I Walked Across America. Here Are the Stories of What I Learned.
Over the course of 204 days, I walked from the shores of the East River in Brooklyn, New York into the waves of the Pacific, just off the coast of San Francisco, California. I started March 9, 2019 and finished September 28th of the same year with my best friend Phill. We spent seven months in a conversation with America––learning about ourselves, each other, and what it means to move at human speed.
I’m starting this article a week after finishing––with dust in my shoes I’ve yet to shake. Time has a way of making memories smooth like stones in a river, and I want to share these stories while the edges are still rough.
There’s a special insight you can have while the memories are still messy, an emotional rawness while it’s still unclear. I think of the Impressionists and how they wanted to paint what a place felt like more than what it looked like.
This article is about my walk across America, three stories of how it felt, and what I think they mean for the question we’re all asking: “What does it mean to live life well?”
It’s not what you do but how you do it.
Just three days and 43 miles from our announced finish, Phill and I were handcuffed and placed in the back of a highway patrol vehicle.
It’s illegal to walk Highway 37, and while we weren’t certain of it at the time, Phill and I weren’t ignorant to the chance of a CHP visit. It’s illegal to walk on all interstates, and California reserves the right to select and restrict highways from pedestrians. But we decided to gamble on walking Highway 37 as we had done on other roads. It’d save enough mileage for the risk.
But at 10:40 PM, flashing blue and red lights crawled toward me on the highway shoulder. Trucks and cars barreled down a single lane 70 miles an hour, a few feet from where we stood.
Two built men in uniforms cautiously opened their doors in a break of traffic. They seemed like the kind of men who wear tactical sunglasses everywhere — at Sunday lunch or in the mall or at the park with their kids. Guys who mostly goof around but might get sentimental if they drank too many Coors. Men who cared about honor and bro codes.
“Hey, you know you can’t be walking out here. What’re you doing?” he shouted from behind his door.
“Oh no. I didn’t know. Um, we were just walking.” I realized how strange that sounded, like I was saying I had just decided to take an evening stroll on a busy highway.
Moving closer, one of them said. “Do you have any weapons of any kind? Guns, knives?” The wind rushed around every word.
I shook my head. “No, no! I have a Leatherman here, and my friend has a knife on his left backpack hip pocket.”
“There are two of you — you left your buddy?” asked one of them. The question felt like an accusation. “What are you doing out here. Where are you going?”
I didn’t know which question to answer first. “San Francisco. Uh. We’re walking across America. My buddy’s maybe a mile back there.” I smiled. Be friendly. Be articulate. Casual.
“Wait. What? You’re walking? Where’d you start from?” the blonde one asked. His eyes lit up with curiosity.
“Yeah, yeah! We actually started in Brooklyn and walked to right here,” I said, pointing the ground beneath me. That was one of Phill’s favorite quips, I didn’t feel bad about borrowing it from him. “And Phill, uhh, he’s a big boy––he’s fine without me. He should be here any moment.” I said with a bit of guilt. I typically walked faster than Phill, and I sometimes would be miles ahead. Phill had all of the food and water, he had a cell phone: he would be fine without me. At least, that’s how I always framed the reasoning. I think I walked faster because I wanted to get away. I hated breathing his air, and I felt guilty at my own resentment.
They looked at each other with slight squints and puzzled faces, like they hadn’t heard a story like this before. Sometimes this reaction feels like a complement and other times I’d feel fraudulent. Especially when someone might reply with Oh you’re so brave! or Oh how inspiring!
But it’d be worse when others would respond matter-of-factly, unimpressed: Oh, that’s pretty cool. It’d speak to the other side of my insecurity, and my fear would invent their thoughts: Oh, I know your type. You’re another Kerouac-ian wannabe. Of course you wanna write a book. Walk across America? I’m already kind of bored by it––where’s the foreign intrigue? Walk across the world. That’d maybe be interesting. Are you at least doing it for a cause? No. Hmm. What about a speed record? No. Ah. Well. That’s pretty cool I guess, good luck to ya.
“Holy shit. That’s crazy.” The blond one said. “How long did has it taken you guys?”
The other officer shook his head in disbelief, looking skittishly out toward traffic. “Well. We can’t let you guys stay out here. We’re liable if something happens to you guys. I don’t even like being pulled over to the side like this.” He said with cars blaring next to him. I wanted to tell him this was one of the widest and smoothest road shoulders we’ve ever been on.
“Well, we started March 9th, just a bit over 6 months ago. We’re about 200 days in.” The words started to form from my lips like a memorized script. “Oh there he is.” I could see Phill’s headlamp bop quietly in the distance.
Phill walked toward us with a casual swagger and earphones in. “Hey hey, can I — uh give you a call back?”
