Just Keep Walking That Way

Hitchhiking in Texas, groomed by grandmas, and shark tooth city

May 19, 2024

Each week, a menu of sorts, around a revolving theme. This week: walking to the ends of the earth, or at least the edge of my neighborhood.

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Ingredient List

🎵 : Honestly, still listening to last week’s playlist, but also weirdly into Chappell Roan’s “The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess.” Sugary power pop, but there’s some really good songwriting skills underneath.

📖 : I need to bookmark more things I read because I consume way too much then forget about it a day later. Probably because I consume too much. Currently reading “To The Gorge,” by Emily Halnon, a “narrative of love and loss, grief and joy, as one woman embarks on a quest for a fastest known time on the Pacific Crest Trail.”

🎧 : My new new favorite podcast is “Otherworld,” which is basically tales of the supernatural, told in first person from the individuals who experienced them. I can’t stop thinking of the multi-episode “Chicken Whackers,” if for no other reason than it’s centered a lot around hitchhiking, something which I had already written about in this week’s newsletter and was closely aligned. Anyway, it’s super bizarre and interesting.

This Past Week

Felt like a weird and disjointed week as the kids had off school for election day on Tuesday and for no reason on Friday. Just let this school year die already. Hard to get into a rhythm. Also, it’s been raining off and on for what seems like the last two weeks. Got in a decent amount of running, including a 10-mile long run on Saturday up through Herring Run Park. Capped it off by running the Gunpowder 5-Miler trail race this morning with my 8-year-old; it was super muddy with a good amount of hills but he beat his time from last year by five minutes. He was rewarded with Dunkin’ Donuts and Pokémon cards.

A few other things I wrote and/or edited this week, or recorded:

“Best Race Day Shoes for Running a Marathon” for Believe in the Run
The Drop Podcast E259 | Nike Pegasus 41, Running Trends, Desert Island Food

I also contribute to The Drop, a weekly email from Believe in the Run, where I round-up running news and stories in a generally sarcastic manner. You can subscribe here.

And now, onto the dinner service.

Course 1

A Word of Gratitude: Pear Blossoms

Every morning, I walk my kids to school. We live on the edge of the zone, so it’s about a mile away and it is indeed uphill both ways, ensuring they’ll have a tale of resilience to tell their grandkids someday.

Some days we ride our bikes there, but most days we go by foot. Summer, spring, winter, and fall, we make the 25-minute trek through it all.

What began as a means to an end has now become one of my favorite things in life. Because as much as I love adventure, new places, and random encounters, I also love routine. And if you can include some randomness inside that routine, then all the better. You’d be surprised how much variance can occur on the same walk through a city every day.

Things are always changing and moving. Seasons, for one. The bloom of pear and cherry blossoms in the spring, the falling of the same leaves in autumn. There’s one tree that hangs super low. In the spring, I shake the branch, heavy with blossoms, over their heads as they laugh and try to catch them. In the summer, they jump to touch the leaves. In the winter, I shower the snow off the branch on top of their heads. In the fall, I wait for them to walk under and shake the rain drops off onto their heads. Classic dad prank.

Knowing that someday they won’t care about these things, that we’ll pass that same tree and it will just be a tree.

There’s plenty of games, which is my youngest son’s favorite thing. Counting cats versus dogs, bouncing a tennis ball, or guess the animal (a variation on twenty questions that’s actually endless). Mysteries to solve. A girl who lost her green hat, the sudden appearance of rubber bands all over the neighborhood. Finding things is a given. Dog tags, loose change, disc golf disc, a brand new pair of Yves Saint Laurent sunglasses.

Of course, there’s the people we pass. Miss Brenda opening her hair salon, whom the kids say ‘hello’ to every morning. The lady pushing the wagon with her kid in it, a walking clock who’s always at the same place on the same block if we’re on time. Walks back with another parent, having a nice conversation on the way home.

There are no phones, just us talking. Sometimes fighting, sometimes me yelling at them to knock it off. Hey, I won the #1 Dad award last year, I have a couple mulligans in my pocket.

