me? you!

hey, there. Welcome to my walk.

My name’s Ian, and I’m in the process of walking from the tip of South America up to the Northern reaches of Alaska. Why? How? Where? Well, hopefully this site will answer those questions, we shall see.

Go ahead and read below to see a bit of the method behind my madness…These are the answers to the 3 most commonly asked questions of me over the past few years:

why in hell are you walking?

The whole thing, the idea, the desire, the actions taken, the rationalizations and philosophies thus formed…they were all spurred by one thing: a llama. A brown and white, bug-eyed llama. In 1992 I was part of a group that rode across the country from Washington state to Maine. Somewhere in the Ohio of that summer, I came across a llama ranch, or so I assumed, as there were a bunch of llamas eating, pooping, and pondering life within my field of vision. One animal in particular caught my attention. It had broken away from its friends and had begun to trot along with me as I trudged up a gradual incline on my bike. Bemused by its behavior, and by the fact that I’d never before seen a live llama, I decided to move in for a closer look at the furry, long-necked mammal. I set my bike down in the ditch that paralleled the road and walked a short distance to a wooden fence. The llama trotted right up to me and stared earnestly at me with one bulbous, black-opaque eye. I got an immediate feeling that it was a girl llama. Her eyelashes were incredibly long, and she batted them at me demurely. She stretched her neck across the top of the fence and brought her head to rest on my shoulder. She smelled like alfalfa and summer air. The wool of her coat was amazingly soft. She gave one of those big, breathy sighs that horses, camels, and other big-nostriled animals seem to give when they’re content. I reached my arms up and gave her neck a big hug. She leaned in to me for a second, and then gently pulled herself to the other side of the fence. With what I swear was a wink, she turned around and cantered back to her friends. I stood and stared after her, in awe of the moment. Maybe her friends had dared her. Maybe she had mistaken me for one of her kind. (many of my former students swear that I’m a dead ringer for the llama in the animated film, ‘Emperor’s New Groove’.) Maybe, though, maybe she had been trying to clue me in to something. Maybe she was giving me a hint. Later that very same evening a vision came to me. I realized what it was that the llama had been trying to tell me. I was destined to ride my bike from the tip of South America to Alaska! 2 minutes later I realized that I was wrong…I wasn’t supposed to ride a bike. Why would a llama have told me to ride a bike? No, I was destined to buy a llama, load it up with provisions, and WALK from the tip of South America to Alaska! It was just that simple. It was preordained. Hallelujah!! As usually happens shortly after such inspirations however, other things got in the way. The adventures of my bike trip soon pushed my newfound destiny to the back of my mind. the door to that back room always stood open just enough, though, for me to catch a glimpse now and again of my future, even as the years slid by in the monotony of work, relationships, bounced checks, broken noses, hangovers, work, failed dreams, work, credit card debt, work, late night Sportcenters, work, etc. I looked into what it would it take to buy, train, feed, and cross borders with a llama. I found out that llamas are great at finding their own food, they’re compact, carry loads up to eighty pounds, and can be great companions. I also found out that most are bred for wool, not hardiness, that they are very temperamental, and that when they’ve decided they’ve worked enough for the day, they’ll just stop and not move until they’re damn well good and ready. I also learned that it’s easier to haul several kilos of cocaine across any given border than to cross one with a llama. (at least so I’ve heard…) So, I decided that the llama was out. But I was still in. I was in because I had come to understand a couple important things about myself. The first was that I was (am) restless, in general…in life. A thin, persistent film of disquiet has covered every action, every moment of my day to day existence. It had slowly been suffocating me for as long as I could remember, even though I’d been generally happy and optimistic. I needed an answer, a solution to that internal malaise. I was tired of being short of breath. The second thing I came to understand is that there was (is) a solution. I sensed it, but was unable to name it during that summer of ‘92, the Summer of the Llama. I later felt it again, though, as I rode my bike from Minnesota to Louisiana, then to New Mexico. I felt it riding from Arizona to Canada and back down to San Francisco. I lived it as I bounced from Fiji to New Zealand, Australia, Bali, basked in it as I walked through the Pyrenees, and I finally saw the simple truth of it as I walked the Camino de Santiago. What I came to realize is that as I walked or pedaled or rode from someplace to another place, I was breathing deeply, freely. I was alive, vibrantly, vividly alive in those moments, those months. That thin mantel of disquiet would disappear. My emotions were heightened, my vision of life clear. I found myself meeting and interacting with the most beautiful people and places. All the fogs of every day life that seemed always to be rolling in on me were burned away…at least until I would re-enter “normal” life. So there it was. Right there. My grandma would have summed it up best, “If it was a snake it woulda bit ya.” The solution to my ever-present disquiet was travel, not as a vacation clocked out in weeks or months, not in little loops that began and ended on my couch, but rather as a way of life…as life. That is why the hell I’m doing this trip .