We’d take calls on long days like this. It was the best way to forget the miles, but we’d often get into conversations with strangers on the side of the road. People who’d pull over. People mowing their lawn. People curious about two men wearing big backpacks pushing a stroller in the middle of their population 30 towns. Phill liked to leave the other person on the line to hear the interaction. I think it was a kind of odd performance to him.
“HEY. Stop. You can stop right there.” The skittish officer said, his hand out to stop Phill from walking any closer. Phill seemed to make two extras steps, walking longer than the officer wanted but not long enough for him to respond to it. If I was casual in encounters like these, Phill seemed cavalier and stoic––almost like he saw their uniforms as costumes. “Hey, yeah. I’ll call you later.” Phill didn’t hang up.
“Good evening” Phill said.
He met the officer’s eyes and stared. Waited. I felt a slight tension. His unbroken gaze and blank face communicated I’m in control. I wondered if it were on purpose, whether it was a kind of defiance or obliviousness.
“You can’t be walking here.” The skittish one asserted himself.
“Okay,” Phill said simply.
“Do you have any weapons of any kind?”
“No.” Phill dropped his pack next to the cart.
The skittish officer and the blonde one deliberated whether they had enough room in their patrol car for us and our gear. Where’d we put the cart? I guess we could zip tie it to the hood. Where’re we going to take them? The only place forward is Sears Point. 37 still runs out of there, and then they’d be in another county. They’d get called on again. Besides, it’s just out in the middle of nowhere, we couldn’t leave them there.
“Wait. We’ve been in the middle of nowhere,” Phill began to say, objecting to the skittish one’s warnings.
“Look.” He said back sternly. “I can’t take you out there because there’s no food or water or anyone, and if you lose service…”
I saw Phill moving again to object, but I interjected: “–––Ah, you can take us back to Vallejo. That’d be okay with us.” I smiled, looking at both officers.
We collapsed our cart carrying our food and water. Their trunk was full, but I managed to slip food in between electronic equipment and their bags.
“Are those closed?” The officer asked, nodding to the several liquor bottles I started to shove in their trunk.
“Uh. Yes.” I lied, awkwardly finding places to wedge the whisky and gin. “We had a little vacation in Tahoe with some friends.” I said, trying to reason the absurd amount of alcohol.
After packing the car like Tetris, the skittish one said: “Hey you’re not being arrested, but I’ve got to handcuff you. I just don’t know you…”
“Oh no, totally understandable. I get it. You’ve got to be safe. You’re just doing your job.” I said, turning around and offering my wrists. “I’ve always wanted to be arrested though,” I said smiling to Phill. “Guess it’s still on the list.”
I had a running list of things I wanted to happen during the trip, like see a bear in person and get into a real bar fight, where pint glasses are thrown and chairs broken. Only one of those things happened though.
The patrol car pulled up to a Denny’s, two exits into Vallejo. The blond officer drove past the first saying, “I’m going to go to the next exit. I don’t feel comfortable dropping you off here. This next one isn’t great either, but I feel better about leaving you here.”
I looked around as the skittish one undid our cuffs. I wondered what the first exit of neighborhoods looked like if this place was safer. The officers left us after examining the hood of their car. They scratched and dented it after zip-tying and removing the cart.
We were now alone in a Denny’s parking lot in Vallejo. Instead of being 43 miles away from our finish, it was almost midnight, and we were near 80 miles away with a day less than before.
“Hey, you still there Sarah?” Phill said into his headphones. Nope. He looked back up to me. “Hey, I know you wanted to camp, but I’d rather get a motel here.” Phill said, putting the cart together. “I’ll buy it for us since I know you wanted to camp.”
I looked across the street at the homeless stumbling through. “You mean…you think they’ll be able to tell we’re not one of them? With our four hundred dollar tent and fancy headlamps?” I was tired and demoralized too. “No, no. You’re right. We can split the room.” I was close to hitting zero on my budget which meant Phill must have already been spending on credit.
After getting inside the room, I sat down to think. My parents were going to visit us tomorrow, so I knew we had two options.
- My parents could drop us off 43 miles north of Land’s End, so we wouldn’t be “cheating” the miles
or
2. We could go the long way from where we were, but the only route without taking a ferry would almost double the distance.
There weren’t any real stakes to the decision. There were no rules for walking, and there was no one policing us for how we did the trip. We already white water rafted 15 miles. We had already backtracked and changed locations a few times already. We must’ve walked a couple hundred extra miles of detours and setbacks. What’s changing a location one more time? It wouldn’t be cheating the miles. We could still say we walked the distance.
But I remembered something Naval Ravikant said about self-esteem. He said “Self-esteem is the reputation you have with yourself, where even in the cases no one sees you––you are always watching yourself.”
We never took rides to make it easier for us.
