On being famous

Walden on Wheels got off to a slow start. Despite a few well-placed op-eds in the New York Times and Chronicle of Higher Ed., the interview requests—that are crucial for a fledgling book, I’m told—never came. I had a few radio station interviews lined up, but many were poorly established operations based in some of the most remote parts of the country. One radio host didn’t even have an assistant to answer company phone calls, so he took them while he was on the air. I called up the day before the interview to make sure the sound quality of my cell phone was up to snuff, and while repeating the words, “test, test, test,” I had the odd feeling that I was live on the air.

“Am I on the air?” I asked.

“Yep,” he said. I would have felt embarrassed, but it occurred to me that there probably weren’t any listeners.

Honestly, though, I didn’t care too much about how many interviews I was getting or how many copies of the book were being sold. I’d already been paid for writing the book, so selling 100 or 100,000 copies would make little difference. I worked hard on the above-mentioned op-eds, and I did my best at every interview I got, so I guess I just felt I did my part, and if the book was going to sell, it really wasn’t up to me anymore, but more amorphous, uncontrollable things like “fate” or laissez-faire economics. Plus, I was just content to have published a book, which seemed like such an implausible, far-fetched endeavor two years before.

I took a flight to Buffalo, NY to visit with family for the first time in a year and a half, and from my boyhood bedroom I did a few more phone and email interviews. Life, though, continued on as normal. I kept working on book #2, I took a nightly jog to the Niagara River, and I made a fruit and yogurt smoothie for myself each morning. For a couple of days, I became the family laughingstock when I replaced the cheap $2 gallon of skim milk (a family staple) with a gallon of organic. Neighbors were called up. I heard some ecstatic shriek from my mom when she was on the phone with my aunt. “Organic? What is your father going to say?” my mom said to me, all smiles and wild cackles. Upon opening the fridge, my father stared at the white jug with a red “No antibiotics and toxic pesticides used” label with a confused, slightly pained look on his face, as if he was trying to figure out if he was the subject of a devious prank. “You bought organic?!” he cried, leery of the new substance he was holding, as if I’d suggested he amend his mug of tea and fill his cereal bowl with turkey grease.

Meanwhile, there were rumors that my aunt needed some dehumidifiers moved in her basement. The transportation of moderately heavy appliances hardly seemed like a daunting task, but our family has a secret PTSD-based fear of my aunt’s basement, so the place, in our memories, is not merely a damp storage facility, but a bunker in which we harrowingly endured hours of exploding shells. Years before, my mom, dad, brother and I helped my aunt haul boxes of clothes, antiques, and holiday ornaments from her apartment to her new home. The boxes went straight from the apartment attic, where they were never opened, to her basement, where they never would be opened. My brother and I, curious about what exactly we’d been hauling for the past ten hours, broke open a box to see what was inside. We looked at each other with mystified expressions when we pulled out a faded teal dress from the 1970s with shoulder pads. “Maine, are you ever even going to wear this again?” I asked. She pretended not to hear the question as she placed a cardboard box on top of another. After three days of box hauling, the basement was like a mini city. When you walked through it, you felt like Godzilla waddling through narrow alleyways brushing shoulders against towering skyscrapers. Consequently, my father, who doesn’t come across to anyone as “morbid,” has more than a few times hinted that he aims to be the first in the family “to go,” so the burden of moving the boxes again doesn’t have to fall on his sore shoulders.

My brother would end up helping my aunt move the dehumidifiers and advising her on how to sell her couches on Craigslist. “You gotta know how to play the game,” he said annoyed, as the older members of our family always seem to lag woefully behind the rest of the world on the march to technological sophistication.

“The game?” I said. “What, are you selling heroin in East Baltimore?” (The phrase struck me as ridiculous because I’d just finished watching HBO’s The Wire, in which drug dealers refer to “the game” as the bloody drug war between gangs—not gypping some sap out of an extra thirty bucks over an old couch.)

Over the course of a couple of weeks, several business media outlets—many of which leaned conservative—became interested in my book. I received a glowing review in the Wall Street Journal, followed by features on websites like Bloomberg, Business Insider, and Mike Huckabee’s website. Three different Fox News television shows asked me to come on.

Things seriously took off when a Business Insider interview was put up on Yahoo’s homepage, once again advertising my patchy chest hair and mouth full of food to the world at large.

