19.

The Cop

PORT ARTHUR, TEXAS—ONE MILE TO GO

February 8, 2013

How would my journey end?

Perhaps it would end heroically. I’d imagined that after months of toil and deprivation I’d be on my last legs. Gaunt and haggard, starving and sun beaten, I’d stagger toward Port Arthur’s Sabine-Neches Waterway, where I was determined to place my final footsteps. Just before reaching the water, I’d collapse to my knees, and drawing from the very last of my energy reserves, I’d crawl the last few feet to the finish line. Finally, with my last ounce of strength, I’d defiantly plop into the water, from which I’d be lifted out by a throng of admiring fans as if I were a a limp piece of meat.

But upon leaving Beaumont, Texas, on the morning of the last day of my trip, I was so well rested and well fed I could hardly zip up my pants. I’d spent the past two nights fattening up in a house on the northern edge of town, where I had stayed with a guy named Pete and his wife, Beth, who fed me as much gumbo and beer as I could handle. Pete and Beth had found my blog and offered their place to me, and I chose to extend my stay an extra night because another blog reader, Woody, offered to pick me up from Port Arthur on the afternoon of February 7.

In the morning, I filled up a small backpack with a bit of food and water, laced up my boots one last time, and left Pete and Beth’s home just as the sun rose behind a bleak overcast sky. It would be a long day—twenty-six miles—and I had to finish by four p.m. so I could pick up a box of clean clothes and shaving clippers at the post office before it closed.

I walked along Eleventh Street through Beaumont’s chain-store commercial district. I noticed, as I cruised through the city, that over the past five months I’d turned myself into a hiking machine. The soles of my feet were smooth and hard. My legs, accustomed to the daily motions of a long march, no longer felt sore. My shin had healed, my knees were tough, my back and shoulders sturdier than ever. My mind was no longer an assembly line or an art studio; it was a gentle breeze, at ease, peaceful, uncomplicated, perhaps even a little slower, a little simpler than it had been before. I had just walked across the country, and I knew I could keep going and walk across the world if I wanted to.

I took my first break in an empty parking lot. I was eating one of my last energy bars when a lady pulled up in her car to ask me if I was the guy who she’d seen standing on top of the overpass.

“No, I don’t think that was me,” I said.

“I thought you were going to jump,” she said, dipping her hand into her pocket to offer me a handful of money.

I continued on down West Port Arthur Road, hiking next to white petroleum holding tanks in the shape of giant cat-food canisters that sat beside the overgrown grounds of Spindletop’s Lucas Gusher (which, in 1901, triggered the oil boom in Texas). I walked alongside the occasional rusted pump jack slowly nodding its head like an old man falling asleep and waking up during church service.

As I approached the refineries, each mile greeted me with a new smell. After the first wave of your standard, and vaguely enjoyable, rotten-eggs stench, I was hit by the slightly more pleasant but more unsettling aroma of smoldering fireworks. Finally, the smell evolved into something more toxic, something more synthetic: a bubbling cauldron of chemicals, a bonfire put out by a gallon of Windex. My tongue began to tingle, so I tried my best not to swallow.

I was in Mordor, on the last leg of my journey, heading toward the summit of Mount Doom: the Valero refinery, with its billowing smokestacks and spouting towers of fire. Unpleasing to the eye and nose as it was, I was happy to be here. I was learning. I was stimulated. I was traveling. To get to the heart of America, we cannot simply walk its forests and fields; rather, we must cut through its industrial underbelly and pull out and examine its organs: its railways and refineries, its coal plants and pipelines. Its guts.

I felt a sense of acceptance looking at the litter, the pollution, the industrial wasteland. It wasn’t that I’d come to accept these things as okay or that I’d become numb to them. But I was sick and tired of constantly feeling angry and powerless and frustrated. I came to acknowledge: This is how things are, this is the world we live in, and I can’t wish or curse these things away. And I ought not restlessly long for what I wish the world would be but enjoy it for what it is, fight for what’s right, and keep putting one foot in front of the other. And that’s just what I did, kicking a cardboard box of Bud Light out of my path and stomping over an empty can of Dr Pepper.