I remember walking in the pouring rain and snow when we first started. How people would pull over and ask if we wanted a ride. Midwest kindness. How we would have to shiver out a “No thank you! Really appreciate the offer though” and watch their faces shrug and reply confusedly “Okay. Suit yourself!”
Even if we didn’t “cheat” the miles, even if no one would know––it was never about the mileage. It was never about accomplishing the walk. For me, it was about a question: “Who do you want to be?”
When it’s difficult, can I trust myself? When it’s hard, can I do the right thing? Especially when it’s inconvenient. Do I have credibility with myself — especially when it doesn’t seem to matter to anyone but me, can I live according to the standards I set for myself? What is the value of my words?
Who do I want to be?
The next morning, I blew the rest of my budget on breakfast at Denny’s. Phill got a 6-pack of Red Bulls to share, and I let out a long sigh before putting my turtleshell of a pack on.
I thought about the night before we left in New York City.
“What? No you’re not. You can’t take the ferry. You’ve got to walk the George Washington bridge.” The bartender said, looking at us with a furrowed brow. He had the confidence to tell us. “You going to walk thousands of miles. What’s another twenty?”
I had asked Phill to plan the first days of the walk. There’s a transcontinental trail called the American Discovery Trail, but it runs from Delaware to California, so we had to just make things up as we went along. Not knowing which highways or bridges would be walkable. Google Maps would continuously ask you to take the ferry––even if you checked the option “Avoid Ferries.”
I looked at Phill. “So what do ya think?”
Dale the Bartender shot back to us, “George Washington Bridge!” He shouted down the bar.
Phill smiled back. “Ahhhh mate! I guess we’re walking the long way!” Phill raised his glass to all of us with rosy cheeks. I laughed, knowing he was tipsy by his non-specific accent and how often he’d say “mate.”
“Okaaayyy,” I said, raising my glass too. “Looks like we’re going the even longer way home!”
“Ayyylll cheers t’ that mate!” We clinked glasses, not knowing where we’d be sleeping tomorrow.
Phill cracked and hissed opened a Red Bull. I did too. I thought about Dale the Bartender, about what the longer way home really meant. How we were just two days from the end, but I was still learning. How even at the end, the right good thing felt as hard to do as it would’ve in the beginning.
“Cheers mate.”
[*] Progress is more about consistency than intensity. Don’t underestimate compound interest.
Before my dad left for work each day, he’d say goodbye to my mom by kissing her. Every day. Marriage, vocation, or anything significant is made this way. More often than not, it’s without glory or recognition but made moment by moment. Skyscrapers with careful foundations. Bricks of sacrifice and careful consideration in daily acts. Doing the dishes. Leaving nice notes. Talking to each other when you feel tired.
What you do everyday will most likely matter more than what you do in any single day.
“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” — Annie Dillard
I remember waking up in California just west of Folsom. Over the last six months, we’d walked close to 3000 miles. Maybe more. I stopped counting in Denver because it didn’t seem to matter anymore. It was just a number. It was something I could tell someone to seem impressive. It was about appearance more than being. But even if I were to keep track of the number, I’m not sure I’d believe it.
I woke up that morning in Folsom, California like I was born there, almost as if someone else had walked every day to get there. The progress happened so slowly, just twenty or thirty miles at a time, I didn’t even notice it. Slowly and then suddenly––like water to a boil or drifting asleep or falling in love––we made it to the middle of California.
James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, writes about marginal gains and the dramatic effect of becoming 1% better everyday. He describes how we fetishize losing weight, building a business, or writing a book with fantasies of earth-shattering improvements, but he describes how these accomplishments are really the aggregate of momentum and incremental progress. If you were to become 1% better everyday for a year, you would be 37 times better than you were when you started.
“Look at a stone cutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred-and-first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not the last blow that did it, but all that had gone before.” — Jacob Riis
Growth hinges on incremental progress, commitment beyond the promise of reward where the reward of work is the work itself. There wasn’t a singular day of distance that mattered. Take away any of the 20 or 30 mile days, we’d be close to the same place. But altogether, it mattered, and we were close to walking across an entire continent.
[*] Joy is a skill. Suffering is the story you are telling yourself.
Trauma is not just a terrible event. Trauma is not defined by what happened, but how it continually happens––it’s the story of it, it’s how we retell it and relive it over and over again. I’m powerless because he did this. I’m in so much pain because she did that. I should’ve done more. They should’ve done this. I feel so powerless.
And you may be right. You may be powerless over that event––but in the same way we’re powerless to physics or whether we were born or not. It happened. But it’s the story and how you tell it that animates that pain again and again. It’s how we contextualize the event with our lives that will dictate what the event means.
“A blazing fire makes flame and brightness out of everything that is thrown into it.” –Marcus Aurelius
This isn’t to say we should stop thinking about what causes us pain or to not be self-critical. But there’s a distinction between self-flagellation and thoughtful analysis. There is a distinction between blame and forgiveness. There is a distinction between “This should have gone differently” and “I can make this better.”
