The Secret to Doing Things

In 2019 - 2020, I took a kind of late stage ‘gap year’ from college. I spent most of this year working in different agricultural settings, but I started it attempting to walk barefoot with my dog across the entire state of Maryland, where I am from. I didn’t even make it 4 days. I was inspired to attempt this walk by the late poet, librarian, and environmental activist Mark Baumer.

By Perry Gregory

Notgoingtomakeit.com, January 8th, 2017

A man / holding a roll / of / paper towels / thought / I am weak / and / it’s okay / weakness / is / a quiet pile / of / information / shoved in a dark hole / do not ignore / your weakness / drag it out / and / look at it / through the teardrops / leaking / from / your vulnerability / until / your weakness understands / it / is not permanent / small insignificant objects / can grow / into / a forest / of / honest desperation / to become / one / of / thousands / of / trees / fighting to exist / as something more than / paper goods / consumed / by adults / hiding from their own / pain / and / fears

(Mark Baumer, Learning to Admit I’m Weak, January 7, 2017 )

At noon on October 14, 2016, Mark Baumer stepped out of his home in Providence, Rhode Island, and began walking. The blacktop hurt his bare feet, so he spent most of the day balanced on the smooth and skinny white line that marked the highway’s shoulder. He ate blueberries and raspberries because he had read that they’d prevent his feet from swelling. At a gas station he bought coffee, green beans, coconut water, and a pear, and ate those, too. He walked eighteen miles to a motel and spent the evening in a bathtub full of ice.

Mark wore a bandanna on his forehead nearly every day of his walk. He had greasy, flat brown hair that grew down past his shoulders. He wore rimless glasses and huge fitover shades. People told him he looked like Wayne Gretzky. In the short daily videos he made for the trek, he is often happily screaming at trees, stray dogs, storefronts, and passing cars about the global climate crisis. In recordings of his poetry readings, he speaks with no expression, always looking directly into the camera, even when in front of a live audience. 

He was a compulsive diarist, constantly on Twitter, Tumblr, and Snapchat. At night he edited short videos from footage of the road, and put them online along with rambling, abstract daily updates and poems. His blog was called ‘notgoingtomakeit.com’.

****

“Yes, my consuming desire is to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, bar room regulars—to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording—all is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yet, God, I want to talk to everybody I can as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night…”

(Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, July, 1951)

I didn’t start barefoot or standing in the Potomac River at Indian Head like I had planned, because the gates to the base were closed. My whole family was there. Our dog, Sampson, was sick and we were doing our best to ignore it. He whined softly under the weight of his own food, packed in a canvas pouch on his back. It would turn out to be a day of historic heat for the month of May in Maryland, ninety-one degrees already at ten in the morning. My feet burned on the black asphalt so I wore Tevas and a tight smile for the picture my mother took of my first steps on the trail.

I saw countless dead possums, turtles with broken shells, some flattened squirrels and frogs. I saw dozens of dead and dying butterflies. I nearly ripped a wing off of a blue moth that was crawling with ants. It was beautiful, and I thought it was dead, but as I tugged on its abdomen the little legs started to twitch. I wanted to tape it into my pocket journal.

The sides of the road were thick with invasive species. Honeysuckle vines climbed over the tulip poplars and smothered the native rhododendron, and everywhere there were thorny bushes of multiflora rose. Spiky brown cane made it nearly impossible for me to find a place to pee or empty my Diva Cup. Even when I was able step off the asphalt and walk on earth, I could see the shiny red leaves of juvenile poison ivy plants poking up amongst the Kentucky bluegrass.

****

“Every piece of wind was whispering,‘Give up.’ And every piece of my skin was responding, ‘I don’t know, this is kind of fun.’” 

(Walking Barefoot All Day in the Snow To Bedford Pennsylvania, November 21, 2016)

Mark didn’t swear as a rule, except for when cursing the industrial forces responsible for climate change. He became straight edge in college while playing baseball for a division three team. On day five of his walk he began approaching strangers and asking, “DO YOU THINK HE’LL MAKE IT? DO YOU THINK HE’LL MAKE IT? THAT GUY WHO’S WALKING BAREFOOT ACROSS AMERICA?”

When he got to New York, he walked through Times Square and ate some of the decorative cabbage growing in the concrete planters in front of the M&M store. He had adopted a plant-based vegan diet in 2014 after a breakup. He spent most of that year alone in the house he had bought to live in with his partner. He loved overripe bananas, and on the twenty-first day of his trip he ate twenty-one of them over the course of two hours to celebrate. “YOU’VE GOT TO TRY TO SAVE THE EARTH WITH EVERY PART OF YOUR BODY!” 

****

My pack weighed forty five pounds when I left home, even though I knew from research that a pack for a long-distance trip like this should be no more than twenty percent of my body weight. I walked around my neighborhood barefoot for an hour twice in the week leading up to my departure. That had been the extent of my training. It’s just walking, I thought. I’ve been doing that my whole life. 

I wore a yellow reflective vest, and a red bandana. I brought two pink tie-dye shirts for the entire eleven-day trip. I didn’t want to take Sampson, but my parents were so nervous about me being a woman in public that I realized bringing our ninety-five-pound doberman on my journey was the only way they would agree to drop me off. I also carried a thirty-two-inch sheathed knife at the request of my dad, which easily accounted for four pounds of the weight in my pack. 

