At a point where it was all I could do to will one foot in front of the other, a junkyard German shepherd, a four-legged terrorist, exploded out of a rural lane. Normally, my response to such creatures is a craven cartoon of panic—a lot of yelling and backing off as I scan my surroundings for the likes of a hockey stick (the national weapon of choice). But in this case, I did nothing. Because there was nothing I had the strength to do. Except keep walking. If the day’s effort was destined to end in a puddle of blood on the roadside, so be it. Go ahead, eat me, I thought. End my misery. The inevitability of it all relaxed me, and the effect was magical. The dog simply didn’t know what to do with someone who appeared to pay no attention to him. In no time his snarling dwindled to mere barking, and he did a big half-circle behind me and, I assume, disappeared up the lane.

As I refined my capabilities for self-reliance, I became, like Blanche Dubois, more often than I might have liked, dependent on the kindness of strangers—or at least people I did not know well. It started the moment I staggered into the Longhouse Hostel, a one-time rural motel that since the mid-1970s has been run as a travellers’ respite by Lloyd and Willa Jones. The Lonely Planet Guide to Canada refers to the Longhouse as “the best hostel” in the country, and Lloyd and Willa are undoubtedly among the country’s most committed and hard-working hosts. They are thoroughly fine people who have helped bring to Canada some 1,500 political refugees—from Vietnam, from Ethiopia, from Sierra Leone—many of whom began their liberated lives at the Longhouse. A magazine story once characterized Willa as an earthly stand-in for the Madonna, a likeness immediately apparent in her determination that George and I be lovingly housed and fed, for which she and Lloyd would not take even the modest fee they normally charge.

Unfortunately, I was in a kind of stupor by the time I arrived and could do little more than sit pie-eyed on the couch while Willa made tea and then dinner. Except for a bout of scarlet fever when I was ten years old, it was perhaps the only time in my life that I was too weak either to move or to carry on a conversation. During my first hour there, I did not have the resolve so much as to remove my outdoor clothes—just sat sprawled on the couch, sipping at a can of cranberry pop that Willa brought to me with a smile. Even so, I felt rude simply lying there while other guests talked and laughed in the kitchen, from where I was plainly visible—especially since I had been introduced to them enthusiastically as a writer who was walking to New York (and, by implication, would have some ripping good yarns to tell). Willa, bless her heart, had gone so far as to pitch me as a kind of literary Ernest Shackleton.

At one point, a muscular young Australian in a gaucho hat wandered over and said, “So, mate, you’re walking to New York—fabulous! How long you been on the road?”

“Six hours,” I whispered.

“Great!” he enthused. “How’s it going?”

“Worse,” I told him.

Later, I sat in the bathroom, afraid to look at my feet. I thought, I can’t do it! What am I going to do? In the bedroom, I settled into a drugged and fitful sleep and awakened stiff to the point where I had to lever my legs one at a time over the edge of the bed. Back in the bathroom, I leaned over the toilet and involuntarily expelled a mass of orange goop about as big as a golf ball. Whereas I had at first assumed stubbornly that I was merely out of shape, I had to admit at this point that I was sick, too sick for what I had set out do. However, four 222s, two flu tablets, and a slug of cough suppressant took the edge off my despondency, and after a hot shower, I slouched out to the kitchen, where Willa, who had been reading one of my books, volunteered a cheery good morning. She hastily poured me a cup of coffee and made me three or four pieces of toast, only one of which I could eat.

As I sat there contemplating my impending disgrace, Willa said, “Well, you’ve got a beautiful day for walking.”

Till then, I had not thought to look out the window.

“Yes, I have,” I said, and having excused myself, I shuffled back to my room determined that my walk would not end here in humiliation. Sitting on the edge of the bed, I packed Moleskin—thick, self-adhesive pads—around my blisters, pulled on my outdoor clothes, and having arranged with George to meet me later in the day, thanked Willa for her hospitality and confirmed that I would be returning to the hostel that night (if I’m alive, I might have added, although I did not want to alarm or distress Willa, who I would eventually learn was already well alarmed by my condition).

