Julie has been taking a virtual walk to Moab, UT, to see her nieces and nephew. John and Ben tagged along. As they passed Smallwander towns, John had a stream of consciousness. Read the origin story.

This post covers May 17 to today, June 27. During the last 5 weeks, I have been distracted by pedestrian concerns and have therefore not been logging our journal. However, that was just enough time to allow our cohort to make its grand entrance into Moab, UT. Moab is a former mining town that has transformed itself into a vacation destination, standing at the gateway to several National Parks (Arches, Dead Horse Point, Canyonlands). You can read the story of Moab in the chapter Dar Williams devotes to it in her book, What I Found in a Thousand Towns. As a fitting punctuation to our 6-month walk, Julie’s Moab family arrived here in Albany for a post-pandemic vacation this week. So, the mission has been accomplished; the circle has been completed. Stay tuned for other virtual trips. We have been considering a walk along the Lewis and Clark expedition trail. Thanks for joining our journey!

Julie is taking a virtual walk to Moab, UT, to see her nieces and nephew. John and Ben are tagging along. As they pass Smallwander towns, John has a stream of consciousness. Read the origin story.

This post is about our journey during the week of May 10. I should have been noting the calendar intervals as we went along. Oh well.  We have been walking for 4.5 months since January. I am very near Moab, in Thompson Springs, UT, and Ben and Julie still have a considerable distance to go. Again, it’s not all their fault, as I sent them on various excursions to visit different Smallwander towns. Sometimes we get lucky when the destinations match up with pop culture. I just saw Nomadland the other night, which is about a woman named Fern, played by Frances McDormand, who lives in her van and travels to various parts of the country, working here and there, sometimes at national parks serving as a park host, sometimes for Amazon in one of their warehouses for the holiday delivery season, and various other places. Her path intersects with other nomads, some of whom have purposely chosen this vagabond lifestyle to escape the grip of ‘normal’ society. That is a long intro to say, for a good part of the movie, Fern works at Wall Drug in Wall, SD. This is where Julie set out from last week. What are the odds? This film, which won Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actress, portrays the openness, loneliness, and freedom of not only Fern’s life, but the West itself.  During this week’s walk, Julie ended up in Sundance, WY, Ben, in Sterling, CO.

Julie is taking a virtual walk to Moab, UT, to see her nieces and nephew. John and Ben are tagging along. As they pass Smallwander towns, John has a stream of consciousness. Read the origin story.

After a week’s worth of walking, Ben has settled into the High Plains near McCook, NE. This place has an interesting story. According to their visitor’s page, back in the 1980s, a couple ‘east coast academics’ had suggested that this area was so depopulated and was going to continue to lose people that the town should be returned to its original prairie state and given back to the buffalo. The re-wilded area would be called Buffalo Commons. The residents were piqued by this suggestion, so they claimed the term as their own and rallied behind a tourism plan that included Buffalo Commons Storytelling Festival. Perhaps as reminder to themselves, they continue to post the original article that prompted the uproar. Nothing like us east coasters writing articles to stir the pot. Meanwhile, Julie made it to Wall, SD, which is the gateway to Badlands National Park. I landed in Fuita, CO, just beyond the Utah border. I’ll ask Julie’s brother to start preparing my room.

Julie is taking a virtual walk to Moab, UT, to see her nieces and nephew. John and Ben are tagging along. As they pass Smallwander towns, John has a stream of consciousness. Read the origin story.

It has been two weeks since my last log. I am seeing now that I have navigated Julie way too far to the north. For that reason, along with the fact that she has had a foot injury, Julie has a ways to go to get to Moab, progressing only a short distance for this posting to Pierre, SD. I, however, with my more direct route, am seeing the end in sight, as I settle down in Georgetown, CO.  It’s a good thing that I know Julie’s brother’s family well, so, they won’t mind me getting there a little early.

