15.

The Stranger

HOPE, KANSAS—639 MILES TO GO

December 22, 2012

After leaving Rick, I bought some chips and guacamole at the bar in Steele City, just north of the Nebraska-Kansas border. The bartender offered me Steele City’s town hall for the night, which was undergoing restoration and serving as a garage for three motorcycles. The jukebox still worked, so I put Bob Marley’s “Three Little Birds” on a loop for an hour while lying in my sleeping bag on the couch.

In Nebraska, I’d been a celebrity. I was interviewed by countless small newspapers, the Nebraska chapter of the Sierra Club, NPR, and two TV stations. I was given presents of food and water, and money was stuffed in my pants. Several drivers were, dare I say, “starstruck,” pulling over when they spotted me on the side of the road. “I can’t believe it’s you,” said one driver, when I was lying on the grass taking a break. “I mean, I was just out for a drive. And there you are!”

But when I crossed the border into Kansas, it was as if I suddenly turned back into an anonymous bum.

Within minutes, a father and daughter pulled over in their car, and the father asked, “What are you, a . . . a . . . a . . . transient?”

I was walking straight south through Kansas, taking a country road that paralleled the 2010 Keystone Pipeline, which had been laid into Kansas ground a couple of years before. I’d be able to parallel the Keystone till Cushing, Oklahoma, where the second part of the XL would be laid from Cushing to the Gulf Coast of Texas.

Because the Keystone runs almost straight south rather than southeast, I could parallel the pipe on country roads rather than walking fields and hopping a fence every ten minutes, which to me sounded unadventurous, but at least this would give me a nice break from trespassing and cows.

It had rained the previous night, so the dirt road I walked along had turned into soft custardy mud. With each step, my boots sucked up mud that would cling to my soles in sloppy clumps, sometimes curling over the toe like the floppy tips of Oompa-Loompa shoes. At times, it felt as if I were carrying an extra ten pounds on each foot. I got off the road and walked over pasture and wheat fields, which were just beginning to sprout blades of dark green grass.

Kansas was not the flat plain I’d imagined but an endless undulation of gently rolling, up-and-down, tree-topped hills. Like southeastern Nebraska, the roads here are spaced a mile apart, and almost all of the land is developed cropland or pasture.

While I missed the desolateness of those wide-open, half-wild spaces from up north, I found that I’d become less discriminating about nature as I continued south. I needed neither mountains, nor ocean monsters, nor endless prairie to dazzle me. I reminded myself that every field has 4.5 billion years of history in it. Every drop of oil that would flow through this pipeline has been on an epic thousand-mile, million-year journey. There’s a story behind every building, pipeline, and person. That tree line is there because of an ambitious FDR-led Great Plains Shelterbelt program instituted during the Great Depression. That corn row was planted by a futuristic GPS-guided tractor. That pile of dirt was once a screaming heap of space-traveling stardust and now perhaps holds the dung of dinosaurs, the slavers’ blood of Bloody Kansas, and the chemicals of Big Ag. With a little perspective, the mundane can appear miraculous, and something as unimposing as a field of winter wheat becomes a hidden universe, harboring a history with endless layers of complexity, rendering what on the surface seemed simple to the eye into a bottomless mirror of the cosmos. I figured there was enough wonder in a handful of Kansas soil to keep me marveling for a century.

The winter remained unseasonably warm—with highs in the low fifties—so I walked in as much comfort as I could ask for. I could hear birds again, which, after hundreds of miles of wind, cold, and snow, made my heart swell with thankfulness. I listened to them chirp from thickets, flitting from branch to branch. Out in the open, I watched squadrons of them jubilantly skim the tops of harvested cornfields.

Around dusk, I veered off the road and headed toward a patch of woods, where I set up my tent and cooked a meal of ramen noodles, powdered mashed potatoes, olive oil, and Parmesan cheese all mixed together in a warm and surprisingly tasty calorie-dense mush. Sitting alone in the dark in the woods all by myself, I realized that my journey was approaching its end. I will miss all of this, I thought—the interactions with strangers; the simple joys of camping; the occasional suspenseful thrill; the never knowing what’s behind the next bend in the road or beyond the next hilltop.