Understandably, my gait that morning was a pathetic echo of what it had been out of Thunder Bay. In fact, for the first four or five kilometres, I might as well have been dragging a plow. But then, miraculously, I felt better, quite a bit better. And for the next four or five kilometres, my muscles and joints performed more or less normally.

I took it as a sign of recuperation that my appetite began to return, expressing itself in callithumpian rumbles from my lower abdomen. At a house that advertised smoked fish for sale, I found four old Finns playing cards in a basement shop area. “I’d like to buy my lunch,” I said, at which a muscular older woman rose solemnly from her chair and led me into a refrigerated room where the shelves were stacked with hoary-looking black masses. As my eyes adjusted to the dim light, these came into focus as individual fish.

“Vawnt herring?” she said, and when I told her I preferred trout, she turned and, like a slugger pulling his bat from the rack, yanked forth an immense wizened laker and proceeded to chop off a portion of its tail. Out in the shop, she took a pair of scissors that might have been salvaged from a medieval ship’s surgery, trimmed off the fin bits, and wrapped the meat in butcher paper. And charged me $2.50—which as it turned out was, by a significant margin, the best $2.50 I had spent in a long time.

But for now I did not want to stop to eat, preferring to get the most out of my timely energy.

A week would pass before I had the latitude to see anything much beyond the exigencies of hourly survival. But on that first day on the Trans-Canada Highway, with my privileged view of the ditches and right of way, I became aware for the first time of the extraordinary array of junk—the demonstrable anthropology of a culture—that hides in the long grass or in the ditches, invisible to motorists. Coffee cups, magazines, tires, hubcaps, burger wrappers, dishes, cigarette packs, pantyhose, hats, shoes, gloves, groceries, pop bottles, construction materials, used condoms, wrecked furniture, beer and liquor bottles. The ditches are, moreover, an open mausoleum for the carcasses and skeletons of deer, moose, foxes, wolves, porcupines—any animal that has been hit and has managed to drag itself from the road before collapsing, or has been knocked from the pavement by the force of a collision. At one point, as I approached the Pass Lake truck stop, I was startled to see below me in the gutter the full skeleton of a moose, dinosauric and forbidding, stripped clean of soft tissue and marred only by a row of shattered ribs where it had been struck.

By the time I had walked seven or eight kilometres, the pain in my knee, which during the previous day’s walk had been occasional, was a lurid constant—so painful ultimately that I could only keep moving by turning around and walking backwards, which for some reason put less stress on my knee. Where medical conditions are concerned, I have enjoyed modest success at self-diagnosis and treatment (once having closed a cut in my foot by overlapping the skin and applying superglue). Eventually, on a brainwave, I sat on a rock, rolled up my pant leg, and wrapped my scarf twice around my knee, knotting it tightly behind. The improvement was immediate. The problem was that to keep the scarf in place, I had to tie it as tight as a tourniquet, so that it restricted circulation, forcing me to stop every few kilometres to untie it until my lower leg regained its colour.

Perhaps ten kilometres east of Loon Lake, unable to get full oxygen because of the accumulating gunk in my bronchial tubes, I scrambled into the spruce bush and sprawled on a slope of moss. As much as my feet screamed for attention, they were going to have to wait as I had no tolerance for tending to them in the cold. What I did have was my fish, which I devoured in thick oily flakes, pretty much solid protein, addictively tasty.

I had intended to walk another two or three kilometres, but as I attempted to rise, I realized I was finished for the day. Because I was out of cellphone range and could not call George, I limped back out to the highway and hitched a ride with a pair of spangle-faced teenagers, one of whom had a dozen or more ear, nose, and eyebrow rings and no front teeth.

My feet when I reached the hostel were in tatters. Blisters as big as dollar coins had broken, yielding flaps of loose skin and bright seeping flesh.

Again barely able to eat, I sat at the dinner table and listened to two feverish Dutchmen, each of whom ate a rhino’s helping of unadorned macaroni. They were on a six-month tour of the universe, and had bought an ’81 van in Sault Ste. Marie, which a day and a half later had blown its water pump and radiator. They asked me what I thought they should do, but I succeeded only in introducing them to the word overheated, which they latched on to and repeated like an incantation. Willa eventually ran them a double sink of dish and rinse water, and they proceeded to wash the dinner dishes by swirling them first in the rinse water, then dipping them briefly in the wash water before depositing them in the dish rack, covered with suds.