The article generated an astounding 9,500 comments, and, within three days, I had 1,200 Facebook friend requests, my book shot up to the 109th bestseller on Amazon, and I had close to 400 messages and emails from complete strangers. Good Morning America was frantically trying to get in touch with me, seeking an exclusive interview, sending me emails all morning while I slept in past 10 a.m. When no one picked up at home, they desperately called my neighbors. These things, I’ve learned, often fall through, so I was never on Good Morning America, but I was invited onto CBS This Morning.

My publishing company flew me to NYC and put me up in a hotel for a night. In the morning, I was picked up in a car and taken to CBS’s studios. I met my publicist for the first time, who didn’t seem to mind my complete silence on the car ride over, as I played out in my head a host of worst-case scenarios, which ranged from “What if I have a brain freeze?” to “What if I crap my pants?”

At the studio, a woman dabbed makeup on my face and combed my hair while Gayle King very charmingly went over all the notes she took when reading my book. Elizabeth Dole, another guest, was backstage with me, and I was trying to avoid eye-contact with her because I’d forgotten if she was still a senator of North Carolina, and I didn’t know if I should address her as “Mrs. Dole” or “Senator Dole.” The subject of “Duke” somehow came up among other people in the room, and despite having my back turned to all parties, one of the producers mentioned that I was a graduate of the school as well. “Well, hello, it’s nice to meet you,” said the esteemed guest. I didn’t want to say something as uncouth as “It’s nice to meet YOU, too,” so I figured I’d kind of just mumble “Senator” hoping that, if she expected to hear Senator, she would, and if she didn’t, she’d just write it off as a speech impediment.

“Hello senna Dole,” I said. “It’s nice to meet you, too.”

For the most part, the interview, only a few minutes long, went well. I stumbled on one (somewhat sprawling) question, but muscled through the brain freeze. Gayle King threw some softballs to me, which I was able to manage with some adrenaline-fueled charm.

Fox News also asked me to be on, and with a great deal of reluctance, I agreed. As David advised, this was my opportunity to “throw a love bomb behind enemy lines,” and I justified it was okay since my harmless message about living simply and paying off debt responsibly deserved as big an audience as it could get.

The next day, I got an email from Steve, a producer of The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, who told me he had a Waldenesque cabin in Idaho and that he identified with my story. We had a “pre-pre-interview” on the phone, during which a producer feels the interviewee out and determines if he/she can supply semi-articulate answers. I managed well, and he invited me to Burbank.

My dad is a big Leno fan, so he and my mom took time off of work and flew in on a separate plane. I spent the evening at the hotel gym working out for four hours. I spent three miles on the treadmill, five miles on the bike, and completed full shoulder, bicep, and pectoral workouts. For the past week, I’d had a borderline eating disorder, as I tried to shed every trace of flab, but also to destroy all nervous energy with intense exercise and an austere diet.

On the morning of the show, my publicist and I met with two producers, who told me about how the interview would go down. Steve, who, I gathered, was having second thoughts about me, said, “Be charismatic, even if that’s not how you usually are.”

I spent the next four hours in the gym, thoroughly scrubbed myself down in the shower, and shaved. A driver took us all to the studio, where I had a dressing room with my name on it, plus trays of veggies and fruit.

Perhaps because of my dizzying workouts, I felt an odd sense of calm. My mom, who said she might “throw up,” was visibly nervous and just barely holding it together. We were talking with one of the show’s writers, when my dad called out, “Hey Jay!” as if Jay, walking down the hallway, was selling bags of peanuts at a ball game. Jay came in and spent about five minutes talking with us, but mostly with my father, who’s Scottish, like Jay’s mother. I was struck with my father’s carefree comportment, leaning back in the sofa, shooting the shit with a nationally-recognized celebrity.

“How old are you?” asked Jay.

“I’m 63,” my dad said.

“Ah, same as me,” said Jay.

“Yeah, well I’m not retiring early.”

My parents were ushered off to their seats in the audience and I was taken to the makeup studio and given a new pair of pants because mine were inexcusably wrinkled.

Steve Carrell was the first guest, and I was watching the show from a television screen in my dressing room, still oddly serene until the second half of his interview was coming to a close, which meant that I’d soon be on.

