june 22 walk update
Greetings, friends:
I am sitting in a library in Buffalo, NY and doing some catch up. Really, if anyone wants to send me or make me a meme that shouts how awesome and important public libraries are, I will be all over it. The ones that are about community computers are either trashing them or are like this:
I want sexy and ironic and clever and revolutionary!! I mean, it’s not just access to the computers - which are awesome - but it’s also who I am sitting at the computers with. Lots and LOTS of good conversations are happening in and around the click click of the keyboards. So, meme makers, g’head. Show me your brilliance!
Ok, first I am just going to be chatty before sharing what has been on my mind these days. A bunch of you wrote to me after the last letter and said you love it when I am just idly chatting about what is going on in my brain, the mundane random things. Then I will give you a route update and finally, a bit of reflection.
Chattiness
I am now about 750 miles in…and about a week from walking across the New York to Pennsylvania border. First: borders aren’t real. They are imaginary lines and I refute them totally. Blast you, borders!!! I hate you and what you represent and that is completely and utterly true. Second: Oh my god, I have been in New York forever! I started down where the state narrows toward New York City and then arc’d up to the Hudson River Valley and then did another arc and zig zag through central NY then up and down in the Finger Lakes and now up to Buffalo before walking along Lake Erie toward Cleveland. I missed everything north of Utica - NY is a BIG state - but my arc kind of covers the length of it and then some. Borders are not real and oh oh OH the sense of accomplishment I am gonna feel when I pass the sign that says welcome to Pennsylvania, followed a few days later by welcome to Ohio!
Ohio is going to be time with cousins and then, for the first time in 43 years, I am spending time with friends I went to high school with. I am beyond excited and I know a bunch of you are reading these posts so hello - we are now 60, d’ya believe it? Gratitude to Maria Colapietro (nee Ficociello) for your house that I am gonna sleep in.
I am now on my second pair of shoes - the first were literally unraveling before my very eyes. I replaced them in Ithaca and while they are the same style (Hokas because a lot of people ask me), they are slightly different so my little toes on both feet are full of blisters. I shared a photo of my toes with my partner and some friends out of a desire to be close and sweet and my photo was not appreciated. Let’s just say that my calluses are doing some interesting shape shifting. I have also now walked long enough that some of my supplies are losing their umph. I need to get a new camping pillow and a new camping towel. Beyond that, my clothes and my other big things as well as my body are holding up well.
Sidenote: this is a day where I am spending about two or three hours sitting at the computer to catch up on things and write this update. From sitting, my body is so STIFF!!! I think about how many hours I usually sit in front of the computer and now, because my body is used to walking most days, everything gets confused.
My body continues to feel strong, although this last week of heat and humidity has definitely worn me down faster. Thank you to everyone who responded to my Instagram and Facebook shout outs about your wisdom in moving across heat and humidity.
And finally, if you are driving down a road near me and you want to surprise me with a gift - fresh fruit! Fresh fruit and vegetables are the hardest thing to get unless I am near a big town. I knew that would be the case but still, I expected it when I got further west where there are large rural food deserts… not here where there are towns every ten or so miles. I stayed one night with a farm family and we were talking about how many people don’t grow any food at all, even when they have acres and acres of land. One of them reflected - well, these days you can get food everywhere - and I replied, but no, you can’t! That is what keeps being so startling to me - without driving a shit ton of miles, there is no access to fresh healthy food. I know this - if you had asked me about it before I started walking I would have told you that I know this thing. But knowing it and then walking miles upon miles, mouth all hungry for something that is fresh, this just takes it deeper in.
Please, if one is available to you, eat an apple or a spring berry or a bit of watercress or spring green for me and savor every crunch and squirt and sense of aliveness that wakes up your mouth. Deep gratitude for the glory of this land.
Route update
This is an idea of my route and the actual path has the potential to shift based on who might reach out and things that I learn as I am walking. I am clear more or less to Fort Wayne, Indiana but after that, I am not sure. I know that I want to walk through Plymouth IN and Prophetstown IL in honor of Tecumseh and the Uprising against westward settlement.
