Wanderlust: A History of Walking by Rebecca Solnit Page B

set out, a march in San Francisco commemorated the farmworker organizer César Chávez’s birthday with a crosstown “Walk for Justice”; and in Memphis, Tennessee, civil rights activists commemorated the thirtieth anniversary of Martin Luther King’s assassination there with another march. In thesouthwest in April, I could have instead joined the Franciscan-led Nevada Desert Experience on their annual peace walk from Las Vegas to the Nevada Test Site (akin to another pilgrimage route from Chimayó to Los Alamos, birthplace of the atomic bomb, thirty miles west). Then there was the Muscular Dystrophy Association’s annual walkathon on the first week of April and the March of Dimes’s WalkAmerica the last weekend of that month. I had come across a flyer in Gallup, New Mexico, for “Native Americans for Community Action, Inc. 15th Annual Sacred Mountain 10k Prayer Run and 2k Fun Run/Walk” to be held in Flagstaff in June, which sounded like the Spirit Runs held by the five tribes fighting the proposed Ward Valley nuclear waste dump in southeastern California, and I knew that the annual breast cancer and AIDS walks were coming up in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park and other locations around the country. And no doubt somewhere somebody was walking across the continent for some other good cause. All these were outgrowths of the pilgrimage, or adaptations of its terms.
    Imagine all those revisionist versions of pilgrimage as a mighty river of walkers flowing from many sources. The first small trickle comes, like March ice melt from a high glacier, from a single woman almost half a century ago. On January 1, 1953, a woman known to the world only as Peace Pilgrim set out, vowing “to remain a wanderer until mankind has learned the way of peace.” She had found her vocation years before when she walked all night through the woods and felt, in her words, “a complete willingness, without any reservations, to give my life to God and to service,” and she prepared for her vocation by walking 2,000 miles on the Appalachian Trail. Raised on a farm and active in peace politics before she abandoned her name and began her pilgrimage, she was a peculiarly American figure, plainspoken and confident that the simplicity of life and thought that worked for her could work for everyone. Her cheery accounts of her long years of walking the roads and talking to the people she met are unburdened by complexity, dogma, or doubt and rife with exclamation marks.
    She started her pilgrimage by joining the Rose Bowl Parade in Pasadena, and something about setting out on her long odyssey from this corny festivity recalls Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, with her own farmgirl can-do determination, starting down the Yellow Brick Road amid dancing munchkins. Peace Pilgrim kept walking for twenty-eight years through all kinds of weather and every state and Canadian province as well as parts of Mexico. An older woman at the time shefirst set out, she wore navy blue pants and shirt, tennis shoes, and a navy blue tunic whose front was stenciled with the words “Peace Pilgrim” and whose back text changed over the years from “walking coast to coast for peace” to “walking 10,000 miles for world disarmament” to “25,000 miles on foot for peace.” Something of her brisk, practical piety comes across in her explanation of the choice of dark blue—“it doesn’t show dirt,” she wrote, and “does represent peace and spirituality.” Though she attributes her extraordinary health and stamina to her spirituality, it is hard not to wonder if it was the other way around. She continued her pilgrimage in her simple outfit through snowstorms, rain, a harsh dust storm, and heat, sleeping in cemeteries, in Grand Central Station, on floors, and on an endless succession of the couches of new acquaintances.
    Though most of her writings are nonpartisan, she took a strong