This isn’t to say it’s easy either. Just to say: we don’t always have a choice in what happens in the story, but we always have a choice in what it means.
We pulled off a small bike path next to the highway to camp. It’s drizzling, and by the shape and color of the clouds, it would be a full storm soon.
Lay down the tent footprint. Check. Unrolled rain fly. Check. Adjusted poles. Buckled corners. Check Check. Unfurled and set tent inside. Check. Staked down every point. Check. Just in time too: the raindrops moved from gentle crackling to a roar of white noise. Thunder echoed through the sky. There was a deep sense of safety and warmth in the contrast. Thank God I’m in here and not out there. Sleep crawled over me like the weight of another body. As the static rush of rain muffled down, and I learned to ignore the thunder, safe in my sleeping bag.
Wait.
What’s that sound.
I shot up. Phill did too.
We’re quiet in our fear, trying to listen to the paws we heard stalking around our tent. How many are there? They warned us about coyotes, how they run in packs as large as twenty out here. How they wanted more than just the Clif bars in my bag. I saw a nose pressed against the thin fly of the tent. Sniffing for us. We pulled in tension.
“Oh heyyy Buddy! What’re you doing?!” Phill said to the wet dog laughing. Just as quickly as panic came, it evaporated––a big wet yellow Labrador, goofy and smiling in its demeanor. “Get out of here buddy!” Phill said, pointing out of the tent vestibule. The yellow Lab just smiled, panting. I peeked outside the tent to peer through the white haze of rain. No one. I looked to the Lab. No leash, no tag.
The lightning got closer, thunder loud as gunshots. Each time the Lab’s face flickered from a goofy smile to animalistic terror.
“Okay, c’mon,” I said to the chubby dog, trying to lead him off my expensive sleeping bag and mat. Lightning flashed across the sky. Thunder cracked loudly. “Let’s get out…of,” I said, struggling to push him away, “of…here — Oooh no.”
In its panic the dog got snatched between our tent, trampling and breaking one of our poles. The tent caved in, water pouring through.
I yanked my body into the storm, bare feet dragging in mud, holding the Lab by its collar. My headlamp guided me twenty feet at a time through the brush and onto a dirt road. Phill tried to fix the tent and to soak up the pooling water inside. The dog clung to me, lost and terrified of the lightning. My hands glazed over with its mangy fur and the running rain. I was shivering.
We took turns packing our gear up and putting on shoes while watching the dog. We dragged our broken tent into a corrugated tunnel underneath the highway, and I leaned against the cobwebbed walls, the dog resting his wet head on my already drenched pants.
“What’s that you said?” Phill shouted across the dark.
“Oh, nothing. I was talking to the dog. I hate that I like him,” I said, watching him shiver the water onto me like a greasy mist.
“You got a name for him yet?”
“Trouble.” I smiled. “He’s been nothin’ but.”
We didn’t sleep that night, and while walking, the Sheriff pulled over and recognized Trouble and where his home really was. Miles away from where we were.
I was a bit miserable that night: soaked clothes, ruined gear, sleepless with a couple dozen miles to walk the next day. But there was this bright moment of clarity while I was in that grimy, damp tunnel. It was just after realizing sleeping wasn’t going to be possible and just before we started walking to warm our wet bodies.
I started laughing.
Just at how silly it all was. How temporary it all was. I slipped into this depth of nowness bigger than the story I made for it. Instead of being stuck in that tunnel, I knew I was standing on a blue marble in space. The absurdity of it. Maybe it was sleep deprivation, but I couldn’t help but laugh at how impossible it all felt.
Phill started laughing as well — he seemed to know too.
Now I wouldn’t classify this story as tragic or traumatic, but I think that’s why it’s so significant to me. It represents the ordinary suffering we opt into with the story we tell ourselves. The boss doesn’t get it. The girl turns the date down. The car breaks down, and no one seems to care. The baby won’t stop crying on the airplane. The tent collapses because a random dog tramples it in a lightning storm on your transcontinental walk.
It’s not what happens that’s frustrating — but it’s our attachment to what we think should be. It’s expectation that robs a moment of its natural dignity. Why should the boss get it? Why should the girl go on the date? Why shouldn’t the car break down?
When our narrative revolves around what’s fair to us, we suffocate on the smallness of own story, on our expectations, on how things ought to be. When in reality, there is only what is happening.
I’m not arguing for numbness or apathy. I’m not saying we should ignore how something inconveniences us or frustrates us. I simply mean, in every moment––we have an opportunity to say, “Yes. Thank you for this too.”
An opportunity to see life beyond our personal narrative. A chance to find stillness and time to ask the important, all-consuming question: What is this story about? Who do you want to be in the story that’s being told?