Ben made it to Lindsborg, KS, which was near near Abilene, where I landed a couple weeks ago. I’m glad he did, because Abilene showed up in last night’s Turner Classic Movie showing of Red River. It begins just after the civil war with the John Wayne character, Thomas Dunson, establishing a ranch in southern Texas. Within 14 years, he, and his adopted son, the Montgomery Clift character, Matt Garth, has grown the herd to about 10,000 head. Dunson is unable to sell the beef in the cash-strapped south, so, they had to drive them 1,000 miles north to Sedalia, Missouri, or so they thought. After much conflict, Matt and the other cowboys insisted that there was a closer and easier route to take to Abilene, along the newly established Chisholm Trail. The plan hinged on the railroad having been extended to Abilene, and sure enough, it was there.

Julie is taking a virtual walk to Moab, UT, to see her nieces and nephew. John and Ben are tagging along. As they pass Smallwander towns, John has a stream of consciousness. Read the origin story.

It has been three weeks since I posted a dispatch because I have been tied up with moving from North Carolina to Troy, NY. The migration is usually in the other direction, I know. I also know that discussing a physical move on the east coast while simultaneously walking across the US shatters the illusion. Nevertheless, we continue on our virtual trek. All of those steps into and out of the moving van have propelled me to Abiline, KS, the home of the Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum. If you are taking a walk through small town America, this is absolutely something you would stop in on (if it wasn’t closed due to the pandemic). You’ll remember that Eisenhower led the Allied forces on D-Day and later warned us against the military-industrial complex. Ben is following me along I-70, landing in the middle of Missouri in Rocheport, which is on the Missouri River. Meanwhile, Julie is making tremendous strides across the upper Midwest, ending up near Chamberlain, SD, which is, coincidentally, also on the Missouri River. Chamberlain is in the midst of four or five Native American Reservations.

Julie is taking a virtual walk to Moab, UT, to see her nieces and nephew. John and Ben are tagging along. As they pass Smallwander towns, John has a stream of consciousness. Read the origin story.

Julie crossed the Mississippi and arrived at Decorah, Iowa, this week. This town was named after the leader of the Ho Chunk Native American tribe, who was an ally of the US in the war against the Black Hawks in 1832. Future President Abe Lincoln served in that war, but he did not see combat. This area became a major destination for Norwegian immigrants. It has a Norwegian-American museum, which is the largest museum in the US devoted to a single immigrant group. Decorah also hosts Nordic Fest, which is scheduled to happen this July 22. John and Ben converged this week in Nashville, Indiana.

Julie is taking a virtual walk to Moab, UT, to see her nieces and nephew. John and Ben are tagging along. As they pass Smallwander towns, John has a stream of consciousness. Read the origin story.

Julie began this week taking a rather quick shortcut across Lake Michigan with the Lake Express Ferry. She has many friends in Michigan and Wisconsin, but, because of her firmness of mind, she moved too quickly to give them a shout-out while she raced to Mt. Horeb, WI, this week. Mt. Horeb is an enclave of Norwegian immigrants. One of their attractions is a trail of carved trolls. Meanwhile, neither Ben nor I know anyone in this part of the country, so, we are making haste even more so. Ben has been complaining of calf pain, in both calves, with his strenuous walking schedule. His quickened pace has brought him to Tipp City, OH, this week, which I passed through a couple weeks ago. I told Ben to seek medical attention about his calves, but he says the pain subsided and was only in one calf in the latter part of the week. We have no sag wagon for this trip. I settled in Jeffersonville, IN, this week.

Julie is taking a virtual walk to Moab, UT, to see her nieces and nephew. John and Ben are tagging along. As they pass Smallwander towns, John has a stream of consciousness. Read the origin story.

Although we are visiting Smallwander towns wherever possible on this jaunt across the States, Ben insisted on passing through Pittsburgh. I bent the rules to allow this because I spent four years growing up in a Pittsburgh suburb. We moved there when I was 6, from Philadelphia. Our hilly Brentwood neighborhood improved our skills for sports. Bike riding was a very aerobic activity. Playing catch in the road demanded accuracy because if you missed the ball, it rolled down the street and down one of the storm drains. Pittsburgh is now a happening place, but back in the mid-70s, we had to boil the water, which did not taste so great. I should say that living there in the era of the Steeler’s first Super Bowl championships was quite exhilarating as a 7- and 8-year-old, which was a major pillar for my self-esteem when I later moved to Albany.