Last week, my 5-year-old bought a shark tooth necklace at the National Aquarium. He was super excited to wear it to school on Monday, but somewhere on our walk the shark tooth came off the necklace and he arrived at school as a far less intimidating kindergartener. Sadness levels were high. The kids had off school the next day, but I told him we’d look for it on our walk to school the following morning, knowing there was little chance we’d find it. Block after block, our three sets of eyes scanned the ground. Street after street, nothing.

“Sorry, bud,” I said to him as we approached the crosswalk to their school. “Maybe it got swept up in yesterday’s rainstorm and returned to its home in the ocean. I promise we’ll find one when we’re in Florida this summer.”

The crosswalk signal changed, and we were just about to enter the street, when I heard him exclaim: “I found it, I found it!” No way. I looked down and sure enough, in his little palm was a white shark tooth with a bent wire frame and blue bead. Honestly, I couldn’t believe it. It seemed so impossible, but sure enough, he found his shark tooth in the busiest crosswalk in Canton, two days after it went missing. The smile on his face was his whole face.

“That’s why they call me Eagle Eye,” he said, the trail name we gave him on account of his proclivity for spotting things in nature.

Like father, like son– losing things, finding things, making a walk to school the most exciting part of the day.

And for that, I am grateful.

Course 2

Appetizer: Champagne & Coca

For most of my life, I was a sitter. Not of houses or babies, just a person whose mission most days was finding the easiest route from sitting in one place to resting in another. I was plenty active when games were involved– bouncing a ball against a wall, throwing a ball at my sister, dodging a ball from my friend during a backyard game of American Gladiators. If it weren’t for spheres, I’d still be in my crib. But I mostly lived my life by Willy Wonka’s line of reasoning for convincing visitors to jump on a terror ride through a chocolate tunnel: “If the good lord had intended us to walk, he wouldn’t have invented roller skates.”

Or cars. Or drive-thrus. Or horizontal escalators.

One of my best friends in high school (and still good friend today), Ethan, was the opposite of all of this. I don’t know if it was genetic or just annoying, but either way, the guy walked at speeds that implied a purpose and determination that no teenager should ever have. We would have nowhere to go, maybe just to another ride at Hersheypark, yet it was treated as a life-saving emergency.

He was a racewalker without knowing it, and if he were born in the late 1800s, he maybe could’ve been the most popular athlete on earth. That’s because at that time, pedestrianism was all the craze, a phrase that sounds so absurd in our era of Door Dash and one wheels, that it almost had to have been a half-step in the evolutionary chain.

A sport that drew Swiftie type crowds, pedestrianism was literally just endurance events of walking. According to the author of “Pedestrianism” (creative title), the sport arose out of the mass migration to cities, especially in the U.S. Already popular in Great Britain, it made its way across the pond, where feats of endurance walking became all the rage. Madison Square Garden in its earliest form would sell out. Huge wagers were placed on the competitors who would cover 600 miles in six days (they only stopped because of Sundays)– walking around a dirt circle in New York City. Match fixing was refined, which would eventually carry over into all areas of sport. Participants were even found to be doping, as some chewed on coca leaves to keep up endurance levels. To stay hydrated, they drank champagne. Stadium sellouts, online wagers, doping– it’s everything that still exists in the modern day Olympics, we just drink champagne afterwards now. More proof that nothing changes except the calendar.

All that to say, walking was cool. It was one of the first Olympic sports, and still continues to this day, where racewalkers routinely finish faster than most marathon runners.

From there, it was all downhill. Like most of society’s descent into listlessness, you can blame it on cars. Trolley tracks and world class transportation were replaced by individual carriages with engines. Then everything was built around those.

Now, it seems like a Lewis and Clark side quest just to go inside a restaurant to order food. You expect me to park fifty feet away and open an entire door, then repeat the process two minutes later with food in my hand? The modern day Louisiana Purchase is just a bag of Popeye’s.

I really want to dive into school pickup lines, but I’m afraid I’ll never resurface for air.

Despite all this, walking has seen a resurgence in recent years. Not so much racewalking, which still is a niche culture, but the general act of bipedal moving. Step counters and their step goals had a say in this, Apple Watch rings have surely helped as well. However, for some, the act of slowing down has become an almost meditative response to the freneticism all around us.