I was done thinking we were on an irreversible path to a fiery apocalypse. Because here’s the thing: We truly don’t know what the future holds or how climate change will play out or whether we will, in fact, all die a cruel skin-melting death under a merciless sun. I don’t question the science; I question our ability as humans to predict anything. There’s a lot that can happen between now and doomsday. We’re worried about a series of “positive feedbacks,” in which one change in the environment can lead to another and another until the planet either turns into a smoldering Venus or a giant snowball. But there is such a thing as a “negative feedback,” too. Kerry Emanuel, an MIT scientist and the author of What We Know About Climate Change, warns that we should be “wary of our own collective ignorance of how the climate system works. Perhaps negative-feedback mechanisms that we have not contemplated or have underestimated will kick in, sparing us debilitating consequences . . . Prediction beyond a certain time is impossible.” This isn’t an excuse to give up on conservation efforts because everything might turn out okay; it’s a reason to keep working and caring and believing that our efforts matter. Perhaps it’s best to believe, whether or not the end truly is coming, that the best of civilization will survive and our efforts will still be valued even if, regrettably, there is death and submerged islands and swamped coastlines, too.

To give in to despair is to place too much faith in how much we know. Negative feedbacks, an enlightened and fed-up citizenry, a golden age of democracy, an ecoterrorism crusade, and, hell, maybe even help from aliens are all possibilities, if distant ones. Perhaps fortune will give us time. Maybe a few minicollapses will force us to turn more enthusiastically toward instilling a conservation ethic. For those who care about the species, the best of civilization and the earth, we thankfully have neither the knowledge of the future nor the ability to confidently predict it. Ignorance, the bane of climate-change action, weirdly, can be our salvation, too.

And as E. O. Wilson might say, let’s not save the world for the sake of saving the world. Let’s try to save it for the sake of saving ourselves. Our biophilia is about loving the earth, its life forms, its beauty, and perhaps even its future, and that means loving it whether the world will end tomorrow or in ten billion years. Do I say any of this with optimism, certainty, or a sense of empowerment? Nothing of the sort. But look into the darkness long enough and you might start to notice something sort of like hope.

•   •   •

I was approaching the Valero refinery. Pipes emerged from the ground like bamboo rods. Smokestacks puffed out white smoke. I was surrounded by an astonishingly complex network of pipes and steel and flaming towers and holding tanks. I couldn’t begin to understand what each part did, how this whole place worked, or how much thought and labor and ingenuity went into building it.

I felt something close to what I had felt at the beginning of my trip nearly 136 days earlier when I flew over the tar sands of northern Alberta. There, I glided over muddied waste pits that looked like they had been carved out by life-ending meteors. I flew over eerie yellow sulfur pyramids, smoking refineries, and a horizon-to-horizon wasteland where fish once swam, moose once browsed, and natives once hunted. Yet above all of that devastation, I’d hardly felt a thing. I was more concerned about not dropping my camera out of the plane’s window.

Looking at the tar sands and now this refinery, I felt something strange, and I felt guilty feeling it. I was impressed. I was impressed by its size and complexity, impressed by how many workers and how much labor had gone into creating this, impressed by how the human mind—or a collection of human minds—could build something so incredibly sophisticated. I was impressed, not because what we’ve done is good but because what we’ve done is amazing. As a member of this incredible species, I felt impressed, proud, and, most of all, hopeful. If we can do this, what else can we do?

•   •   •

“HELLO!”

I was startled by a loud robotic voice behind me. I jerked my head around to see a cop talking into the microphone in his car.

He got out, and said, “In Texas, you should walk against the traffic, on the other side of the road. You never know when a drunk driver will run off the road and hit you from behind.

“You weren’t the guy taking photos of the refinery, were you?” he added.

“Yeah, that was me,” I said, looking ahead to the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Bridge less than a mile ahead. I was eager to place my feet in the water beneath it to conclude my journey.

“They called up complaining,” he said.

