I’m going to be in conversation with Tim Herwig and Ann de Forest as part of a Walk-Listen-Create event in a couple of weeks (details will be forthcoming closer to the day it happens). We’ll be talking about my forthcoming book, Walking Well: Trails, Paths, Pilgrimages, and Herwig’s 2022 book The Long Way Home. My copy of The Long Way Home arrived last week, and I found a couple of hours to read it. Of course I’m biased–I love books about long walks–but I think The Long Way Home is brave, thoughtful, and lovely.
About 25 years ago, after a failed marriage and several years of subsequent unhappiness. Herwig decided to walk from Chicago, where he lived, to Minneapolis, near the town where he grew up. That 500-mile journey (I had no idea Minneapolis and Chicago were so far apart!) is the subject of the book. Herwig takes us along with him, giving us the sensory experience of the walk and portraits of the people he met. If that were all The Long Way Home did, I’d be happy reading it. But it includes something else.
Herwig was groomed and then sexually abused by one of his high-school teachers, an experience that haunted him, and as he walks, he shares more and more about that abuse with us. He doesn’t just relate the details, though. Somehow the act of walking 20 miles every day for weeks helps him heal the deep wounds he was carrying. Part of what Walking Well thinks about is the way that walking is good for our mental health, and I was happy to know I’m not the only person who has been able to let trauma go, at least a little bit, simply by walking. I wish I could understand the mechanism that allows that healing to take place. In Walking Your Blues Away, a short book I blogged about here 12 years ago, psychotherapist Thom Hartmann argues that walking is a form of bilateral movement, not unlike EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing Therapy), which has become a standard treatment for PTSD–even though nobody’s quite sure how it works. (EMDR’s inventor, Francine Shapiro, said she came up with the idea for this therapy while walking in a park.) Maybe that’s why Herwig found walking so helpful. Or maybe not: perhaps he felt better because he was spending time alone (his was a solo journey), thinking about what happened without drifting into unhelpful cycles of rumination. Perhaps it’s the way moderate exercise helps our brains produce BDNF, brain-derived neurotrophic factor, a protein that helps induce neural plasticity and create new connections between neurons. I wish more research were being done into this subject, but it’s not likely to make money for pharmaceutical companies (shoe manufacturers would be another story altogether). Anyway, the evidence that exists–some of it anecdotal, like Herwig’s book–suggests that walking is good for our emotional and physical health.
That’s not all that Herwig’s walk does for him. It also helps him connect with the world he’s walking through. “It does not matter that I am walking alone,” he writes. “I have made company with the land and the light that moves across it.” That connection gives Herwig the courage to begin re-creating himself (as a nun he meets, Sister Donna, suggests to him). Part of that re-creation involves telling us about the abuse, emerging from its heavy cloud of shame. Through the experience of his walk, Herwig begins to tell a new story about his life. At the party celebrating the walk’s conclusion, he tells us, “I have another beer and declare my love for everyone present, joyous in the peace I have found in a landscape of love in which I am now free to live.”
Well, I guess that’s kind of a spoiler, but I’m not sure how to talk about the transformative power of Herwig’s walk without indicating how he was transformed. As with other examples of travel writing (or og writing about long walks), part of the point of this book is to read his detailed account of the day-to-day experience of walking through the American midwest. Even without the narrative of recovery from trauma, this book would still be worth your time and attention.