I had gone the entire length of the twelve-mile paved bike trail, and walked one mile on the highway, when I noticed a little bridge over the drainage ditch leading off into the woods. It was getting dark, so I waited around till there were no passing cars, and climbed over the metal rail to find a place to sleep. I lost hold of Sampson's leash and he wandered away to a creek. When I caught up with him he was pacing back and forth in the water and panting. Back at the tent, I noticed that he couldn’t seem to lift his leg, that he was shaking and barely able to squat in order to pee. When I looked closer, I saw blood. My mom met me in the morning at a nearby gas station to pick him up. She had driven for one hour to Indian Head, and the fourteen miles I’d traveled since then in about twenty minutes. 

The morning of the second day was beautiful. I passed a one room schoolhouse in Charles County. Then a Civil War cemetery. A bridge over wetlands in Port Tobacco. Dozens of tiny, living toads in a puddle. Rolling red and brown farmland, a stone church on a hill, some ancient paint-peeled white barns. But by the afternoon I was back on a larger highway, and had only strip malls on either side of the road for miles.

When I reached the spot where I had intended to camp, I realized that what appeared to be a large, uninhabited green swath of land on Google Maps was actually a swamp. I had already walked eighteen miles that day, but I walked four more until I came to dry land that was relatively flat. After it was dark, I started to hear laughter, and noticed fairy lights glowing around a picnic table about 200 feet away. I was fully camping in someone’s backyard. I tried to keep my headlamp on the dimmest setting so as not to attract attention as I combed over my body for ticks. I found three.  

****

“I felt like a little boy who tells everyone at the party their bed time is “real late” but falls asleep in the corner at six p.m.” 

    (I Sat In A Motel Room All Day Because My Feet Didn’t Work, December 10th, 2016) 

Sometimes Mark moved so slowly that he would still have fourteen miles to walk when the sun was setting. He would arrive at a motel after three in the morning, and usually he would take the next day off. In Norwich, Ohio, it started to snow, and the salt on the roads sliced into his already swollen feet. He knew that as long as he could feel the pain in his toes, he wasn’t in danger of frostbite, but it was early December, and getting colder every day.

On the 65th day of his trip, Mark took a bus to Jacksonville, Florida, and started all over again. Two days later it was his birthday. He turned 33 and ate two whole cantaloupes in his motel room. He talked to his aunt on the phone and she told him he didn’t have anything to prove. He talked to his grandmother and she said Grandpa would be so proud. 

In Florida they kept putting him on the front page of the newspapers. Because he walked directly on the dividing line, and not on the shoulder, a lot of cars honked at him, which he found upsetting. Sometimes people pulled over to try to give him shoes or to tell him he was going to be killed. An old woman gave him a hug and told him she loved him. A man tossed him a bag containing pretzels, a bible, and a toothbrush.

****

Two men in a red Toyota Camry who had already passed me twice finally pulled over. I was nervous that they had seen me emptying my Diva Cup. The intense Maryland humidity meant that shade was no relief from the heat, and when I poured out my blood onto the leaf litter, a dozen flies had swarmed the sticky mess in under a minute. But these woods were not thick and I had been in clear view of the road the whole time. I don’t remember what they said to me at first, but I told them I was finishing up a trip and was just about to reach my friend’s house. The man driving laughed and looked at his buddy and said, “I don’t know about that.” I just smiled and turned around and started walking directly into the woods.

I guess I wanted to do something big and real with my body. I wanted to put myself in a situation I had never been in before just to see how I would deal with it. I wanted my interactions with the world to be immediately understandable, unmediated, and quantifiable. I didn’t feel like a real person. I did feel a lot of guilt. I was taking a gap year from an expensive urban university, effectively LARPing the existence of a great-depression-era bum. I was extremely fearful and sensitive about the performative nature of what I was trying to do, and simultaneously nauseated by the sincerity of my effort. Maybe I just wanted to get an idea of what Maryland looked like. I felt that was appropriate, to want that after having lived there for eighteen years.

But Sampson was dying. On the phone my mom emphasized that it was simply bad timing, that the heat on Monday had probably made his symptoms worse, but it hadn’t caused them. She said everyone will understand that you are coming home because of this, not because you can’t do it. It was so painful to think that she knew I was too proud to admit I had to come home anyway.

****

“I can no longer see the part of my body that is not connected to this journey.”

(Every Step Reminds Me to Continue This Thing I Don’t Understand, November 11th, 2016)

I cannot stop imagining the very moment of his death. He was wearing his orange reflective vest, moving against traffic as he was supposed to. Mark had walked across America once already, with shoes on, in 2012. It took him eighty-one days. In 2017, he was killed at 1:45 p.m. on the one-hundred-and-first day of his barefoot journey, and he still had over two thousand miles to go. It was the Saturday after Trump’s inauguration. He had recently gotten an extended leave of absence from his position as a librarian at Brown University. In one of his final vlogs, he addressed how slowly he had been moving. “Hey, my name’s Mark Baumer, and I'm a weak individual. There's a lot of weakness trapped inside of me, and it feels really good to admit that. I encourage everyone else out there who's feeling weak to be honest and admit that they are, that there's weakness inside them as well." (Trying To Think of a Title That Will Save The Planet, January 17th, 2017) 

The police report says the SUV drifted out of its lane. He was declared dead at the scene. Mark was 6’3’’. I keep thinking about the extreme flatness of Florida, and how it must have been impossible not to see this slow orange giant, walking right there on the side of the road.