After serving in the US Army, Jake suddenly finds himself homeless, so he begins walking to different towns in search of work. Although he is unable to find any lasting employment, he soon realizes that walking and sleeping under the stars seems to be helping with his PTSD. During one of the nights while camping in the forest, Jake decides to walk across America just to see what it could do for him. Alone and unsupported, Jake spends the next three years traveling on foot from Tennessee to Delaware, to California, to Florida, to Alaska, back to Florida, and back to California again. This is a true story that details all of his experiences.
Twenty-five years ago, a disillusioned young man set out on a walk across America. This is the book he wrote about that journey -- a classic account of the reawakening of his faith in himself and his country. "I started out searching for myself and my country," Peter Jenkins writes, "and found both." In this timeless classic, Jenkins describes how disillusionment with society in the 1970s drove him out onto the road on a walk across America. His experiences remain as sharp and telling today as they were twenty-five years ago -- from the timeless secrets of life, learned from a mountain-dwelling hermit, to the stir he caused by staying with a black family in North Carolina, to his hours of intense labor in Southern mills. Many, many miles later, he learned lessons about his country and himself that resonate to this day -- and will inspire a new generation to get out, hit the road and explore.
A memoir of one young man’s coming of age on a journey across America--told through the stories of the people of all ages, races, and inclinations he meets along the way. Life is fast, and I’ve found it’s easy to confuse the miraculous for the mundane, so I’m slowing down, way down, in order to give my full presence to the extraordinary that infuses each moment and resides in every one of us. At 23, Andrew Forsthoefel headed out the back door of his home in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, with a backpack, an audio recorder, his copies of Whitman and Rilke, and a sign that read "Walking to Listen." He had just graduated from Middlebury College and was ready to begin his adult life, but he didn’t know how. So he decided to take a cross-country quest for guidance, one where everyone he met would be his guide. In the year that followed, he faced an Appalachian winter and a Mojave summer. He met beasts inside: fear, loneliness, doubt. But he also encountered incredible kindness from strangers. Thousands shared their stories with him, sometimes confiding their prejudices, too. Often he didn’t know how to respond. How to find unity in diversity? How to stay connected, even as fear works to tear us apart? He listened for answers to these questions, and to the existential questions every human must face, and began to find that the answer might be in listening itself. Ultimately, it’s the stories of others living all along the roads of America that carry this journey and sing out in a hopeful, heartfelt book about how a life is made, and how our nation defines itself on the most human level.
"There's a cancer, and it's killing our democracy. A poor man has to sell his soul to get elected. I cry for this country." On February 29, 2000, ninety-year-old Doris “Granny D” Haddock completed her 3,200-mile, fourteen-month walk from Los Angeles to Washington D.C. She walked through 105-degree deserts and blinding blizzards, despite arthritis and emphysema. Along her way, her remarkable speeches — rich with wisdom, love, and political insight — transformed individuals and communities and jump-started a full-blown movement. She became a national heroine. On her journey, Haddock kept a diary — tracking the progress of her walk and recalling events in her life and the insights that have given her. Granny D celebrates an exuberant life of love, activism, and adventure — from writing one-woman feminist plays in the 1930s to stopping nuclear testing near an Eskimo fishing village in 1960 to Haddock’s current crusade. Threaded throughout is the spirit of her beloved hometown of Dublin/Peterborough, New Hampshire — Thornton Wilder’s inspirations for Grovers Croner in Out Town — a quintessentially American center of New England pluck, Yankee ingenuity and can-do attitude. Told in Doris Haddock’s distinct and unforgettable voice, Granny D will move, amuse, and inspire readers of all ages with its clarion message that one person can indeed make a difference.
As seen on The Fine Living Channel's, Radical Sabbaticle TV program. The delightfully refreshing true story of one mans walk across America. The book tells of his adventures along the way, as well as reviews some of the historical sights he passes.