They took me behind the stage, where I’d wait to be called out. The band was rocking. The crowd was energized. A lady looked at me and said, “Steve really got them going.”

In moments, I’d be called out onto an iconic stage on one of the most iconic shows—a fixture of American culture. How did I feel? I was pumped. As the band played on, I found myself dancing while shadow-boxing, oozing with energy that desperately needed a vessel into which it could be salvaged.

I still wasn’t even that nervous. Part of it was because I was well prepared and that I’d had my “first time” already. But part of it was just that I didn’t care. I am going to be on TV—so what? Whatever I put in books, on TV, on radio, on this blog doesn’t matter—it doesn’t change what I am inside. How people perceive me doesn’t change how I perceive myself. While I certainly didn’t want to crap my pants and be a viral embarrassment, truth be told, I just didn’t care what anybody thought. If Joe and Susan in New Mexico think I’m a dweeb, how does that in the slightest affect me? And while I’d very soon be in the national spotlight, I knew I was a mere comet pebble in a vast TV galaxy—one voice drowned out by millions of others on thousands of channels.

Between a last second pep talk, in which I deceived myself into believing I was up to the task, and a reminder to, as Steve the producer said, just have fun, I walked out onto the stage with something bordering on confidence.

The next five minutes passed as if they were seconds. Afterward, I leaned back in my chair, feeling awfully content with myself. Steve Carrell introduced himself and told me my story would make for a good movie.

That night, I received another flurry of emails, including one from “Erika,” who called me “realllly sexy,” attached a suggestive picture of herself, and proposed that I “might have an easier time getting some in Miami than you did in your van….”

Turned off a bit with her forwardness and leery of getting entrapped in a Manti Te’o-like scandal, I politely turned down Erika, who turned out to be one of my male friends in New York screwing with me.

This was my third fifteen minutes of fame in the past few years, and I was prepared to handle it. In the past, I’d been transfixed with having my name listed on national publications, with receiving emails from mysterious strangers, and always wondering what other changes this fame will bring me. There’s a high high when you’re on top, and a low low when your popularity dissolves. This time, though, I was just kind of nonchalant about the whole thing, feeling the sort of breezy contentment that one basks in after a good, hard day’s worth of work.

I’ve learned there really are no substantial “changes.” Though inundated with new Facebook friends, there are no new friends. There is no new money. No new things. No one recognizes you on the street. In the media ocean, you are a big swell that lasts for a moment, and you’re dashed into a trillion indistinguishable bits on the shore the next. It may in fact present some new opportunities, it may improve your chances of getting a second book deal, but it doesn’t change who you are. How can you live for thirty years and, one day, just magically change into someone else, with different hobbies, values, and friends? You can’t. And having just spent a month visiting old friends and family, it was so clear to me that people just don’t change, sometimes for the worse, sometimes the better. Myself included.

While my friends worried that I’d be swept up and altered by this new wave of fame, I knew better. At the height of my “fame,” with Leno on the tube, I wasn’t at some throbbing club, rubbing shoulders with famous people, or having wild sex with the likes of Erika, but laying in my underwear on my hotel bed, with the tray of fruit and veggies I’d pilfered from NBC resting on my stomach, watching another episode of The Wire.

A hiking epilogue and a published book

So I’ve been running around the past couple of months.

After I finished my hike in February, a guy named Woody Welch from New Braunfels, Texas picked me up and drove me to Washington D.C., where we’d attend a big climate change rally, hosted by the likes of 350.org and Sierra Club.

The turnout was impressive. According to many accounts, there were upwards of 40,000 people. As encouraging as the size of the crowd was, I couldn’t help but feel a little stupefied, dazed, shell-shocked. Just days before, I’d been walking across the country, often feeling very alone in my opposition to the Keystone XL, but always with a sense of self-assurance and importance made possible by the innumerable interviews I did with the media, not to mention an enlarged blog following. And suddenly, here I am, surrounded by tens of thousands of people (many of whom dressed as polar bears), hoisting signs like “KEYSTONE XL IS STERIODS FOR CLIMATE CHANGE.”

I was an insignificant atom among a shoulder-to-shoulder swarm of bodies and signs and banners. It was all rather eerie and surreal, and, as much as I agreed with the crowd’s message, it was impossible for me to get swept up in the mob-like fervor which had gripped other participants. My ego was getting the best of me, as I’d recognized that my days of having some sort of “voice” on this issue were over, and that what I now had to say was just a faint vibration lost in a deafening chorus.

