Neil King Jr. · 2023 · road

Neil King Jr.'s 2023 memoir of walking from Washington to New York in the spring of 2021 - 330 miles in 26 days, out of a city still fenced after 6 January and through the oldest settled ground in the country. He took the long way on purpose, and the book is mostly about who he met in the yards along it.

1. 1
   The Capitol

   Spring 2021. A former Wall Street Journal reporter walks out of his door a few blocks from a Capitol still fenced after 6 January, having come through cancer and a lockdown, and turns north with a satchel and no particular plan.

2. 2
   The Mason-Dixon line

   Out through Maryland by battlefields and country cemeteries to the surveyors' line of 1767 - a mark cut through farmland that decided which side of the country people would be born on, and still does something to the air.

3. 3
   York

   Into Pennsylvania, and the towns that were the working country when the roads were canals - and the beginning of the book's actual method, which is stopping to talk to whoever happens to be in the yard.

4. 4
   Lancaster County

   The deliberate detour west: Quaker and Amish farms, horses on the shoulder, and the one stretch King says he most wanted to see - which is why he took a 330-mile route where I-95 would have done it in 230.

5. 5
   Valley Forge

   Stream beds where an army starved through a winter, walked slowly by a man thinking about what a country is - and the historical thread that runs under the whole walk without ever taking it over.

6. 6
   Philadelphia

   Across the city on foot, the only real urban crossing between the two ends - and out again north-east toward the Delaware, because the point was never the cities.

7. 7
   New Hope

   Up the Delaware Canal towpath, thinking about the men who dug it and died of cholera doing it - Henry Mercer's real founders, the ones the plaques leave out, which is the closest the book comes to a thesis.

8. 8
   Princeton

   Over the river Washington crossed and on through New Jersey - a state King walks the length of, mostly along road edges, in the stretch that people told him was the ugliest and he says was not.

9. 9
   The trash mound

   He climbs a capped landfill in the Meadowlands for the view, which is the most American thing in the book - Manhattan across the water from the top of everything the city has thrown away.

10. 10
    The Ramble

    Across New York Harbor and up through the city to a tangle of paths in Central Park that the designers called the Ramble - twenty-six days and three hundred and thirty miles, ending at a name.