From the New York Times-bestselling author of The Hidden Life of Trees, this guide to awakening your senses and engaging deeply with the forest is the perfect gift for hikers and walkers. “This book will fast-track you into the joys of spending time amongst the trees.”—Tristan Gooley, author of The Lost Art of Reading Nature’s Signs and How to Read Water "You'll be changed after reading this fine and enchanting book.”—Richard Louv, author of Our Wild Calling and Last Child in the Woods When you walk in the woods, do you use all five senses to explore your surroundings? For most of us, the answer is no—but when we do, a walk in the woods can go from pleasant to immersive and restorative. Forest Walking teaches you how to engage with the forest by decoding nature’s signs and awakening to the ancient past and thrilling present of the ecosystem around you. What can you learn by following the spread of a root, by tasting the tip of a branch, by searching out that bitter almond smell? What creatures can be found in a stream if you turn over a rock—and what is the best way to cross a forest stream, anyway? How can you understand a forest’s history by the feel of the path underfoot, the scars on the trees along the trail, or the play of sunlight through the branches? How can we safely explore the forest at night? What activities can we use to engage children with the forest? Throughout Forest Walking, the authors share experiences and observations from visiting forests across North America: from the rainforests and redwoods of the west coast to the towering white pines of the east, and down to the cypress swamps of the south and up to the boreal forests of the north. With Forest Walking, German forester Peter Wohlleben teams up with his longtime editor, Jane Billinghurst, as the two write their first book together, and the result is nothing short of spectacular. Together, they will teach you how to listen to what the forest is saying, no matter where you live or which trees you plan to visit next.
God only knows what possessed Bill Bryson, a reluctant adventurer if ever there was one, to undertake a gruelling hike along the world's longest continuous footpath—The Appalachian Trail. The 2,000-plus-mile trail winds through 14 states, stretching along the east coast of the United States, from Georgia to Maine. It snakes through some of the wildest and most spectacular landscapes in North America, as well as through some of its most poverty-stricken and primitive backwoods areas. With his offbeat sensibility, his eye for the absurd, and his laugh-out-loud sense of humour, Bryson recounts his confrontations with nature at its most uncompromising over his five-month journey. An instant classic, riotously funny, A Walk in the Woods will add a whole new audience to the legions of Bill Bryson fans.
How to Walk Across America is the survival guide for the crazy, courageous few who want (or need) to chuck it all and walk from ocean to ocean. No nonsense. No marketing. Just lessons from the road, from people who have actually walked across America. This is the ultimate primer on mega-long distance hiking, practical advice to keep feet from failing, sanity from disintegrating, and bank accounts from disappearing, no matter how long the hike. Attorney, adventurer, and author Tyler Coulson walked across America in 2011 with his dog, Mabel. Contributor Nate Damm did it in 2011, and contributors John and Kait Seyal did it in 2012, with three therapy dogs. Coulson shares lessons that you can only learn on the road, from common sense to highway secrets. He writes with candor and humor, stripping away all the marketing and glamour of high-tech, high-dollar hiking. What's left is the ultimate first-level guide to the practice of chucking it all and walking out. It pulls no punches: it will scare you, inspire you, and leave you laughing. Tyler Coulson is also the author of BY MEN OR BY THE EARTH.
In 1896, a Norwegian immigrant and mother of eight children named Helga Estby was behind on taxes and the mortgage when she learned that a mysterious sponsor would pay $10,000 to a woman who walked across America. Hoping to win the wager and save her family’s farm, Helga and her teenaged daughter Clara, armed with little more than a compass, red-pepper spray, a revolver, and Clara’s curling iron, set out on foot from Eastern Washington. Their route would pass through 14 states, but they were not allowed to carry more than five dollars each. As they visited Indian reservations, Western boomtowns, remote ranches and local civic leaders, they confronted snowstorms, hunger, thieves and mountain lions with equal aplomb. Their treacherous and inspirational journey to New York challenged contemporary notions of femininity and captured the public imagination. But their trip had such devastating consequences that the Estby women's achievement was blanketed in silence until, nearly a century later, Linda Lawrence Hunt encountered their extraordinary story.