Personally, I’ve come around as well. I don’t know if it started with moving to a city, or whether it was a way to keep moving while marathon training. All I know is that I love it now. Walking is my favorite. It’s a great way to see things you didn’t know were there. A bird nest in the tree, a penny on the ground, a neighbor planting flowers.

I have few rules in life, but here are two: never use a drive-thru (honestly, it’s usually faster to go inside these days, because nobody does). The other is, never walk fast unless you’re late for something. Because if you do, you’re missing out on the world around you. And you look like a weirdo.

Course 3

The Main: Mesquite Smoke With Hints of Pine

I swear, I’ll stop writing about Texas one of these weeks, but at least this story has a happier ending than getting pepper sprayed by the Dallas PD.

Again, we were on tour in August, a time in Texas where heat doesn’t sleep. I learned this when I stood for two minutes at a kitchen sink one morning, waiting for the tap water to get past lukewarm.

“Oh, that doesn’t ever get cold,” said the person we were staying with. “The ground is too hot.”

I don’t remember where we were driving, but once we were in Texas, it was generally east to Arkansas or north to Oklahoma. I can guarantee it was a four-to-six-to-twelve hour drive, as everything out west is. We were on a four-lane state road, shirtless and lying on sleeping bags on the floor of our tour van, a metal box with air vents only in the front. Meaning, the A/C only reached the driver and passenger seats. It was one of those “try to keep cool by staying still” type of situations.

The road was a straight line with nothing but mesquite and scrub brush and tumbleweeds all around, the entire landscape bleaching out under the summer sun. I half-expected Bugs Bunny to pop up with a cattle skull on his head.

At some point, our van started having power problems. Which was more than a mechanical problem, because “between towns” in Texas means a different thing than between towns on the East Coast. Eventually, like everything else around us, the van gave up and we rolled to a stop on the shoulder of the road. Fortunately, we did have cell phone reception and were able to contact a towing company.

An hour later, they showed up. Assessments were exchanged, probably something like “Yeah, it’s gotta be the thermoregulator, she’s been put through the ol’ wood chipper over the past few days.” We dropped our trailer off the hitch, the operator loaded our van onto the flatbed, and then he told us to get in his truck.

“I can only take two of y’all with me though,” he said. “I got two spots in the truck, but we can’t let anyone else ride in a vehicle if it’s being towed.” This was a problem since there were four of us. The repair shop was 23 miles away.

The only option was for the two of us to wait there for an indeterminate amount of time. Well, not the only option. There was always hitchhiking.

I had never actually hitchhiked before, though I had picked a couple of them in my day. One time I was driving down to visit Kimi when we were first dating, picked up a guy on the on ramp, and drove an hour and a half with him in the passenger seat before letting him out in Timonium. Honestly, he was pretty cool, so I figured that little bit of goodwill might boomerang itself back to me and Luke if we started walking down a Texas highway.

Before the tow truck took off, I grabbed a Sharpie out of the cash box, the one used to ruin kids’ t-shirts who asked a bunch of bums to sign it. If we were gonna hitchhike, we needed a sign. We had nothing to draw on, but we had faith that the good Lord would provide. We really were leaning into the whole “ask and you shall receive thing,” because five minutes later we were standing on the side of the road, the tow truck disappearing into the distance, and the sun overhead on a 90-degree day. Luke and myself, two guys in cut-off jorts with long hair, already dirty, already sweating, already looking like a “Build Your Own Truck Stop Killer” or “Baby’s First Texas Chainsaw Massacre Victim” base set. Either way, we were ready to convince the world that we were two upstanding gentlemen just looking to ride in the backseat of your car through the desolate desert.

And then we were walking.

I honestly don’t even know if we had any water with us, that’s how sure we were that we would get picked up. Our confidence confuses me, even now. Again, let me reiterate– I had no idea how hitchhiking worked. I had never hitched a ride myself. But I respected the craft. To have that confidence, that faith in other human beings, that you– a person so bereft of financial and social means that you’ve resigned yourself to sticking your thumb up at random cars– can get a ride to the place you need to go. Sometimes across an entire country! It’s an art form, and I wanted to paint with that brush.