Now that my adventure was over with, I had to go through the trouble of getting my life in order. I had car registration bills and taxes to pay, computer files to sort out and organize, possessions spread out across several states. From D.C., I flew to Denver so I could get my van and drive it and all my stuff home to North Carolina. I decided to hang around for a couple of weeks so I could spend time with Josh and play on his coed floor hockey team with the hope of helping them make a playoff run. But alas, the season ended in the semi-finals after a humiliating defeat.

The next day, I drove across country through Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, Kentucky, en route to North Carolina, which proved to be a fairly uneventful trip, but one made enjoyable by the many Radio Lab episodes I’d downloaded and listened to on my iPad.

And so: I’m back at the place that most resembles home, North Carolina’s Acorn Abbey. David, since I’ve been gone, has become active with a grassroots anti-fracking group here in Stokes County, Lily the cat still hisses at me when I make affectionate advances, and the five hens I’d raised last year are all grown up (though one has been evicted by David for being a he). We’ve since added three more girls (or who we think are girls), naming them after 1950’s starlets (Bridget, Sophia, and Marilyn).

In less than a month my book comes out, so I’ve kept busy doing promotional work, like this New York Times 2,000-word adaptation of my book. The article was translated into Portuguese and re-printed in Brazil, so now I have thirty new Brazilian Facebook friends who’ve sent me a mailbox full of messages like, “Será um vencedor!!” which I don’t understand, but nevertheless appreciate.

Despite the relaxing and familiar setting, and despite my several recent successes, and despite my new Brazilian friends, it seems I’m forever doomed to be weighed down by uncertainties and anxieties.

How will my book be received? Maybe everyone will hate it. Maybe it’ll be ridiculed by critics. Maybe internet forums and message boards will heave and splatter me with vitriol-filled and poorly spell-checked rotten tomatoes. These are the thoughts I daily fret over.

I googled “Walden on Wheels” a few weeks ago and agonized over two negative reviews—one of which called my writing “as thick as pancake batter,” and another which called the book “middling.” I worried that maybe these are the best reviews I was gonna get. It’s usually my first instinct to make the best of a bad situation, so I thought that these negative (but far from harsh!) reviews were going to have to be the ones my publisher’s marketing team will have to work with for back cover blurbs. Instead of “Inspiring!” or “A raucously funny adventure,” we’ll have, in big letters, “Middling!” and “As thick as pancake batter!”

I mean, everybody likes pancakes, right?

The other day I went to the mailbox and found a big package in which three copies of my book were enclosed. I ripped it open and pulled out a copy. At first, I was a bit stunned to see my name on the front cover of a real book. For a moment, I became an aesthete. I traced the ball of my index finger over the book’s textures: the shiny-smooth and vaguely-embossed lettering of “Walden on Wheels,” the coarse grain cover, and the leaves of crisp parchment within. I flipped through the pages, admiring the layout, the font, the presentation. I laughed stupidly. If just in this one moment I could forget about all of my anxieties and savor the sense of accomplishment from having done the impossible: publishing a book.

I held the book in my palm, and felt, in this one pound bundle of paper, several years of grief, desperation, anxiety, frustration, and despair, but also jubilation, inspiration, and ecstasy.

I reminded myself that I’m a heretic, and that I ought not give a shit about what other people think, and surprisingly, this tactic, this little reminder, has worked wonderfully. The book, after all, like the hike, was always a struggle, but a journey worth taking, regardless of how gloomy the destination.

Day 146: Port Arthur, Texas–the final day

(Photo credit: Pete Churton)

How would my journey end?

Perhaps it would end heroically? I’d imagined that after months of toil and deprivation, I’d be on my last legs. Gaunt and haggard, starving and sun-beaten, I’d stagger toward Port Arthur’s Sabine-Neches waterway, into which I was determined to place my final footsteps. Just before reaching the water, I’d collapse to my knees, and, drawing from the very last of my energy reserves, I’d commence to crawl the last few feet to the finish line. I’d hack out bloody phlegm and crap my pants without realizing it. Finally, with my last ounce of strength, I’d defiantly plop into the water, from which I’d be lifted out, like a limp piece of meat, by a throng of admiring fans.

