AMERICAN RAMBLE: A WALK OF MEMORY AND RENEWAL

By Neil King Jr.

Neil King, a national political reporter, and editor for the Wall Street Journal, had often joked about hoping to take a slow, exploratory walk from Washington DC to New York, but thought it a laughable self-indulgence to imagine he could ever set aside the weeks he would need for such a journey.  But when, in his late fifties, he suffered a jolt -- a diagnosis of cancer of the esophagus – he took up planning, hoping, for making such a journey once again, should he recover.

It was in April 2021, after four years of treatment, interrupted by a recurrence and more treatment, that King finally felt ready to set off on his walk. His beautifully written account of his daily experiences draws readers in from the outset to walk with him past the Capitol where a mob had rioted just months before, leaving Washington along the winding shores of Rock Creek. He aimed to make friends by talking with strangers, and in the process to “talk to America, to listen to her, to examine her, to wonder over her, at what we all hoped was the end of one of the roughest patches in our history.” In so doing, King aimed to honor and respect what he saw, agreeing with the poet Mary Oliver’s that “Attention is the beginning of devotion.”

Because it happened that our Esplanade reading group was meeting to discuss this book in April, King’s attention to observing and exploring the coming of spring to plants and trees as he had moved North led us to pay more attention than ever to how spring was unfolding all around us. Day after day, we could follow his daily rambles as we took our own walks and looked out our windows.

We were moved by King’s close attention and effort at understanding the individuals he encountered along the way, scattered as they were along religious and political cultural divides: the auctioneer of tractors convinced Satan was moving into the country, for example, or the children playing baseball at the Farmersville Mennonite School, then singing soaring hymns and thanking him for having come to visit them; or the engineers eagerly guiding him to the top of the vast Edgeboro Landfill in Brunswick, New Jersey; or his reliving the September 11 events at Ground Zero that he had covered as a Wall Street Journal reporter at the time, newly astonished at the terrible toll among those who had rushed in to help.

King had stressed, in the book’s Pre-Amble, his desire to leave behind the noxious chatter of Washington and the tribal feuding on television and computer screens and to care only for the particularities he found along the way. “My aim was to be as footloose at sixty-one as many of us are at twenty, but minus the angst of figuring out who I was to become.” But early in the book it was clear that of course he was still figuring out what he was to become, what to do with his life -- hoping to draw on what he was learning to understand his own life better, however long or short that life would end up being. His walk would truly become, as his subtitle indicates, one of Memory and Renewal.

Sissela Bok