What I remember most about the day we finished the ADT portion of our journey was working out the lyrics for the song I composed in my head back in Ohio, the song about kindness. I came up with lyrics about the kindness found in children, a village and overall humanity, based on all the kind experiences we witnessed on the journey. A photo captures my memory of precisely where I finished those lyrics; Cindy was looking at the dead end to a sidewalk, which consequently came right before the first film crew came to meet us.
I incorporated that song into my American Discovery Symphony, an orchestrated travelogue and love story. The Yale School of Music will premiere my symphony on May 24, the tenth anniversary of when we finished our walk across the country. You can register for free admission to the concert here:
American Discovery Symphony Registration
The route went by the high school where our host Serinda Conner taught and she had her class out there cheering us on as we walked by. She also baked us a thoughtful cake (having known we were coming) with ADT references, that she brought to our finish on the beach. Lion Karl Gude, on behalf of the Lord Baltimore Lions Club, came out to hike the last half mile with us. He also treated us to lunch the day before our finish, and escorted us as guests of honor for his Lions Club meeting the evening of our finish. Poetically, the Lions Club contact that started our journey’s mission for kindness and community became the last.
As for the finish on the beach, we started the ADT journey at the Pacific Ocean on a raw day in June and finished at the Atlantic Ocean on a raw day in May. Aside from the subdued atmosphere of the ocean mists, we were not really finishing the end of our journey. We would hang a left and continue hiking up the Atlantic Coast until we reached our home in Connecticut. Before leaving the shore I picked up two smoothed pebbles that I would later use for guitar picks whenever I play the final movement of my American Discovery symphony.
Reaching Cape Henlopen was preclimatic for us, but not for the media. In addition to the crew from WBCC 16 to meet us on our way to the finish, a crew from WMDT 47 met us at the shore, and we followed up with an in-studio interview with WMDT 47 the next morning. A reporter from the Cape Gazette also covered us at Cape Henlopen and we were their front page news the next day.
We spent a couple of rest days with Serinda and her family, and joining the Conners one pleasant evening on the Rehoboth Beach boardwalk. We also went on a tour of Dogfish Brewery. We did not need the rest days so much as we were stalling for time. Before we resumed our hike up the coast we rented a car to attend our oldest daughter Charissa’s graduation from the Honors program in Nutritional Science, making the trip up and back in one day. We resumed hiking after making that field trip.
I also used the rest days to catch up on my blog posts and wax philosophical about a couple of issues our journey highlighted. One was the pervasiveness of virtually everyone wishing us to “be safe.” If we wanted to be safe we would not have hiked 5,000 miles across the country. I prefer instead to “be well,” or to “live well,” to strive for a high quality of life rather than all my actions geared towards safety. For that matter, all those people wishing us to “be safe,” while bestowing an act of kindness upon us, failed to practice their own advice. Being kind to strangers involves risk, easily avoided if one wants primarily to “be safe.”
Perhaps I am making too much out of the fact that “be safe” is universal in this country, while “be well” is seldom heard as a parting greeting, but I can’t help but link how pervasive “be safe” is with how fear-mongering has made our nation increasingly apprehensive. The fear-mongering goes beyond the NRA and their corporate benefactors using the tactic for gun sales. During our recent pandemic, fear-mongering was the currency for both anti-vaxxers and pro-vaxxers. Adherents to different political parties have gone beyond vilifying each other’s platforms to vilifying each other. I fear the ever-increasing fear in America.
In a switch from the usual, Ky waited for us back in Delaware. Upon our return Cindy and I took the ferry over to Cape May in New Jersey, while Ky drove to meet us. While avoiding major highways, we often hiked along residential streets, going into and out of towns, meeting people in their yards on a frequent basis. One commented on my blog afterwards; a couple of people offered us their place to stay the night; one cute little girl wanted her picture taken with Cindy.
We could not accept many offers of kindness because we were now near the end of our journey. In December we could take impromptu days off for weather or hospitality; we knew we could make up the mileage before our targeted finish date of May 24, one leap year after we began our journey. With under three weeks to go any major diversion from our intended daily mileage would make our target finish increasingly difficult to achieve.
We became more like passing motorists as we walked through the pine barrens, or past a zoo right along the route. One night Ky brought us to a campground that comped us our stay; the other night we camped with permission in a homeowner’s woodsy yard. We discovered the next morning that the woodsy yard we stayed in nearly bordered the zoo we passed. That might explain what I discovered later as the worst thing to happen along our entire journey.