My blisters were so sensitive, even to bedsheets, that by morning I doubted I could walk at all that day. At the breakfast table, I was given courage and some good advice by a young French bush pilot, François, who was in the area looking for work and who had once walked the entire Appalachian Trail suffering “horribly not nice” blisters of his own.

“Let me seeing your feet,” he demanded, and I dutifully took off a sock and crossed my bare foot over my knee.

“Merde,” he gasped, giving me hope that he would order me off the road. Instead, he told me that under no circumstances must I quit walking, even for an hour. “Eef you stop,” he said gravely, “your feet has won.” If I kept walking, he explained, my feet would adjust and eventually toughen. He recommended that I buy pantyhose, cut the feet off them, and wear the latter underneath my socks to protect the skin. Ever the economist, it occurred to me that I might have brought along some used ones (creating the potentially drastic irony of my tottering along the highway in Betty’s spent nylons). He also suggested that I buy antibiotic cream and, at every opportunity, rub it aggressively into my feet.

Beyond his prescription, I desperately needed a knee brace that would flex with the joint and breathe. Unfortunately, I was still fifty kilometres from Nipigon and a drugstore, where I could be fitted for such an appliance.

Among the questions I am most often asked about my walk are, How long did it take? How many pairs of shoes did you go through? And, Did you cheat?

Since they are all questions that aim at something reducible about an essentially irreducible enterprise, they are easily answered.

Including eight days in New York City, I walked for ten weeks straight—and did not ruin even a single pair of shoes. The three pairs I wore were contemporary, slightly lumpish affairs that were space-age tough and broke down eventually not in the treads or vamps but on the insoles, which from the daily soaking and pressure began gradually to compact. By the time this happened, some 1,500 kilometres into my trip, I was so committed to my main pair, both emotionally and physically, I couldn’t bear to stop wearing them. Instead, I stuffed in a pair of Dr. Scholl’s cushioned insoles, walked until they were the thickness of a communion wafer, then stuffed in another pair, and kept walking.

As for cheating, I had no reason to. I did, I believe, cheat fate—particularly at the beginning, when by rights I should have quit and gone home, or lain down by the roadside, as I often wanted to, and awaited the arrival of the ravens.

More prevalently, I am asked why I went. Or sometimes, Why on earth? Or in heaven? And the simplest answer is perhaps the best.

Because I felt like it—which is not an answer people find easy to accept in this age of business plans, mission statements, five-point programs, and endless career or project objectives. I was fifty-three years old, had gotten myself into a rut and needed risk, excitement—needed a journey, the oldest and still perhaps the best way of resetting one’s compass and reintroducing the possibility of surprise. I would not presume to say that in walking I expected to find answers in any absolute sense. I believed, however, that somewhere out along the road, I might, as Pico Iyer put it, locate “better questions.”

There is, of course, at the bottom of such an adventure, an irrationality, a desire to do something based not on reason or utility but on faith and a sense of adventure. Which was as big a part of the attraction as anything else. In any event, walking to New York City seemed highly reasonable compared to what most of my contemporaries would be doing for the next seventy days, and the next seventy and the next: behind the desk, in front of the sales force, making cold calls, at the front of the classroom, on the shop floor, in the warehouse or chemical lab.

As to why I went on foot, the idea was not to move as slowly as possible but merely at the pace of a more observant chapter in human history—to slow things down to where noticing becomes not just possible but unavoidable. Walking is such an inversion of the travelling norm these days that to go any distance at all on foot comprises something of a political statement—or at the very least a spit in the eye to the dehumanizing influences of media and technology, and to the shrinkage and “virtualization” of the planet. Whereas jets and the internet collapse the planet, walking expands it and returns to the walker a sense of its proportions and the intimacy of its appeal to the senses.