There are other reasons, too. There always are. You know them as well as I.

do you have a cause?

Hmm, am I doing this for a cause? No and Yes. I’m conflicted. I say No because I would feel fraudulent, patronizing, and somewhat condescending if I were to start on this journey with a “cause” in hand, and I say yes because much of what I hope to do on this trip could be categorized, depending on how you define the term, as “a cause”. I’ve heard of people on these kind of trips setting forth so as to “promote a vision of world peace” or “Bring attention to the plight of the Snowy Plover”, or “To help end hunger in the world”. How do you do that, though? How do you walk into some small mountain village, a subsistence level community, look the villagers in the eye and say “Hi, I’m here to further my cause: World Peace. You need help with that, don’t you?” What do I say? “Hey, my man, be, like, peaceful and stuff!”?Causes, most of them anyway, are valid, just, and well intentioned. Yet I end up asking myself “why do they always seem to be advertised instead of acted upon?” If you want to promote a vision of world peace, then live it, share it, be it, don’t just advertise it. If you want to help save the Snowy Plover from extinction, then get a PhD in the biology of marine waterfowl set up a breeding and re-introduction program, then you can advertise that. Etc, etc. You see, I’m ultimately on this trip for selfish reasons. But I’ve discovered that there are a couple different levels of selfishness. There’s plain, old egocentrism which isn’t worth a damn. There’s also what I call “productive” selfishness. For example, I teach because it makes me feel good…but what makes me feel good is helping and watching kids expand/discover their intellectual capabilities…and that seems pretty productive to me. By walking a couple continents, I’m feeding my selfishness. No doubt about it. Yet I’m going to meet incredible people, share laughter and tears with them. I’m going to help someone who has fallen, and vice versa. I’m going to talk, converse, share ideas. I’m going argue and shout my philosophies, and change them as I hear those of others. I’m going to play music with him, and her, and them. They and I are going to see that we aren’t so different, after all. We’re not the “devils”, “primitives”, “criminals”, “capitalist pigs”, “terrorists”, “arrogant bastards” or “suspects” that our respective medias portray us as being. I’m going to mingle in the human community. And I’ll share within it. Then I’ll come back and share with my students, with my family, with you…and, well, that sounds pretty productive in the end.So, No I don’t have a cause. You won’t see me carrying a placard, or asking if you have heard of the plight of the Snowy Plover. On the flipside, however, yes I do have a cause: It’s a simple, tangible one, one down on my level…being as kind, as sharing a human being as I’m capable of being.

why don’t you just drive, dude?

Oh, there’s a whole truckload of reasons why I’d never drive. The profound one is because it’s difficult to capture and savor the infinite layers of beauty that surround us in our every moment as we hurtle along a pothole-ridden, cliff-bordered Andean mountain road in our 3,000 pound steel, mobile-pollution box, unwitting of the multi-colored Peruvian Public Transport Bus full of Qechua speaking farmers that’s careening in our direction around that blind corner just ahead, while the driver…a nice guy, really, but tired…dozes off, gently guiding his vehicle into our lane. That’s the first reason.Some other reasons as follow: because cars cost money, gas costs money, repairs cost money, and car thieves like to steal cars. Furthermore, cars are loud, they scare little, living things away (or plow over them), they pollute like hell, and they isolate us from the outside world, from the sounds of life, from the minutiae of our existence.Yet another reason is because the little, selfish kid in me likes to imagine that I’m setting off on a modern day epic. Exactly like what Homer might have written, if he was still kicking today. You know, the kind with minotaurs, gorgons, medusas, and Greek verse…but different. An epic where the cyclops is a person, and the sea lion takes on the role of ’sea dragon’. A story that unfolds in conversation; in English or Spanish, not in the rhyming verse of a language so dead that only a few über-geeks and tragic pedants are able to decipher it. It just seems like zooming along in a car with the only effort being that of nudging the gas or brake pedals now and again just lowers quite a bit the “epic-ness” quotient of the whole thing.