But upon leaving Beaumont, Texas on the morning of the last day of my trip, I was so well rested and so well fed I could hardly zip up my pants. I’d spent the past two nights fattening up in a house on the northern edge of town, where I stayed with a guy named Pete and his wife Beth who fed me as much gumbo and beer as I could take. Pete and Beth had found my blog and offered their place to me, and I chose to extend my stay an extra night because another guy, Woody, offered to pick me up from Port Arthur on the afternoon of 7th.

So, on the morning of the 7th, I filled up a small backpack with food and water, laced up my boots one last time, and left Pete and Beth’s home just as the sun rose behind a bleak, overcast sky. It would be a long day — 26 miles — and I had to finish by 4 p.m. so I could pick up a box of clean clothes and shaving clippers at the post office before it closed.

I walked along 11th Street through Beaumont’s chain store commercial district. I could tell, as I cruised through the city, that over the past five months I’d turned myself into a hiking machine. The soles of my feet were smooth and tough. My legs, accustomed to the steady motion of a long march, no longer felt sore. My shins had healed, my knees felt well-lubricated, and my back and shoulders were sturdier than ever. My mind was no longer a factory or an art studio; it was a gentle breeze: at ease, peaceful, uncomplicated, perhaps even a little slower, a little simpler. I’d just walked across the country, and I knew, if I wanted to, I could keep going and walk across the world.

I took my first break on a store’s empty parking lot. I was eating one of my last energy bars when a lady pulled up in her car to ask me if I was the guy who she’d seen standing on top of the overpass.

“No, I don’t think that was me,” I said.

“I thought you were going to jump,” she said, dipping into her pocket to offer me a handful of money.

I continued on down West Port Arthur Road, hiking next to giant, white, cat food canister-shaped petroleum holding tanks, by the grown-over grounds of the Lucas Gusher of Spindletop (which, in 1901, triggered the oil boom in Texas), and alongside the occasional rusted pump jack, slowly nodding its head like an old man continually falling asleep and waking up during church service.

As I approached the refineries, each mile greeted me with a new smell. After the first wave of your standard, and vaguely enjoyable, rotten eggs stench, I was hit by the slightly more pleasant, but more unsettling, aroma of smoldering fireworks. Finally, the smell evolved into something more toxic, something more synthetic, a bubbling cauldron of chemicals, a bonfire put out by a gallon of Windex. My tongue began to tingle so I tried my best not to swallow.

I was in Mordor, on the last leg of my journey, heading toward the summit of Mount Doom: The Valero Refinery, with its billowing smokestacks and spouting towers of fire, where the XL oil would be refined and shipped off to foreign markets.

Unpleasing to the eye and nose as it was, I was happy to be here. I was learning. I was stimulated. I was traveling. To get to the heart of America, we cannot simply walk its forests and fields; rather, we must cut through its industrial underbelly and pull out and examine its ugly organs: its railways and refineries, its coal plants and pipelines. Its guts.

I felt a sense of acceptance looking at the litter, the pollution, the industrial wasteland. It wasn’t that I’d come to accept these things as “okay,” or that I’d become numb to them. It was just that I was sick and tired of constantly feeling angry and powerless and frustrated. I came to simply acknowledge that: This is how things are, and this is the world we live in, and I can’t wish or curse these things away. The best I can do is to enjoy what’s left, fight for what’s right, and keep putting one foot in front of the other. And that’s just what I did, kicking a cardboard box of Bud Light out of my path, and stomping over an empty can of Dr. Pepper.

I was approaching the Valero refinery. Pipes emerged from the ground like bamboo rods. Smokestacks puffed out white smoke. I was surrounded by an astonishingly complex network of pipes and steel and flaming towers and holding tanks. I couldn’t begin to understand what each part did, how this whole place worked, or how much thought and labor and ingenuity went into building this place.

It was close to the same thing I felt at the beginning of my trip, nearly 136 days before, when I flew over the Tar Sands of Northern Alberta–the worst manmade environmental disaster in our history. There, I flew over the muddied waste pit that looked like it had been carved out by some planet-ending meteor. I flew over eerie yellow sulphur pyramids, smoking refineries, and a horizon-to-horizon wasteland where fish once swam, moose once browsed, and Natives once hunted. Yet, there, above all of that devastation, I’d hardly felt a thing. I was more concerned about dropping my camera out of the plane’s window.