I went, too, because I was interested in walking’s history and decline. Several times a year, my maternal great-grandfather, a Muskoka farmer, walked 160 kilometres, round-trip, between the central Ontario towns of Bracebridge and Orillia to mill a seventy-five-pound bag of grain, which he carried on his back. “Why didn’t he take a horse?” I once asked my aunt, to which she responded, “He didn’t have a horse—couldn’t afford one.”

For many people, walking was simply how distances on land got covered in those days. My dad walked up to seven or eight kilometres a day well into his eighties, and, like his forebears, viewed travel afoot as the most natural and obvious way to get somewhere. As a teenager, I did a fifty-mile walk with others at the instigation of President Kennedy, who urged young people to get out and experience the world. We walked from Cornwall, Ontario, south across the St. Lawrence River to Upstate New York, into the foothills of the Adirondacks, and back. I remember well the grinding spirit of accomplishment that came at the halfway point, and the grim optimism of thinking we had “just twenty-five miles” to go—feelings decidedly revisited on the way to New York as I walked eight hundred and then a thousand kilometres, thinking, at times rather soberly, that there were now just a thousand kilometres to go.

As for the timing, I was ready to go—ready, as the Hindus put it, to detach from what I was and knew, and to reconnect with a more basic version both of the planet and of myself.

If I needed additional motivation for going, I had, on top of everything, lost my job—as a husband. And while I was desperate to remain true and connected to my children—at the time aged seven, eight, and fourteen—I had also come to an opportune time to get away and re-evaluate.

What I could never have anticipated was that the most persistent question of all about my trip—the most skeptical question—would be from the beginning, Why New York City? Was it about the collapse of the World Trade Towers? Or for media attention? But neither had even the slightest bearing on my decision.

Months before 9/11, I had become fascinated by the idea of a marathon journey on foot. I had been hankering, simultaneously, for a good long visit to Manhattan, where I had not been for more than a twenty-four-hour stretch since I was fifteen years old. One night during June 2001, Betty said to me, “Why don’t you just combine the two and walk to Manhattan?”

In the morning, on my desk, there was a note: “Walk to New York—copyright Betty Carpick.”

The possibility took root—and with it a sense that in walking to the great city I would be exploring, a step at a time, the largely unexplored axis between rural culture and the more artful, articulated culture of big city civilization. Or, in this case, between the vast Precambrian wilderness (one of the most isolated and magnificent parts of the continent) and the centre of North American cultural and financial life.

Where history is concerned, the wilds north of Lake Superior are about as close as one gets these days to conditions that existed prior to European settlement in North America. New York, by contrast, is pretty much the edge of history’s forward motion on the continent.

One thing I did not want the trip to become was overweening, overly cerebral in its ambitions, or overrationalized as a journey toward selfhood. I believed then (and still do) in a certain amount of rationalization—walk as therapy, meditation, personal challenge. At the same time, I agree with writer Ron Strickland’s view that “voluntary walking is no mere rejection of technology but a reaffirmation of the pleasure of having two legs.”

So, I could talk the talk, as the hipsters used to say. The question was, could I walk the walk? Could a fifty-three-year-old guy battling incipient arthritis, stiffening arteries, and the atrophying muscles of middle age hope to hike across half a continent? And if so, at what cost? Let me be clear, I was not in good physical condition when I left in late April 2002. I had done nothing to get fit, largely because for weeks I had been battling a stubborn dose of bronchial flu. It never occurred to me that people’s doubts about my prospects might be justified. When anyone asked what I’d been doing to get into shape, I’d joke that I was “intellectually” or “psychologically” prepared (which itself turned out to be false). Betty would look at me wheezing around in my dressing gown and say, “Charlie, you’re not fit to walk across town, let alone to New York.” But it made her no less persistent in her campaign to get me out of the house, out of her life, and on my way.

If I had any clear inkling of what was to come, I got it two or three nights before my departure, when I decided to test a pair of shoes by walking a kilometre or so downhill to a meeting. No problem on the downslope. However, the flu was so deep in my respiratory apparatus that, as I came back uphill, I had to stop every hundred metres or so to catch my breath, and arrived home enervated and somewhat less confident than I had been.