We walked and talked and sweated and eventually found a cardboard shell of a beer case, the former home of a Lone Star crustacean family, now scattered on the shoulder to fade in the sun. On the box, we wrote an SOS, a plea to the good citizens of Texas to open their doors to us: IT’S SO HOT.

Every car that passed, we’d turn around and hold up that sign, showing them that we could indeed write a weather report for the current afternoon. It wasn’t enough to convince them, probably because it was the equivalent of hitchhiking in San Diego and holding a sign that said: “THE WEATHER IS PERFECT.” Eventually, after two miles, we did the math and realized we weren’t going to get there until late at night, a fact that previously eluded us. But there was nothing else to do except keep walking.

And then, an hour later, someone stopped. Was it a mirage, a fever dream, a cruel joke on these lonesome travelers? It was not. It was a real life woman in a four-door sedan, in her mid-fifties with a social IQ that was clearly far below the remedial line.

“Where you boys headed?” she asked, a surefire sign she was a killer. We told her our destination and she said she was heading right through there and that she could take us the whole way.

I almost wanted to tell her: “Stop, you shouldn’t be doing this. Guys that look like us on the side of the road should not be trusted. Do you have a cousin or brother you can call?” But we were hot, and tired, and had no idea when another foolhardy person would cross our paths. So of course we accepted the ride.

“You just looked so young, I couldn’t bear to see you walking that road out there in the heat,” she said. Again, I wanted to say, “That is still not a valid reason to pick up two random guys in the middle of nowhere.” I held my tongue, because there was a 90% chance she thought we were girls at first.

Luke sat in the front seat, I sat in the rear passenger seat. Again, lady– you should not be doing this! Of course, I couldn’t tell her that; giving her advice out loud in that situation would put us all in an awkward situation, so instead I just had to question her character and judgment for the rest of the ride.

Where do these people come from? Apparently, the Piney Woods, an area in East Texas with– you’re never gonna believe this– pine trees. We learned all about it during our 30-minute drive. We also learned about her entire extended family, her job, her upbringing, the history of the state of Texas and all its geography, and general observations of life. And on and on, with no end in sight.

Let me remind you that she was driving me– the same person who is friends with no fewer than three former Uber drivers on Facebook– in the backseat. If you recall from my previous post (Everyone You Meet), I thrive on engagement with random strangers.

And yet, I was about to pull the ripcord and tumbleweed myself out of the car. I almost told her “right here is fine,” as if I were trying to save fifty cents on the free fare, and “right here” being the same desolate shoulder we started on ten miles before. If we had to start over, would it really be so bad? We did it once, we could do it again.

Alas, we stuck with our savior.

We reached our destination, she dropped us off and we thanked her. We probably gave her a copy of our latest album, our currency of gratitude at the time, much to the chagrin of anyone who helped us. Our van was fixed, we went back and grabbed the trailer, and then we were off to Arkansas. Over the course of the next few years, we’d break down plenty of times, but we were always close enough to our destination that we could get a ride from a friend or a contact nearby.

Never again would we hitch a ride with a serial killer, who talked us to death with her tales of Texas.

Course 4

Dessert: Sticky Syrup

For a long period in my life, a decade spanning from the beginning of college to the end of my band days, I worked at a Holiday Inn in Grantville, Pennsylvania. It’s likely a place you’ve never heard of, until maybe the last decade since a Hollywood Casino went in with an outdoor venue that now draws national acts.

It sits next to Interstate 81 in the countryside outside of Hershey, at the foot of the Blue Mountains. I worked there because it was a) super close to my parents’ house and b) they pretty much let me leave whenever and come back whenever, so I could basically peace out for a month and come back for a month and still have work. Rinse and repeat.

There are plenty of stories to share from my time there, but there’s one moment that always comes back to me, even now.

Things in the band were just okay. We were playing music, we were having fun, but we were broke as hell. Like, there were actual times when I came back from tour and emptied out my change jar just to get gas, and it wasn’t a whole tank. This was after I had moved out of my parents’ house, and while I had super cheap rent, it was still shoestring city on my balance sheet.

