I’m a walker, not a hiker, though my preference for walking over hiking hasn’t prevented me from admiring Sam Tidwell, who went on a long road trip, solo, soon after his 21st birthday and who is now a teacher in a California classroom and embarked on yet another journey into the unknown. Tidwell’s students (97% Latinos, 60% English learners) at Mary Chapa Academy—a public school in Greenfield (population 7,000)—know their thirty-year-old-teacher as “Mr. Tidwell.” They also know that after he graduated from Lewis and Clark College he went on the road for a year and racked up 5,200 miles. Unlike the Latino parents of his students, who came to the US from Mexico and Central America, Tidwell wasn’t looking for work, running from a firing squad or escaping a bleak life without a future.
But like many hip, cross continental travelers, he was inspired—“fed” he calls it—by Jack Kerouac's iconic novel about Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty, two hipsters who roar across the country by car, barely stopping for food and gas, though they drove to bebop and carouse with friends in Denver and elsewhere. Tidwell first read Kerouac’s On the Road when he was a college student. He was “swept away,” he says, by the author’s invocation “to break boundaries and seek adventures.” He reread the novel on the long-distance hike that took him off the beaten track. Still, the more he traveled, the less appealing the novel. Other millennials have said much the same thing. On the Road doesn’t punch the wallop it once did. Indeed, Tidwell began to find inspiration in the pages of his own journey, and in the faces and the lives of the people—most of them strangers—who extended, he says, “great kindness.”
“I was a college grad and didn't know what I wanted to do,” he tells me. “I grew up sheltered and privileged. I wanted to see America and learn its essentials.”
Unlike Kerouac—whose picaresque novel, is a lament for the end of the road and the end of America—Tidwell made his secular pilgrimage into a quest for the wellsprings of “grace, fortitude, perseverance and resilience.” While he saw great darkness, he also saw great light. “Nihilism is the enemy,” he says. “I want people to defy it.”
Kerouac traveled across the country mostly by car and usually as a passenger, and not as a driver. Tidwell walked across the US with poles, a backpack, a phone, a tent, water and food. Henry David Thoreau might have called what he did, “sauntering.”
Tidwell was 21 and 22 years old. His slow, steady journey began in California on November 1, 2013. It ended on November 1, 2014. Nearly a decade later, he’s still processing what might be called an epic chapter in his life that was filled with excitement and also with what he calls “empty time” when he reflected at the end of the day on the distance he had traveled. Mostly, Tidwell walked alone, though for stretches, friends joined him and shared the kind of camaraderie that Walt Whitman celebrates in “Song of the Open Road,” in which he extols his “great Companions,” and explains “I carry them, men and women, I carry them with me wherever I go.”
Tidwell says he might have ended his trek before the calendar read November 1, 2014, but he aimed for the symmetry that a journey can provide: beginning, middle and ending. Along the way, he wrote copiously in his journal, describing what he saw and heard and how he felt. At one point, he looked back and explained, “I didn't feel special at all and I think it's because I could see how all this walking was one step on the way to being the person I wish to be.”
Tidwell also made short films; by the end of the trek he had hundreds of them, plus hundreds of pages in his journals, which I read and which brought his journey into focus. I was there, albeit vicariously, and doing what I never would have done myself. In the summer of '74, I drove across the US with my then girlfriend, Maisie, and our dog Lilly. Once was enough for me.
Tidwell’s journals read like a series of mirrors carried along hundreds and hundreds of miles of rural roads, urban streets, super highways and unpaved paths and trails, including parts of the famous 2,200-mile Appalachian Trail. His journey took him away from Greenfield, California, across the desert, through the Deep South and to New York City where family and friends greeted him.
