From the title you might assume that this post is about one of the many speeches given recently by President Trump. That is not the case. Instead, I am offering a suggestion for a book to read, once the weather turns. If the weather had not been so good for so long, I had planned to review the book myself, but will now provide remarks and reviews by others since we are about to leave for a few weeks in British Columbia and the weather is still too nice to be blogging.
Walking From Washington, D.C. to New York City
Here is how it begins:
"Our house stands along a row of white maples nine blocks east of the U.S. Capitol, as it has since Ulysses Grant was president. Tens of thousands of times in our twenty-two years there I have opened the wrought-iron gate between the garden and the sidewalk for trips to work, dog walks, early runs, quick jaunts to the store for a clutch of bananas, or with daughters in hand on Christmas morning.
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....No hastening anything on this trip. I wanted nothing over. I kissed my wife, Shailagh; said goodby to my brother Jeff; scratched my Airedale behind the ear; and turned north. I was off to talk to America, to listen to her, to examine her, to wonder over her, at what we all hoped was the end of one of the roughest patches in our history. I wanted to think about what we are, and once were, and still yearned to be. To poke among the graveyards of our past and brush the moss off forgotten things. To chew over this American project and come to some hazy conclusion over whether America was still possible or had seen its best days."
As the author acknowledges, the walk from downtown D.C. to Manhattan is not a difficult one and anyone familiar with the general area would likely choose to ramble around just about anywhere else in the U.S. For example, although the title of Chapter 21 seems promising -- "Cresting the Great Mound" -- it is about climbing the Edgeboro Landfill in New Jersey. And, even though the author offers again a warning that much of the walk will be about wandering through a wilderness of warehouses, rather than the other kind, it is still a journey you should take with him.
"There's nothing heroic about walking to New York, It is a humdrum feat by any measure. It is no trail through Appalachia to the peaks of Maine. No Everest looms along the way to surmount. No Grand Canyon to get across. No Cyclops to gobble me while sailing home from Troy. No Amazon requiring a machete in the belt for vines or snakes, No warlords or highwaymen along the way to loot one's knapsack. The gravest threat was a driver looking at his phone."
Believe the Blurbs
"This is a near perfect book, an exquisitely seen and felt memoir of an American journey; it's not just a geographic journey, full of keen observations and thoughtful insights, but a spiritual one, finding in our complex and sometimes contradictory landscape a mirror in which King's own inner life awakens as he wanders. Amazing."
— Ken Burns
"Part travelogue, part history, American Ramble is a thoughtful, warm-hearted guide to the country that we’ve inherited and that we’re making." — Elizabeth Kolbert, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Sixth Extinction
"A 61-year-old journalist, recovering from cancer, sets out to walk from Washington, D.C. to New York City. Where we might see monotony and sprawl, overpasses and rest stops, he finds time and nature, humankind in all its variety, and even, at moments, rapture. Go with Neil King on this fascinating, enchanting, and rewarding journey." — Evan Thomas, author of the New York Times bestselling First: Sandra Day O’Connor and Being Nixon.
"Beautifully written, American Ramble is packed with keen observations, surprising discoveries, and wise reflections. Readers will be rewarded at every turn in the road. It is a journey both through a landscape most of us never see and through the tangles of America’s history. It is also about perseverance and renewal. Neil King is a gifted writer, and this book is a gift." — Daniel Yergin, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Prize and The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations.
Sources:
Reviews are easily found and always adulatory. The book is readily available and for those in London, copies are found in the London Public Libraries.
Unfortunately, King had been diagnosed and treated for cancer before the walk and did not live long after it. Here are two obituaries.
"Neil King Jr., Who Wrote of a Long Walk of ‘Renewal,’ Dies at 65," Trip Gabriel, NYT, Sept. 27, 2024.
"Neil King Jr., a journalist whose book, “American Ramble,” told of his 330-mile trek from his home in Washington, D.C. to New York City while in remission from cancer, an account that lyrically evoked the people, history and back roads of the Mid-Atlantic region, died on Sept. 17 in Washington. He was 65.
Mr. King’s travelogue-cum-memoir, whose subtitle is “A Walk of Memory and Renewal,” was based on a 26-day hike he began in late March 2021, when the country was emerging from the Covid lockdown. (He modestly called it a “humdrum feat by any measure.”) It crystallized for many readers how the pandemic had heightened a sense of life’s urgency and fragility."
"Neil King Jr., Who Walked the Byways on His ‘American Ramble,’ Dies at 65," Washington Post, Sept. 20, 2024.
"The idea for his ramble germinated over decades, fed by his fascination with history and inspired by the treks of other writers such as Patrick Leigh Fermor’s hike through Europe in 1933 recounted in “A Time of Gifts” (1977) and Bruce Chatwin’s travels in Australia’s Outback in “The Songlines” (1987).
Then, over a few turbulent years, Mr. King felt a deep urgency to make his journey. He had bounced back after cancer surgery but knew there were risks that the disease could return. The pandemic lockdowns amplified the pull of the road, he said. And the violent storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, by supporters of President Donald Trump left Mr. King wanting to observe America’s deep political fissures from the modest vantage point of a lone wanderer.
“I had set out with a wonder first stirred by a sickness,” he wrote. “A jolt of fear had opened a seam of freedom, and I had slipped through. I went out to seek and give meaning, with the giving being a key part of that conversation.”
On March 29, 2021, Mr. King slipped on his gray-and-green backpack, put on his tweed cap, gave one last stretch to his lanky 6-foot-5 frame and walked down the front steps of his Capitol Hill townhouse."
