Walk to New York

In the spring of 2002, Thunder Bay, Ontario, writer Charles Wilkins had reached a crossroads. His marriage was over and his wife, Betty, wanted him out of their house. He was in a rut, he writes, and “needed risk, excitement–needed a journey, the oldest and still perhaps the best way of resetting one’s compass and reintroducing the idea of surprise.” For some time he’d been fascinated by the idea of a marathon walk, but he also wanted to make a long visit to Manhattan. “Why don’t you just combine the two and walk to Manhattan?” Betty asked. “The possibility took root,” Wilkins writes, “and with it a sense that in walking to the great city I would be exploring, a step at a time, the largely unexplored axis between rural culture and the more artful, articulated culture of big city civilization. Or, in this case, between the vast Precambrian wilderness (one of the most isolated and magnificent parts of the continent) and the centre of North American cultural and financial life.” And so, one day in late April, 2002, he started walking, accompanied by his friend, poet George Morrissette, who drove a van filled with supplies so that Wilkins didn’t have to burden himself with a heavy backpack. He was also supported by a number of sponsorships–Columbia Clothing, the Ontario provincial parks system, a cellphone company, the Warwick Hotel in New York–and by his publisher, which was interested in publishing the book that the long walk would produce. After stepping out of his front door that April morning, Wilkins ended up covering more than 2,200 kilometres in 10 weeks, losing 25 pounds and most of his toenails in the process.

Walk to New York is partly a book about the thoughts the act of walking generated in Wilkins’s mind–primarily about the connections between past and present and the way that walking brings the two together–but it’s mostly about the process of making such a long journey: the people he met along the way, the things he saw, the various adventures he had. As readers, we learn what it’s like to walk along the shoulder of a highway in northern Ontario, alongside ditches filled with litter and car parts and dead animals and just a metre or so from passing cars and trucks. Later, Wilkins tried walking along the Bruce Trail in southern Ontario, but he abandoned that route because it wasn’t as direct as a southbound highway, and we read about his harrowing journey through Toronto’s suburbs, where the roads were designed without any regard for pedestrians. In comparison, his walk through upper New York state–over the Catskills and across a bridge over the Hudson River–was an idyll. Then he heads south along the Hudson, past the estates of robber baron capitalists (some now state parks) and the infamous Sing Sing prison, and through the Bronx and Harlem to his goal, the Warwick. By the time he arrives, he’s addicted to the endorphin rush of walking–yes, it can be that strenuous–and finds himself driven to walk all over Manhattan instead of resting his weary feet.

It’s a strange book about a strange journey, and it left me wondering what it might be like to walk out of my front door and start trudging towards some impossibly distant goal–like Toronto, maybe, or Vancouver. Or somewhere even farther away. Of course, I don’t think I could convince anyone to drive a support vehicle so, unlike Wilkins, I’d have to carry a tent and a sleeping bag in my pack and hope to find enough water to drink along the way. That would be the biggest difficulty, I think, especially in this part of the country, where towns and villages are very far apart. And I’m not sure I can imagine wild camping at the side of a highway–what would passing Mounties have to say about that? Still, I know it’s been done before, and I keep thinking about whether I could pull it off. Maybe I’m not quite crazy enough to try.