destinations, but the back routes on the highway; similarly, King is constrained to come across landmarks and communities as he finds them. I wished, in fact, that he had done a little more to synthesize the different stops on his trip, or perhaps to synthesize them in a way that was more historical and contextual than personal. What I liked best about the book is the way it reveals certain historical themes of this particular landscape that have been buried by urban sprawl and the great highways. King's route takes him through the crucibles of the American Revolution, including Valley Forge and the Delaware River, which he pointedly crosses at the same place that Washington did. It also takes him through the heartland of American religious pacificism, including the Amish country of southeastern Ohio and the vestiges of Quaker and Shaker culture. In each individual instance, King, a journalist, does a great job of investigating the particularities of place and history, but there is a larger story that emerges from the happenstance of the route that I felt was missing, somehow.

On the other hand, it's hard to ignore that momentousness of the feat by the end of the book. King makes it clear that this isn't the roughing-it style hitchhiking of his youth; he stays in hotels and AirBNBs and his meals are restaurant fish tacos, not Vienna sausages on a camp stove. And yet, by the time he strolls into New York's Central Park, he's traversed some of the most pedestrian-hostile landscapes on the face of the planet, including the great wastes of warehouses he calls "Amazonia." More than a story of physical triumph, it's a story of resolve, and a stubborn desire to see a familiar landscape in a new way.