A Walk into America’s History

by Patricia Sanders

One morning in late March, almost exactly two years ago, in a neighborhood in Washington, D.C., a man named Neil King kissed his wife, stepped out the front door of his house, turned right, and kept walking.

And kept walking—for three weeks.

He walked all the way to New York City.

He mostly kept to country roads, walking through landscapes that looked much like they did before so much of America was paved over and built up. He stayed in Airbnbs, cheap motels, and occasionally a bed and breakfast or a private home. He carried a backpack with a few items of clothing and basic camping gear in case he had to rough it.

He passed through the cities of Philadelphia and Princeton, and walked through some smaller communities that have become famous for various reasons, like York, Pennsylvania (home of the peppermint patty), and Grover Mills, New Jersey (alien landing site in Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds). But mostly he visited towns and hamlets you’ve probably never heard of: Reisterstown, Maryland; Farmersville, Pennsylvania; Cranbury, New Jersey.

When he came to large rivers, he traversed them on foot or by boat: the Susquehanna he crossed on a bridge built in 1930, the Delaware in a kayak, the Arthur Kill (dividing New Jersey from Staten Island) in a launch named Peanut, and finally the Hudson on a Boston whaler.

Along the way, he met all sorts of people, from all walks of life and all along the political spectrum. A Mennonite farrier who chats while he shoes a bay. A pair of Korean men playing tennis. Housewives tending their flower gardens. A guy in a MAGA hat who’d voted for Obama and gave King a sack of clementines for the road. Archivists, amateur historians, and war reenactors. Farmers and bartenders, roadside preachers and prophets.

King crossed the Delaware—in that kayak—at the same spot where George Washington did in 1776. He walked among the recreated barracks at Valley Forge, wearing shoes where his toes had started to stick out.

He walked along the trails of the Underground Railroad, trudged over battlefields, and paused in cemeteries to pay his respects.

He crossed the Mason-Dixon line thinking about the forces that have divided the nation since before it even