The human mind struggles to sympathize with a devastated landscape, especially one that was never our home. A whole ecosystem removed from the earth is an unbelievable sight. It’s an abstract concept. And appreciating it requires more than just our eyes and ears. On first sight, we’ll feel shock and awe and amazement, but I’d wager that only a few are overcome with the moral indignation that we’d originally expected to feel. It’s not until afterwards, when we’ve had time to think it over, to reflect on industry’s shortsightedness, to imagine the exodus of animals, and to consider the implications for our climate — all nebulous, abstract things — that we’ll begin to feel what we’d expected to feel.

But, looking at this refinery, I felt something else, and I felt guilty feeling it. I felt impressed. I was impressed with its size and complexity, impressed with how many workers and how much labor had gone into creating this, impressed with how the human mind — or a collection of human minds — could build something so incredibly sophisticated. We are mining some of the toughest-to-get oil in the world, pumping it through a 36-inch pipe across the continent, and here we’re turning it into fluids that run our cars and planes. I’m impressed, not because what we’ve done is “good,” but because what we’ve done is amazing. As a member of this incredible species, I felt impressed, prideful, and, most of all, hopeful: If we can do this, what else can we do?

***

“HELLO!”

I was startled by a loud robotic voice behind me. I jerked my head around to see a cop talking into the microphone in his car.

He got out and said, “In Texas, you should walk against the traffic, on the other side of the road. You never know when a drunk driver will run off the road and hit you from behind.”

“You weren’t the guy taking photos of the refinery were you?” he added.

“Yeah, that was me,” I said, looking ahead to the Martin Luther King Jr. bridge, less than a mile ahead, beneath which I was eager to place my feet and conclude my journey.

“They called up complaining,” he said.

“Well, I won’t be around long,” I said. “I’ve been walking for 1,700 miles and 136 days. This is my last mile. I’m going to end my trip beneath the bridge up there.”

“Were you that guy on Yahoo News?” he asked.

“Hmm… I don’t think so, but I’ve been interviewed by other places.”

He shook my hand and wished me luck. But less than a minute later, his and another policecar, as well as a large truck (perhaps a Valero security truck), had parked behind me with their lights flashing.

Oh, what now!? I thought.

“Sir,” he said. “I was telling my partner what you were doing, and she wanted a picture with you.”

With much glee, I took pictures with the officers and continued on. Pete from Beaumont was taking photos of me up ahead, and Woody, also a professional photographer, was also positioning himself ahead for shots.

When I got to Pete, who was standing by his car in front of the bridge, two more cops had pulled behind him and asked for his ID.

“The refinery is pissed,” said the policewoman, exasperated.

“Don’t take any more pictures of the refinery,” said the policeman. “They don’t like it.”

It was 4:15 p.m., and I had to get to the Post Office before 5 p.m. so I was eager to get my feet in the water. There was a levee under the bridge that was surrounded by fence and barbed wire, so if I wanted to get my feet in the water, I’d have to cross this quarter-mile-long, unusually steep, definitely sketchy, no-shoulder bridge. Things began to feel a little chaotic. I wasn’t sure if Pete was going to get arrested or a ticket, I was running out of time, and I had this last obstacle in front of me.

“I’m going to try and walk it,” I told Pete, who was still being interrogated by the police. “If it’s too dangerous, maybe I’ll turn back.”

I hopped onto the bridge and walked the narrow 18-inch-wide elevated concrete guard on the left side. I looked at my watch, and realized that I was running out of time, so, between the sense of urgency created by my logistical conundrum and the excitement of ending my journey, I took off on a sprint up the bridge. While running, I looked down upon the elevated grassy levees, then the wide waterway, and finally the gloried, lush wetlands of Sabine Lake, which looked all the more prettier having just passed through Port Arthur’s Hiroshima-ed industrial district. I didn’t care about preserving energy or being in pain tomorrow. This was the end, and I had the freedom to give it my all. So I ran, and I ran hard.

I left the bridge and, saturated in sweat, continued my jog on Pleasure Island, running toward a small mosquito-infested park where Woody and Pete (who didn’t get arrested) were stationed with their cameras. I descended the muddy, eroding bank, took off my boots, and sunk my feet into the water–the final step of the journey.