I worked in the restaurant there, and while I usually waited tables, I sometimes had to pick up whatever shifts I could find. Which meant I’d sometimes have to work as the restaurant host on the morning shift, a slot that had a 5:30 start.

The morning shift was a wild place, mostly because all the servers were middle-to-older-aged women, industry lifers who would sexually harass you the entire shift, and I mean that literally. It was incredible to watch a high schooler come in for his first busboy shift and have his ass smacked within the first hour, for no reason whatsoever other than he was standing with his back towards them.

Pam, a 65-to-80-year-old woman who– thanks to a lifetime diet of Virginia Slims– looked like a mix between the dry bones turtles in Koopa’s castle and the cryptkeeper, was the most perverted of them all. This was Pam in a nutshell:

One time, while standing in the server area, she told me she had a joke for me. I don’t think I had the choice of turning it down.

Standing behind me, she put her right arm under my armpit, then wrapped it up and around and grabbed the back of my neck with her hand.

“This is a half nelson,” she said.

Then she did the same with her other arm, clasping the fingers of both hands behind my neck. “This is a full nelson,” she said.

“And this is a Father Nelson,” she said, as she repeatedly dry humped me from behind, laughing hysterically with what breath she still could manage through her tar-ladled lungs.

So that was kind of the general vibe each morning.

The buffet runner, Jimmy, was a guy who looked like he never left 1988 and was hardwired with one of those anger light switches that went off on a random timer, whenever the cocaine decided it was ready. He lived in the trailer park across the street and was fired and/or quit about every other month but managed to keep coming back, mainly because nobody wanted any of the jobs he did. With seven kids to five different women and just as many judgments against him, he legitimately worked 70 hour weeks with most of that going to child support.

Honestly, they were kind of a vibe, especially the women. I genuinely loved them because they were completely insane. It was just the job that got me down, which was part of a whole ecosystem of grinding away.

I just remember this one morning, walking into work in the deadest part of winter. Obviously we were between tours, and it was a bit of a ways into the band years, so the excitement was stalling out. Life was still fun, but there was a routine, and it wasn’t always great.

It was the middle of February, which– back along the mountains of south central PA– means that it’s as dead as it’s gonna be. Not much moves, frozen and suspended and waiting for spring. I had probably stayed up til midnight or later drinking, so I had about three hours of sleep and a whole shift ahead of me. For some stupid reason, a new rule had just gone into place where all the employees had to park in the upper lot of the hotel, which was a couple hundred yards from the back entrance. There was no logical reason for this. The place survived on Hershey tourists, and in the wintertime we were a few flurries away from becoming The Shining. The entire parking lot was desolate. Nevertheless, I parked my car at the top of the hill and began the walk in.

It was still completely dark outside and the cold grabbed onto whatever part of me it could the moment I stepped out of the car. Whatever H&M jacket I had on was doing nothing to alleviate it. I had a whole shift of cheap coffee, fake smiles, and sticky syrup ahead of me. I was just tired. From the shift before me, from the night before, and probably the year before all of it. It was all coming down on me on that short walk.

I just remember thinking, “Please God, let this be worth it.”

Because I knew there was more to me, to what I had, but I couldn’t see a way out at the moment. It had to be the band, it just had to be, and I was totally willing to sacrifice all this for that. It wasn’t, of course. I worked that job for another couple years, was humiliated by horrible customers, missed every holiday to make extra money, sat beside dumpsters on cig breaks with the cooks and bitched about work every chance I got. Never got rich or above the poverty line for any of it, just a whole savings account full of dashed dreams and student loan deferment fees.

I still don’t know how it was all worth it, or to what end it all achieved, but it was a stepping stone to here, so I just accept it.

But you know what? It was all worth it. Because you can’t eat a kid’s chicken tender meal with wine in a to-go cup or get groomed by a grandma when you’re sitting behind a corporate desk at some boring office job.

End of Menu

Thank you for dining with me this evening, I hope the service was acceptable. Tips (whether monetary or recommendations to others) are appreciated, but not expected.

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