Travelling Hero #2

Earlier, in my ‘Dream Almost Thwarted’ article, I mentioned the young man who rode his bicycle to Oklahoma from San Antonio. This is not the only person I have admired for his travels.

In April, 1977, just one month before graduating from high school, my family received their April issue of National Geographic, and in it, a captivating story of Peter Jenkins in ‘A Walk Across America’.

In 1973, Peter was a college student in upper  NY, and sick of the Vietnam War, sick of the government, sick of everything, and planning to leave America and never come back. However, a man at his college challenged him to not ‘chunk’ it until he sees it, America, that is.

So, in Oct 1973, Peter and his Alaskan Malamute dog, Cooper, set out to walk from NY to the gulf coast in four months. Then, his plans were to leave America and never come back.

About two and a half years later, Peter, without Cooper, (Cooper had died while they were in a hippie community in middle Tenn.) stumbled in to New Orleans, where he writes the first of two National Geographic articles. While there writing, and working on an offshore oil rig to earn money for the rest of his trip, he meets Barbara, a prim and proper Missourian belle who had never slept outside one night in her life.

Peter and Barbara  fall in love and get married and leave New Orleans for the West Coast. So,  5 years and 4 months after Peter leaves NY, the two of them (three of them, she’s pregnant now) walk into the Pacific Ocean in Oregon. By then, Peter had fallen in love with America, and her people, and had no desire to leave full-time.

Along the way, Peter meets an Appalachian mountain man, stuck away in a cabin for years without running water or electricity. He spends 5 months in a single-wide trailer with a black family while working in a lumber mill. He spends about 6 weeks in the commune where Cooper dies, figuring out that communal life is not for him. He meets a wheelchair bound governor in Alabama. He met a man who spent several summers as a teenager during the Great Depression in a cabin in the swamps south of New Orleans killing alligators by flashlight at night. He spent a few months in Dallas working in a Mexican Food Restaurant. Instead of going to a ‘pot’ party in Mobile, he turns his life over to Jesus while attending an evangelical crusade he saw advertised on billboards. They spent a bone chilling winter in a small cabin in Colorado, writing the first of two books about the journey. Peter almost lost his new bride just weeks before the end of the trip when Barbara was lifted off the highway by a crazy, speeding car.

So, there are many hundreds of other stories telling of this almost 5 1/2 year trip. The second NG article came out in August 1979. The two books are Walk Across America, and The Walk West. Other books of Peter’s and Barbara’s travels include,  Journey into China (1982), The Tennessee Sampler (1985), Across China (1986) The Road Unseen (1987), Close Friends (1989), Along the Edge of America (1995), The Untamed Coast (1995), and Looking for Alaska (2001)

Though I have not read all of these, I have read the first two,  several times. Twice, about 5 years apart, I read both books one or two pages at a time to my children, two age groups at a time, my older two and then my younger three. So, as an aspiring walking traveler, I recommend all of you seeking out these books and articles, possibly online, and maybe your local library.

Stay tuned, I have two more heroes.