I had imagined this moment many times on my walk and I had already experienced the emotions that this moment might bring, so I didn’t really need to experience it again. Each time I had imagined the end, I’d come close to tears thinking about all the people I’d met. Ron in Wyoming, Harold and his giant Mormon family in Alberta, the Caswells in Saskatchewan, Patty and Lewis in Montana, Rick and Heidi in Nebraska, Harold and Maralee in Kansas, Dusty and Darcee in Oklahoma, Pete and Beth in Texas, and the hundreds of others, and I would feel this deep sorrowful love for my fellow man, and this anachronistic, but very real, pride for being North American. I’d think about how I came on this journey to learn about pipelines, but how I would learn more about the goodness of mankind.

Oh, and the dear prairie. How I’d think about walking over you, feeling the long grainy tails of your green grass waving against my legs, the cloud mountains, moving mountain chains, sailing across the deep blue sky, the chatter of coyotes, the groans of cattle, the stars, oh the stars. I’d feel melancholic thinking about you, about how I have you yet don’t have you at all. This life is so mortal, so finite, and I wish I could keep coming back to see you every year, forever, and savor your sights and these joys over and over again. Then you’d be mine. But I can’t, and I’ll have to be content with these memories and this sweet sadness–the sadness of having done, but not having the lifetimes to do again.

I’d think about how the Thoreau in me is cynical, critical, misanthropic; at peace in the company of pine needles, but crabby in the company of men. But also about how this trip has brought out the Whitman in me — a lover of all things man and nature — and how sometimes I just want to exuberantly catalogue all the professions of mankind in an epic poem, along with the clatter of our tools and the babble of our speech.

I’d think about America, and about how the history of the place would come to life, and how my very path would be the rolling parchment onto which our history has been scribed. I’d felt the ghost of the Pawnee horseman at my shoulder. I’d seen the arms of the pioneer building his homestead. I’d heard the laughter of the Creole Cowboy. I’d admired the craftsmanship of the pipeliner, and marveled at the genius of the engineer.

When I think of the men and women of North America, I don’t think we need this pipeline. A pipeline is built to send a resource from a place that has a lot of something to a place that doesn’t. But civilization won’t collapse without oil; it’ll collapse without clean water, healthy soil, and a stable climate. What we ultimately need, it seems, is what no pipeline can bring because it’s already here. Walk across America, and view the paths that were once been blazed by hand tool, the wilderness tamed by pluck, the tree roots yanked out by grit, and see, within us all, the deep reservoirs of goodness, the wellsprings of love, and you can’t help but believe that — with our nimble hands, inventive minds, compassionate souls, and a good pair of feet — we can go far.

***

Below, the photos have been taken by myself, Pete Churton (formerly a photographer with the Beaumont Enterprise), and Woody Welch, also a professional photographer, who’s based in New Braunfels, Texas (where I am now). Woody and I will be driving up to Washington D.C. in a few days to take part in the President’s Day anti-Keystone XL rally. You can view Woody’s photography at woodywelchphotography.com.

Triumphantly placing my feet in the Sabine-Neches waterway. It’s here where the tankers from the refineries ship the oil to foreign markets.

(Photo credit: Woody Welch)

The walk to Beaumont.

Pete, his neighbor Jesse, and me.

Walking toward Port Arthur.

Port Arthur refineries.

(Photo credit: Woody Welch)

Several policecars stopped to inquire what I was doing.

My “interrogation.” The officers were actually really nice, as were all the officers I met along my trip. I probably had upwards of 50 encounters, all of which were pleasant except for one in Nebraska.

(Photo credit: Woody Welch)

(Photo credit: Woody Welch)

(Photo credit: Woody Welch)

Port Arthur levee, picture taken from bridge.

Railroads from bridge.

Running along the Martin Luther King Jr. bridge.

(Photo credit: Pete Churton)

Sabine Lake wetlands.

Pleasure Island park.

(Photo credit: Woody Welch)

Placing feet in the Sabine-Neches waterway.

(Photo credit: Woody Welch)

(Photo credit: Pete Churton)

(Photo credit: Pete Churton)

(Photo credit: Pete Churton)

Before.

After.