I also want to say before I move into my details that for at least the last week - and for a few days more - I am walking the route that the Oneida people took when they were forced to leave their traditional lands here and resettle in Wisconsin. I think of this every day, knowing that there are forced marches all over where maps like this one are not available. There are at least 30 or 40 recorded forced marches of indigenous people - trails of tears. This is one of them.
And I am and have been walking through the lands of the nations that make up the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, listening to podcasts about Haudenosaunee history and life, visiting places, meeting people and listening. As I move from these lands towards lands that many many people moved across and which, at first contact, were and are Haudenosaunee, Wyandot, Shawnee, Erie, Huron and more.. I will keep listening.
So, what comes next? If you know anyone who lives near any of the places below and might have a bed or place to put up my tent and share a shower, please let me know. If you know anything about the land I am walking through, any stories or histories or tidbits, please know there is no such thing as too much information. The dates are not exact and might shift the further away I get from this moment.
New York
wanakah - evangola state park 24th I have a place to stay
evangola to silver creek 25 I have a place to stay
silver creek to fredonia/dunkirk 26
fredonia/dunkirk to lake erie state park? 27 I maybe have a place to stay but am open to anything else
lake erie state park to westfield, NY 28
Pennsylvania
Westfield NY to northeast PA 29
Girard 30th I have a place to stay
Ohio
Girard to Conneaut - 1st or 2nd
Conneaut to Ashtabula - 2nd or third
Ashtabula to Geneva State Park Campground - 3rd and 4th I have a place to stay
Geneva to Painesville OH 5th
Painesville OH to headland dunes? 6th
Family in Cleveland 7, 8, 9th I have a place to stay
Brunswick to Valley City July 10th I have a place to stay
Valley City to Oberlin July 11th I have a place to stay
Oberlin to Fort Wayne - about 12 days - July 23rd or July 24th. I am going to go via Birmingham, Huron, Castalia and visit Pickerel Creek where there is a reported wild rice stand, the last on Lake Erie, Fremont, Millersville, Risingsun, Defiance and Cecil)
Indiana
Fort Wayne to Plymouth IN - about 7 days - July 30th or August 1st (towns in Indiana include Columbia City, Pierceton, Winona Lake)
Indiana and then Illinois
Plymouth to Prophetstown, IL about 2 weeks - August 16th (coming around Chicago thru Chicago Heights and Joliet) (towns in IN include Grovertown, Hanna, Wanatah, Valparaiso and in IL include Ainsworth, Merrillville, Park Forest, Frankfort, Joliet, Plainfield, Shabbona Lake)
Illinois to Iowa
Prophetstown up the Mississippi to Pikes Peak Park - about 10 days - August 26th more details to come
Reflecting
When I started this walk and people would ask me why I am walking, I would answer in paragraphs. Sometimes they would be shorter and sometimes bigger but I couldn’t feel my way to the right words. Finally, maybe only a week ago, the words landed in a way that each time I say them out loud, I remember who I am and why I am doing this thing. I feel the reason. The sentence that I am holding in my heart and mind as I walk is this one: how do we live on this land in a good way together? Sometimes I say, I want to know how to live on this land in a good way together. Every time I say this, the person across from me nods. Most of the time they soften which is lovely because I soften inside when I say those words. And then the conversations that come next cover so many different things: What gets in the way of living on this land in a good way together? What does that question actually mean? Is kindness enough? I ask that last one because a lot of times folks talk about kindness right away and so I ask that.
This question helps. It holds me as I walk, helps me start and end my day without blanking out. I was explaining to a few friends recently that I have now moved from the first phase of the walk which was all about newness and a kind of sparkly intensity, even on the bad days, into that part of practice where the newness has worn off and now it’s like… Oh. This is what I am doing. Day after day. Just this.
I know this is part of any kind of practice - we weave in and out of things feeling alive or connected again and then into the times when the aliveness and connection is harder to feel. These last few weeks, with multiple exceptions where the people I have met or the slant of sunlight on a stream have woken everything up again, have been in this part of practice. The walking itself, hot and with a heavy pack on my back, these are the moments where each step feels as much of a trudge as it does a blessing.