This week, Julie is about to cross Lake Michigan in Muskegon, John and Ben almost made it to the Smallwander Ohio towns of Oxford, and Cambridge.

Looking back on the routes Julie, Ben, and I have been taking, you might say that they were determined thousands of years ago by their physical geography. During the beginning of our trip, Julie and I traveled through the Mohawk Valley of New York, which separates the Adirondack and Catskill mountain ranges. The valley was created by an enormous amount of rushing water that melted from retreating glaciers after the last ice age, about 10,000 years ago. At the bottom of the valley now lies the Mohawk River. The Mohawk, named after the Native American tribe, has always been an important transportation route because it very nearly connected east coast to the interior of the country by way of the Great Lakes. That ‘very nearly’ part vexed a lot of our founding fathers, including George Washington, who was one of many who spoke of the need to build a canal to extend the Mohawk to Lake Erie. Nevertheless, Thomas Jefferson passed on federally funding the project in 1800.

What became known as the Erie Canal was eventually built in 1825, after 8 years of work by Irish laborers. New York Governor Dewitt Clinton used 7 million dollars of state funding to pay for it. Goods could now be shipped from New York via the Hudson to Albany, where they would make a 90-degree left turn into the mouth of the Mohawk and head west. The canal is what made NYC so wealthy and became the reason New York is called the Empire State, the original gateway to the rest of the country. There was one problem though– Cohoes Falls on the Mohawk slowed the fully water-borne passage. The problem had been surmounted with a series of locks along the canal. However, some passengers did not want to wait while their cargo made its way through the locks. Therefore, in the early years of the canal, a stage coach was set up between Albany and Schenectady for travelers who were content with letting their luggage catch up with them later.

That stage line eventually gave way to the Albany-Schenectady railroad in 1831, the first railroad in New York. The line ran through the Pine Bush area, a unique habitat with a large density of pine trees. In fact, the word ‘Schenectady’ is derived from the Mohawk phrase schau-naugh-ta-da, which means ‘across the pine plains’ (and is the setting for the Ryan Gosling movie Place beyond the Pines). The soil in this 19-mile stretch is sandy, sediment left from the glaciers that carved out the Mohawk Valley. Before the glacier water receded, there was a lake here, called Lake Albany by geologists. That flatness of the old lake bed made it ideal for the rail line. Eventually, the rail line also went away, making way for the age of the automobile. A road called Central Avenue took its place. I tell you all this because I live about a mile from Central Avenue, midway between Albany and Schenectady in what is now known as the Town of Colonie. Central Avenue might now seem like a placeless and nondescript commercial corridor, but if you look into its history, it played a key role in the development of the United States.

As far as Ben’s route, I’ll have much to say about that in my next post. Spoiler alert: I spent part of my childhood in Pittsburgh.

Julie still manages to outpace us as she ventures into Michigan. This week, she is about 14 miles short of the Smallwander town of Tecumseh. Tecumseh was named after a Shawnee war chief who resisted settlers coming into the Northwest Territory. During the War of 1812, Tecumseh sides with the British but is killed in battle. His death marks the beginning of Native American removal from the territory. To continue with my habit of free association, the Union Civil War General, William Tecumseh Sherman, was named after the chief by his Ohioan father. So, Tecumseh is venerated by later generations born from the settlers who swept through the land and disposessed its first inhabitants. John ventured just outside of Mansfield, OH, which is known as the ‘Fun Center of Ohio’ for reasons yet to be explored. Ben’s final destination was New Bethlehem, PA, home to a Peanut Butter Festival because of its Smucker’s factory. Interestingly, according to Wikipedia, Smucker’s does not sponsor the festival. I see an opportunity here.