“I wasn't the first twenty-something-year-old to walk across the country, and I won’t be the last,” Tidwell tells me. He’s right. From 1973 to 1979, a college graduate named Peter Jenkins journeyed from New York to Oregon, and wrote about his experiences in A Walk Across America, which became a bestseller. Jenkins made walking and driving great distances a profession. He has ten road books to his name. Tidwell was strictly an amateur who walked for the love of walking and not to make a career of it. He was the only person in his cohort of college friends (all of them millennials) who didn’t buy a house and start a career, but rather he pulled up stakes, left home and walked for a year. It’s an uncommon experience in any generation, including Henry David Thoreau’s. No one, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, his Transcendental friend, joined Thoreau when he explored his neck of the woods in and around Concord, Massachusetts and wrote about it in the essay “Walking,” an American classic.
Tidwell visited historical landmarks, albeit not by design, but by accident. “Sometimes famous places, like where Jefferson Davis and Ulysses S. Grant met to end the Civil War, and sometimes obscure sites of some unknown person's birthday,” he says. In the South, with its echoes of William Faulkner, he noticed the power of a family name built up over years and then destroyed in a flash. “I saw that society will slam you, like an accusatory mob kind of thing,” he says.
In Arizona, he met John, a homeless man struggling with addiction, who walked with him from Phoenix to Las Cruces, New Mexico where he decided to go into rehab. “John saved himself,” Tidwell tells me.
Tidwell also saved himself, not from an addiction but from a predictable middle class California way of life. Along the way, he found towns that were dying, others that were thriving and still others which were doing both. “I saw patterns of light and patterns of darkness,” he says. “The side of town with the railroad, which was no longer in use, would be dying, while the side of town with the new highway would be growing.” He adds, “Some towns were struggling to recreate themselves when mining and logging ended.”
Several times, he encountered the police, including once in the cold New Mexican desert. There was no place to take shelter and hide, though for a night he camped behind what he describes as “a pile of dirt.” In the morning, cops arrived and explained they would find him a room in a hotel, at no expense to him. He declined the offer and went on his way.
Later, in Louisiana, he camped in an open field where sugar cane had been harvested and where he was visible from nearly all sides. A farmer called the police, one of whom approached Tidwell with a Taser, but he came away from that encounter unharmed and with a banana in hand, thanks to the sugar cane man.
“I felt safer when I was in nature and around trees than when I was in the open,” Tidwell tells me. He adds, “I discovered that I like solitude. When I felt lonely, which is something else, I would meditate or talk to myself and find out what was bothering me. Sometimes, I closed down for the day, went into my tent and fell asleep.”
At home in Greenfield after a year in near constant motion, he unpacked his bags and settled down. “I don’t miss the road,” Tidwell tells me. “I learned what I needed to.” He went to work at Mary Chapa Academy, and learned that he had to discover how to teach, how to interact with students and how to express himself. “Now I’m digging down deeply in one place,” he says.
Many of his students come from indigenous families who have migrated from Oaxaca, Mexico, and who speak four and five languages, including Zapotec, Mixtec and Trique. Thrown into the classroom, Tidwell stressed. But the kids grew on him, and he on them.
“They are beautiful,” he says. “They are a joy to be with, though many of them have lived with darkness as well as light.” Tidwell is growing day by day and learning as much as he is teaching: how to listen, observe and ask questions. “I don’t really tell students what to do or not to do,” he says. “I’ll say something like ‘I notice,' or 'I wonder.' It seems to work. I never say, ‘Be quiet!’”
In the classroom, he recycles his journey. “I describe the walk,” he says. “I want the students to know who I am and to trust me. For first graders, I wear the clothes I wore when I was walking. I set up my tent and sleeping bag and invited them inside. The idea is that when they’re older, they’ll respond to the call of adventure and take the leap.”
Tidwell has suggestions for adult wanderers, walkers and explorers. “I think the most important thing is to have a sense of purpose,” he tells me. “If you’re doing it just for yourself, for status and reputation, I don’t think that’s enough to keep you going for hundreds if not thousands of miles. At the start of my journey I was thinking of stopping and turning around and going home. But when I got out of California, I knew I could go all the way.” He did that indeed, all the way from coast to coast.
(Jonah Raskin is the author of Beat Blues San Francisco, 1955, a novel.)
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