It had already been a difficult day, without question – what with all the fatigue and the heat and the cars racing past my aching feet and the noise and the dirt and the scowling sadness of fellow brothers & sisters seemingly inundated by the meaningless drone of lives not yet well-lived. And so it […]
I ambled onward thereafter, wondering over Newark’s disconcerting lack of public benches as I did so. And yet the lack of places for residents to simply sit & be was actually the least dismissive thing about those first few miles of this city. For here I encountered a level of abject poverty & palpable despair […]
I make it past the town of Elizabeth, where I am coldly rejected by both a local Dunkin Donuts & Papa John’s Pizza joint – neither of which could muster the decency to even offer a pilgrim a glass of water. And yet though I was deeply saddened by this inexcusable display of cold-heartedness, my […]
I thereafter made it to the outskirts of the town of Linden, where I walked quite easily up to the truly beautiful St. Elizabeth’s Church – a deeply peaceful place where I at first thought I might spend the night. And yet everything was closed up tight by the time I arrived and no one […]
And so it was that walked on into the gathering loom, and then deeper into the darkening night; eventually making it to the 2nd Baptist Church in the town of Rahway, where I limped up to its open front stoop and lay my weary body down for the night … “I have been finding treasures […]
It was another 5am wake up call from life on this day and I rose surprisingly smoothly from the church’s front stoop to begin the day’s walking. Passing by the East Jersey State Prison was a bit disconcerting, and I paused to send thoughts of gentle compassion to the hundreds of inmates there – both […]
Highway 1’s initially wide and smooth shoulder soon morphed into what would pass for my walk’s most common American trail – limp-provoking, litter-strewn, and super-thin rivulets of grass and dirt right next to a surprisingly busy roadway. At times I was given a brief reprieve of a somewhat wide pathway a bit farther from the […]
This proved to be an unusually satisfying stop and a seemingly normal fast food joint (I think this one was a Dunkin Donuts). I was pretty nondiscriminatory when it came to choosing the locales where I asked for water – sometimes it was office buildings, sometimes it was gas stations, and sometimes it was fast […]
The roadway then entered another longer stretch where there were essentially no walk-able shoulders at all, so much so that I ended up walking “against traffic” in the central median for a time. Unsurprisingly, this proved to be not the best of ideas, so I tried the opposite shoulder for awhile as well, which – […]
I eventually made it to the outskirts of the town of Edison, and thankfully left the frenetically crazed thoroughfare in favor of the cooler and much calmer confines of the Skylark Diner. Not wanting to intrude upon the more joyous and carefree ambience inside, I asked for a water to go and then parked myself […]
One of the waitresses at the diner found out the location of the local library and I headed out to find the same – hoping for some cool respite from the heat, and maybe an alternate route to the terrifying (and very hard on the feet) faux-shoulders of Highway 1 … I crossed the highway […]
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