Where do they all go? The books, the lessons, the conversations, the kisses, the dreams? Has everything I’ve experienced been filed away for safekeeping, each memory ready to fire back to life like a smoldering coal torched by a gust of wind? Or are these experiences more like snowflakes melting on a fingertip: there and pretty one second, and gone forever the next? Will this old barn, this house, those rolling fields, this warble of meadowlarks, and the feelings they evoke be gone forever after I finish? As soon as they’d come, I’d feel them begin to leave. How I wanted to take them all with me. To have them when I’d need them most.

It seems that when you go on a long walk—when you’re taking in a constant stream of stimuli—the brain must unload heaps of memories, sometimes expunging experiences from your mind as soon as they come in. My days began to indistinguishably blend into one another. I struggled to recall ordinary words and terms (“carpal tunnel”). Years of coursework were vanishing from my memory banks, leaving me in a state of quiet and simple though increasingly dim-minded peace.

Because you can’t take anything with you from the places you pass through—the sights especially—there may be nothing more impermanent than a long walk. Unlike normal domestic living, life on a long walk is not one of material accumulation but of extreme possessionlessness, where the prospect of carrying more things and adding more weight is unthinkable. And it’s not just things that you can’t add and carry with you but thoughts and ideas and memories, too. You have this sight, this feeling, this breath of wind on your face one moment, and it’s gone the next. It’s thousands of minutes and miles of instantaneous impermanence, vexing and liberating at the same time.

•   •   •

In the morning, I continued on to the town of Chapman, where I hoped to charge my electronics and enjoy some of the other luxuries of town: perhaps a church floor or a pint of chocolate ice cream.

Kansas, though, hadn’t been giving me the warmest of welcomes up until this point. In my first three days of hiking across the state, I’d been approached by four to five officers (I’d lost count), who’d gotten calls from people worried about my walking with my beard and backpack down their rarely traveled roads. In just a couple of days, I’d had my ID checked more times than I had in all the other states and provinces combined. But it wasn’t just the cops (who were all really nice, actually). Oftentimes my waves to drivers weren’t returned. Dogs, which had yet to be a problem on this trip, would sprint from their homes and snarl at my heels. These were Labradors from hell: red-eyed and savage. A giant pit bull, chained to its doghouse, lunged at me over and over again. An obese woman in sweatpants came out to yell at the dog. I waved at her twice, but she just stared blankly at me.

I made my way into Chapman and headed straight to the Methodist church. There was no one at the church, so I asked an old man walking a dog where the pastor lived. “My name’s Harold Bray,” he said, shaking my hand. “I’ll take you to his home.” Harold was a retired music teacher who plays the trumpet and volunteers for an organization that supplies hotels with Gideon Bibles. We must have looked like an odd couple walking through the middle of Chapman: a ragged, bearded backpacker and Harold, dapper and dignified, with a tiny dog at the end of a leash.

Suddenly, three cop cars converged on us at once. It was a coordinated sting.

Well, this is a bit excessive, I thought.

Two cops got out, one wearing a smile and the other a steely glare. At this point, I was right behind the pastor’s house, and I was conscious of how being surrounded by cops wasn’t helping me to make the best first impression on Harold or the pastor inside.

Harold, who I’d already thought was one of the kindest, sweetest men I’d ever met, seemed taken aback by the cops, as if he were being targeted as an accomplice for my crimes. “I was just taking him to the pastor’s house,” Harold explained.

I told them what I was doing and asked one of the officers if he’d like to see my ID.

“You probably have this happen to you all the time, huh?” asked the nice officer, taking my North Carolina license from my outstretched hand.

“Not until Kansas, actually,” I said. The cop mentioned something about the most recent school shooting that took place earlier that week (the Newtown, Connecticut, massacre, where a gunman killed twenty schoolchildren and six staff members) and how no one can be trusted these days.

I’d received mostly kindness and generosity on this trip—and that’s definitely true—but some of that had to do with what I was: a white, straight, American male in my twenties with nothing particularly unusual about my speech or appearance, minus the beard and backpack. Yet even as a white, twentysomething, straight American (who could easily have been thought to be Christian and conservative as well), I’d been ID’d nearly every day of my walk through Kansas. I was approached by paranoid Montana men and kicked out of Boone County, Nebraska. If it’s this hard for me—a Caucasian walking through homogenous Caucasian country—what would it be like if I were black, or gay, or Korean, or Muslim, or a woman, or all of the above?