I might have waited a little longer to begin, except that I had by now concocted an elaborate itinerary, including a projected arrival time in New York with free use of a hotel room, organized all manner of support and beds along the way, and arranged to make regular road reports to CBC Radio, beginning the following Wednesday.

Plus, the pressure on me to vacate the Harmony Hotel was by now so intense that, when I mentioned to Betty on the day before my departure that I might need another day’s rest before hitting the road, she immediately called her lawyer, who called my lawyer, advocating something along the lines of psychic disembowelment if my seventeen years of cohabitation with Betty extended to seventeen years and one day—all of which struck me as a trifle extreme, but did help keep me on schedule.

It didn’t help matters that, as in the tragedies of Shakespeare, where wind and storms tend to echo the affairs of the characters, the weather through late April had been, and would remain, a scourge of wind, rain, hail, cold, and snow.

And yet I remained optimistic—with at least sporadically good reason. During the weeks before my departure, I had, through a series of bold pleas to strangers and strategic requests of friends, pieced together a support plan whose seeds were planted the day I realized that three or four changes of decent outdoor wear and shoes were going to cost me perhaps fifteen hundred dollars. On a whim, I sought out Jeff Timmins, the Canadian sales manager for Columbia Clothing, an Oregon company that I knew manufactured most of the items I coveted. Jeff and I chatted enthusiastically, exchanged pertinent information, and a week before my departure, two enormous cartons arrived at the house, crammed with shoes, jackets, pants, fleece wear, rain gear, and so on.

Eden, my youngest, was home from school the day the shipment came, and together the two of us unpacked it all, elated, even gloating, over this indisputably fine windfall. When my son, Matt, got home, he was gleeful that his old man was now “sponsored,” as his snowboarding heroes are sponsored by clothing and gear manufacturers.

Buoyed by my good fortune, I contacted an old university friend at Rogers Communications and in no time had arranged to have both a cellphone and a car phone, with free calls anywhere for the ten weeks’ duration of the trip.

When I inquired at the Warwick Hotel about accommodations for a visiting writer, the sales manager invited me, without hesitation, to make the hotel my home, gratis, for as long as I was in New York. A day later, the director of public relations with the Ontario Provincial Parks agreed to let me stay free in Ontario’s parks.

However, my best bit of pre-trip planning was to persuade George to come along in a kind of shadow role, to haul supplies and to rendezvous with me at the end of each day, or at least every second day, so that I could walk unencumbered by a thirty-kilo pack.

George had lived in New York City with his wife and sons for a dozen years during the sixties and seventies, and had earned his M.A. in fine art at Lehman College. But he had eventually been chased out by high rents, the deterioration of his neighbourhood in the Bronx, and finally by the loss of his job at the Kennedy Fine Art Gallery on East Fifty-second Street. He had last made his living in New York driving gypsy cab in Harlem and the Bronx, all but masochistic work that had itself contributed to his fleeing the city. He had nonetheless developed a desire and taste for the life of Manhattan, which, at the time of our trip, had gone frustrated for the better part of three decades (decades marred by, among other occurrences, the suicide of his wife).

Now he was on his way back, his story in part paralleling my own, in that his relationship to the woman with whom he lived had become distorted to the point where he was more than ready to give himself up to the road.

As the days to our departure dwindled, I reinforced my fragile optimism by mapping a detailed itinerary that would take me east and south along the shore of Lake Superior to Sault Ste. Marie, on to Espanola, southeast to Toronto, then east along Lake Ontario to Kingston, where I would enter New York State and follow the westernmost flank of the Adirondacks to Cooperstown and the Catskill Mountains. The last glorious days, as I imagined them, would take me straight down Highway 9, Broadway Avenue, along the east bank of the Hudson into New York City.

The route would, among other things, trace that of the earliest fur trade voyageurs, the first transcontinental railway, the Erie and New York Canal, and more personally, the path of a branch of my ancestry that made its way north into Canada in the wake of the Salem witch hunts.

I tightened my resolve during those last days of preparation by assembling my camping and survival gear, and building up a modest inventory of nonperishable foods. In all, I estimated we had about twice as much gear as we would need—this in the face of everybody else’s estimates that we had about half as much.