King opens our eyes to what has been hiding in plain sight. These men all died of disease, exposure, or earlier injuries and were buried there on Christmas Day, 1776.” It’s the “Christmas Day” that brings that distant past into a poignant present.įor most of us, this patch of the mid-Atlantic region seems characterized more by monotony - or at least the smallest of differences - than the dramatic contrasts of much of the rest of the country. Each stone marked the grave of a soldier buried there who never made it to New Jersey on the night Washington crossed for his sneak attack in Trenton.
… It was the simplest of memorials, easily missed, with nothing but a flagpole to draw your attention. Some historians think he was poisoned when he died on his trip back to Virginia in 1618, and that his corpse was then tossed out to sea.” At the eponymous river, King encounters “twenty-three simple white gravestones, all lined up. The lord who gave his name to the Delaware didn’t fare well in the New World despite his large footprint. There’s the “dubious aristocrat, Thomas West, otherwise known as Lord De La Warr, who never even sailed the bay named for him or floated its main river. Walking with King is like having an especially learned and observant companion, one who wears his erudition lightly as he regales you with concise yet illuminating glimpses into a moment of American history that happens to coincide with each spot he happens upon. And this doesn’t include the many lesser lights who have walked out the door of whatever place they called home carrying only essentials and explored a world made radically different by just taking it slow. And while she was not the one writing the famous Tales, the many-times-married Wife of Bath making her pilgrimage to Canterbury took the opportunity to regale her fellow travelers with ribald and audacious stories that have endured. In “ The Songlines ,” Bruce Chatwin traveled through the Aboriginal world in Australia, wandering in the Outback and discovering its impenetrable culture and himself. Henry David Thoreau took a nice, rainy 30-mile walk on a Cape Cod beach in 1849 and chronicled his experience in “ Walking,” an essay published in the Atlantic right after his death in 1862. Patrick Leigh Fermor strolled across a Europe in 1933 that would become almost unrecognizable 10 years later. Writers have walked probably millions of miles over the centuries and turned those journeys into compelling books.
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