The pastor wasn’t home, so Harold took me back to his place, where he introduced me to his wife, whom he called Saint Maralee.

“Your mother must be worried sick,” said Maralee.

“I think she’s used to me doing stuff like this,” I said.

“No,” said Patty, a friend of Maralee’s. “She’s just putting on a good front. Mothers don’t get used to something like this.”

“You can tell her,” said Maralee, “that now you have two more mothers worried about you.”

They fed me chili and let me spend the night at their home. Patty was embarrassed by the local police, so she called the next town I was headed to in order to make sure I’d get a better reception. She gave me a phone number for the town’s ex-mayor, Don. I called Don and he told me that I could have the town’s Ladies’ Lounge for the night.

The Ladies’ Lounge?

The very name of the place sent excited shivers up my spine. I pictured a large matronly woman welcoming me into a velvety room cloudy with opium haze and smelling of an anything-goes carnal stink. Along the walls, women with bored expressions would be fanning themselves in aging pastel corsets.

I walked another twenty miles and got to the town of Hope. There were no ladies in the lounge: only Don, a shelf full of books, and a few wicker chairs.

I was grateful, of course, especially since there was supposed to be a blizzard that night.

I stepped outside at midnight and felt so thankful that I had a warm room all to myself. Thick, heavy, wet snowflakes zipped across the street diagonally under the streetlamps. I shuddered, shut the door, and crept into my sleeping bag next to the hot-to-the-touch radiator.

In the morning, Don brought me a breakfast of pizza and chocolate milk, and he told me he’d called the mayor of the next town, where I’d be able to sleep at their senior citizens’ center.

Because the road heading straight south was icy and relatively busy, I moved a mile to the west so I could head down a dirt road, where I was sure I wouldn’t be struck by skidding vehicles.

After a few miles of walking, I saw a dark figure in the distance walking toward me through this white barren landscape.

Seeing someone else out here was unusual for several reasons. First of all, it was rare to see anyone out for a walk. Second, this was yet another remote part of the state, with maybe one house for every mile of road. Third, it was a cold day, with biting twenty-mile-per-hour winds. Who’d walk in this? Parts of the road were covered in a foot of snow. And last, this was a black man coming toward me in a part of the country that is almost 100 percent white.

What the hell is he doing walking out here?

I moved to the right side of the road to give him a clear passageway to my left, yet in whatever direction I went, he went. As he came closer, my curiosity gave way to confusion and fear.

He was a young African-American man wearing baggy gray sweatpants and a sweatshirt.

“Good afternoon,” I said.

“Do you have a phone?” he asked cheerlessly.

I said no. I did have a phone, but it had stopped working nearly two months ago. (I’d learn later that that wasn’t true—I’d merely confused the mute symbol with the no connection symbol; it had been working the whole time.) Plus, my iPad was out of cellular data for the month. While it was true that I thought I had no functioning communication equipment, I think in hindsight that I answered his question more out of impulse than deliberation. For some reason, I suddenly became protective of my gear. All I wanted was to keep walking my way and let him walk his. What the hell is he doing out here?

He gave me a disgusted look, and said, “My car slid off the road.”

I’d just passed two homes, so I suggested he approach one of them to ask for help.

As I continued on, I became doubtful about his story. Why would he take this dirt road that hasn’t been plowed and is never driven on—even when there’s no snow—when there is a plowed and perfectly good asphalt highway, surely leading to his destination, a mile to the east? And why didn’t he have a cell phone?

But sure enough, a mile down the road, I saw his car stuck in hard, crunchy, foot-high snow, and I felt sick to my stomach. I was disgusted with myself. Was there anything I could have done for him? Could I have offered to help push it out? Maybe I should have explained my phone situation better so he didn’t think I was some small-minded xenophobe or racist. All along my journey, I’d been looked upon as a transient, a bum, and even as a criminal, yet I discovered that, even with these experiences, I was just as quick to misjudge, to fear the unusual, and to be governed by unexamined and deeply rooted prejudices.

I never found out if he ever got his car out of the snow or if he was just passed along to the next house, and the house after that, by other scared people.

I resolved to be quick to forgive those who’d misjudged me and never let my first instinct—the next time I came across a person in need—be mistrust or fear, but instead to extend the trust and charity that had been shown to me again and again.