A year ago today, Natalie and I kicked off our coast-to-coast walk across America. Here’s a photo of us at the very beginning, right outside my friend Gracie’s apartment in Brooklyn:
I still think it’s amazing this photo exists. First of all, I had to muster up enough courage to ask a New Yorker on a cold Saturday morning if they would take a photo of me and my woman in goofy hiking clothes standing next to a giant baby stroller. Perfectly late, the courage came just as one couple had walked by, so I told myself I would ask the very next person.
So we waited.
And waited.
And waited.
And, with the awkward minutes passing, I started to wonder whether this would be the first moment of the trip where I’d annoy Natalie. I mean, did we really need a photo with both of us in it? We had already decided it was too cold and annoying to start at the ocean, so why not just shrug off our kickoff photo too? But I probably thought of my mom or Kathleen or various other people and convinced myself to wait. In the meantime, we took photos of ourselves solo:
Eventually, someone came, I made the ask, and they accepted.
And then we started walking.
Because of the technical challenges posed by melted and re-frozen ice in one direction, our very first steps briefly took us east on Richardson St to Kingsland Ave (veering south) to Maspeth Ave (southwest) to Metropolitan Ave (west). Bundled up against the morning cold, we strolled past the Graham Ave station, which had been our main hub for taking the L train to Manhattan. Instead of taking the subway, we kept on walking, took a left on Bedford Ave, and then hooked up with the Williamsburg Bridge to cross the East River.
Downtown, we stopped at a coffee shop to use the facilities. While waiting for Natalie outside, I was approached by a homeless-looking man, who asked about the buggy at my side.
“That’s real nice. You build that yourself?”
“Ha, thank you!” I said. “I assembled it myself but I didn’t exactly build it myself.”
He kept admiring it as he walked away, and I felt a little mixture of shame and privilege at having acquired a fancy bum-cart as easily as clicking “order” on Amazon.com.
We went on, west to Chinatown, where we stopped at a teeny bike shop to pick up spare bike tubes. I knew this would be important in case we ever got a flat, but for some reason I didn’t think about buying a pump. Silly me, probably just assumed we’d always be near a gas station. Though it would be a week or more before this mistake came back to haunt me, it thankfully didn’t factor into our first day.
Yes, we walked out of Brooklyn, across the East River, and across Manhattan, but we still technically cheated on day one (as I confessed in a prior piece). While it is possible to walk from New York to New Jersey, you can only do so by crossing the George Washington Bridge way uptown. Like 10 miles uptown, which is to say 10 miles north, which is to say 20 miles out of the way. Sure, we could’ve done it, but we didn’t feel like it. In the same way that we decided to walk across America “because we wanted to,” we also decided to take a ferry across the Hudson “because we wanted to.”
We landed in quiet, downtown Jersey City around 1230, three hours after starting. With the winter sun reaching its zenith, we were sweating underneath all our warm clothes, even though the high of the day was just 37°F (3°C). Also, our stomachs started grumbling, so we stopped at America’s finest restaurant to use the restroom, peel off some layers, and enjoy our first lunch of the walk.
And I’m sure glad we refueled because, soon after we left the McDonald’s, Google Maps sent us on quite the little adventure.
Walking along Communipaw Ave was easy enough, but it ultimately led us to a super busy intersection uniting state highway 440 and U.S. truck highway 1–9. Not only did we have to figure out how to cross this metallic mayhem of an intersection, but then we had to somehow get on the U.S. highway to cross the Hackensack River. From our vantage point, still east of the intersection and several hundred yards from the start of the bridge, it looked impossible.
When we failed to see a clear walkway on either side of the bridge, we went into a gas station on the corner to ask if there was a way to cross the bridge on foot. Both guys working there laughed and said the police would ticket us for even trying.
So we did it anyway.
Three wheels, four legs, we carved our impossible path through stubborn winter ice and its new best friend, foot-high slush and snow. It was utter madness, but eventually we found a walkway on the south side of the bridge — just barely wide enough (a miracle!) for the buggy to pass.
It was utter madness, but we did it… twice. A short walk after the first bridge, we came to another, carrying us over the Passaic River:
Later that night, I would write in my journal: “I may have nightmares of those cold, metal corridors completely inundated with soulless slush, but I will sleep so soundly that I could not care less.”
That’s because, even though crossing those two snow-blocked bridges may have been the most arduous part of the day, we still had three more hours ahead of us.
We walked on and on through industrial Newark, past Penn Station, past the Essex County Courthouse (above), on and on and on down the first Springfield Ave of our trip… until finally reaching home sweet home — the America’s Best Value Inn in Irvington, NJ.
We were exhausted. We’d only walked 17 miles, three below the typical 20 we’d do once we hit our stride and exactly half of the 34 miles we did that one crazy day in eastern Colorado. And it had taken us 8.5 hours, making for a measly, two-miles-per-hour pace.
But we did it. We’d finished our first day of walking.
Tired and sore, we somehow managed to stand up and walk a block down the street to pick up Caribbean-style jerk chicken, rice, peas, and sweet plantains for dinner from a restaurant that had apparently just opened. Our appetites easily engulfed the large, delicious servings. And then, setting a precedent for every other evening for the rest of the trip, I spent a few minutes penning a journal entry:
And then we passed the f out.
