Why I read travel (journey, adventure, pilgrimage...)

Walking to Listen:
4,000 Miles Across America, One Story at a Time

by Andrew Forsthoefel


There's everything good to say about this book. Most admirable: the way he shifts seamlessly between his own inner life and that of the people he's listening to during his walk across the country. He's honest about his boredom, apprehension, fear--existential and physical. Climbing out of Death Valley--will I die out here? Crossing the Navajo reservation--will people revile me because I don't belong? Walking into a barbershop in Selma, Alabama--will black people talk to me?

He talks frankly about the envy he feels for couples in love and people who've found their belonging place. He questions himself--am I really so different from Jeffrey Daumer? He asked the same questions as I did--but he decided to kill people, me to walk and listen to people. He meets a few oddballs along the way, but more often good-hearted, generous and caring people. People take him in and he reciprocates--

[Leaving a Navajo home]

I stayed with the family for several days, and it was only right before I left that I was convinced Grandma didn't resent me. I gave her one of my vogesite pebbles as an offering of gratitude.
"Thank you, my son," she said in English.
Later, Melissa texted me and said that Grandma had cried when I left. I'd been a bit choked up myself. The family compound had become a kind of home, like Marian and Herb Furman's Homeplace in Alabama, and I didn't want to leave, but at the same time I couldn't stay. I spent the whole day walking in that contradiction.              

Here's the beginning of one of the most gorgeous, puzzling, head-scratching passages of all. I can only quote a little,

Walking in the desert of Arizona emptied me, a simple blankness impossible to describe using words, which fill rather than empty. The heat melted tons of bullshit from my mind. The dry drained the swamps inside. The sky seemed to lend its own expanse for the unfolding of my own....

I hope that makes you want to read the rest--its gets better. I want to read this again; wish I'd bought it on Kindle. Or Audible. It's narrated by the author.  Above all, his writing is enchanting. Even when bad things are happening, you can't stop wanting to read on.