“Well, I won’t be around long,” I said. “I’ve been walking for 1,900 miles and 136 days. This is my last mile. I’m going to end my trip beneath the bridge over there.”

He shook my hand and wished me luck. But less than a minute later, another police car, as well as a Valero security truck, had parked behind me with their lights flashing.

Oh, what now? I thought.

“Sir,” one of the officers said. “I was telling my partner what you were doing, and she wanted a picture with you.”

I gladly took pictures with the officers and continued on. Pete from Beaumont was taking photos of me up ahead, and Woody, also a professional photographer, was positioning himself ahead for shots.

When I got to Pete, who was standing by his car in front of the bridge, two more cops pulled up behind him and asked for his ID.

“The refinery is pissed,” said the policewoman, exasperated.

“Don’t take any more pictures of the refinery,” said the policeman. “They don’t like it.”

It was four fifteen p.m., and I had to get to the post office before five p.m., so I was eager to get my feet in the water. There was a levee under the bridge surrounded by a fence and barbed wire, so if I wanted to get my feet in the water, I’d have to cross this quarter-mile-long, unusually steep, definitely sketchy shoulder-less bridge. Things began to feel a little chaotic. I wasn’t sure if Pete was going to get arrested or a ticket, I was running out of time, and I had this last obstacle in front of me.

“I’m going to try to walk it,” I told Pete, who was still being interrogated by the police. “If it’s too dangerous, maybe I’ll turn back.”

I hopped onto the bridge and walked the narrow eighteen-inch-wide elevated concrete guard on the left side. I looked at my watch, and between the sense of urgency created by my logistical conundrum and the excitement of ending my journey, I took off on a sprint up the bridge. While running, I looked down on the elevated grassy levees, then the wide waterway, and finally the lush wetlands of Sabine Lake, which looked all the more pretty since I had just passed through Port Arthur’s grim industrial district. I didn’t care about preserving energy or being in pain tomorrow. This was the end, and I had the freedom to give it my all. So I ran, and I ran hard.

I left the bridge and, saturated in sweat, continued my jog on Pleasure Island, running toward a small mosquito-infested park where Woody and Pete (who didn’t get arrested) were stationed with their cameras. I descended the muddy eroding bank, took off my boots, and sank my feet into the water of Sabine Lake, which empties into the Gulf of Mexico—the final step of the journey.

I had imagined this moment many times on my walk and I had already experienced the emotions that this moment might bring, so I didn’t really need to experience them again. Each time I had imagined the end, I’d come close to tears thinking about all the people I’d met. My hitchhike drivers up to Canada, Harold and his giant Mormon family in Alberta, Ron and Eleanor in Saskatchewan, Patty and Lewis in Montana, Rick and Heidi in Nebraska, Harold and Maralee in Kansas, Dusty and Darcee in Oklahoma, Pete and Beth in Texas, and the hundreds of others, and I would feel this deep sorrowful love for my fellow man and this anachronistic but very real pride in being North American.

I thought about how the Thoreau in me was cynical, critical, misanthropic, at peace in the company of pine needles but crabby in the company of men. But also about how this trip had brought out the Whitman in me—a lover of all things, man and nature—and how sometimes I wanted to exuberantly catalogue all the professions of mankind in an epic poem, along with the clatter of our tools and the babble of our speech.

Oh, and the prairie. How I’d dream about the days spent walking over you, feeling the long feathery tails of your green grass waving against my legs, the cloud mountains sailing across the deep blue sky, the chatter of coyotes, the groans of cattle—and the stars, oh the stars. I’d feel melancholic thinking about you, about how I have you, yet don’t have you at all. This life is so mortal, so finite, and I wished I could keep coming back to see you every year, forever, and savor your sights and these joys over and over again. Then you’d be mine. But I can’t, and I’ll have to be content with these memories and this sweet sadness—the sadness of having done but not having the lifetimes to do again.

After 146 days, 1,900 miles, eight states and provinces, three pairs of boots, and being taken care of by hundreds of strangers, I left the path of XL and got in Woody’s car, where he helped me figure out how to get home.