I wanted to say this because it is easy through social media and who knows what to only focus on the highlights and low dips, the moments filled with sensation and aliveness. But in between, as you well know, is this… waking up in the morning and gathering my things - again - and feeling everything in me want to go and lie down and watch a movie or do anything except walk again. Same clothes. Same backpack growing ever more sweaty no matter how much I clean it - old locker room smell, anyone?
I started thinking about how, even in my bodywork practice and other places, I don’t spend as much time really with this in between part of practice, this trudging mundane. Living in a city surrounded by people I care about and with a world of devices to wander in, I don’t always have to be in the step after step of another day. This is a privilege as much as anything else. I am surrounded by the ability to make choices about where my attention goes and to shift my attention if I am bored.
Walking like this reminds me of being 12 and 13 and 16 years old when school was out and I just had days of boredom. I think kids still get bored, but I am not sure. As I’ve written in my social media posts, I don’t see many of them playing outside as I walk. I tend to see them in clusters, leaving me to believe that there are ecosystems of children outside just like all ecosystems - like it is most likely when there is more than one doing it.
Endurance means to harden - and actually it means to harden the heart, but the older meaning behind it is to be within steadfastness or firmness. Stamina comes from stamen, an old word meaning to stand, make firm, be upright which has been used for a part of a flower and a part of a loom. Tolerance is word that I started to hate in the 1990s when I first heard it used to talk about what we are looking for within justice work. Like many folks, I pushed against the concept saying that we want more than tolerance. Tolerance means literally to bear, to carry. Patience is the quality of suffering or endurance. And perseverance comes from to have or to hold within a context of steadfastness or toughness.
I looked over these words, listening for the histories behind them. I wanted to find words that got to the moments of hard, where you would have a choice to stop, to give up, to shift but something keeps you moving. I wanted to find words that carried some quality of purpose or care or an awareness that this is part of the path of reconnection. Tolerance fits, to some degree, as the word that had the closest resonance in meaning - to bear or carry a thing …….because the reason for bearing and carrying is stronger than the discomfort of the weight? It is closer but still not it. Each one of the word histories I looked at held within it something that felt like hardening or toughening as part of the process… and this keeps making me curious. Like really curious.
When I am walking down a busy road and there are semis rushing past, loud and heavy and impersonal, I can feel myself tightening around my squishy center. My mind disconnects and I move through each step with an awareness of how much longer I have to walk before I can stop. When I am walking down a side road, I can hear the sound of birds and there are moments where the shape of the land and the connectedness of life gets illuminated. People talk to me more often in the second scenario. In the first, hardly anyone. I will sometimes meet folks who say - oy, I saw you on route 20 or 33, that was you, right? I wanted to stop but everything was moving so fast.
What does it mean to be on this land in a good way together? Walking is not slow enough. Moving so quickly that even if your curiosity and hearts open for a second, there is no time to pause. Moving through overwhelming loud streets and moments where the only way to get through is to harden your heart, tighten up and then move through to the imagined end when you can rest again. To endure.
There is nothing new in what I am saying. Nothing at all. I spend a lot of my days noticing all of the choices I have made in my life that have meant that I move fast, that I see the person out of the corner of my eye as I am passing them, that means I don’t pause, not really, for a stranger without first assessing them to see if I think it would be “worth” it.
Every day on this walk I am humbled… hugely deeply humbled. And then comes the next step. This is what has been filling my heart-brain for the last week.
And next
When I was a child growing up in Cleveland, you couldn't swim in Lake Erie. It was too polluted. Going to the lakeside, there were fences across the beach with signs that said dangerous, keep out. My mother would tell me about her childhood spent swimming in the lake, and I was jealous. I am going to walk for over a week along this shallowest of Great Lakes, a lake that used to have wild rice growing along its shoreline and where there is still one patch of wild rice off a park in the northwest corner of Ohio.
Every moment in that lake will be a prayer for what the lake remembers and what it’s been through. Lake Erie: Aanikegamaa-gichigami or Waabishkiigoo-gichigami or Erielhonan and a whole lot of other names as well.
Until later, friends.