Walking the East Coast

A serial memoir

Original photos by Mike McAuliffe. Cover design by Alli Rickards.

A letter to you

Can I tell you about the time I lived for half a year out of a backpack along the US East Coast? What it meant to me to walk, to carry all I needed? Maybe I’m not saying anything you don’t know. Or maybe you’ll think this is a little out there. But for me, to watch from the window of a bus or train as the world goes about its living, unaware of your gaze, is an intimacy. It can feel a little like moving through sedimentary layers, only in motion-picture reels. And you can see yourself reflected back. You know how an immediacy of depth can be achieved between living creatures not despite but because of the ephemerality of a connection? I found that again and again on this, my first long roam, as I stepped out here or there to blend in for a bit.

And then, will you tell me what my monthly missives from that road make you think and feel and remember about your own walks in life so we can shape our stories together? Or maybe that’s presumptuous. I should stick to my own molding. It’s just that, when I read about the taste of your first kiss or how you sometimes felt diminished in your mother’s presence or why you tie a ribbon around a dry stalk in a field near your house, it can feel like watching from a train window again.

I should just tell you what happened. Exploration had called since I first understood the shapes on the globe to be homes. I’d been waiting, though, for a partner who heard that same call. I, single woman, couldn’t just set out alone, could I? The trek chronicled in Walking the East Coast was answer.

In July 2007, I left Charleston, West Virginia, in a bus, wending and zigzagging my way along the coastal United States and, by late November, into Montreal, Québec, Canada. A log, much more field notes than diary gratefully, traveled in the brain of the pack I carried on my back. Tiny script that spills into the margins offers up character sketches, conversations participated in or overheard, drafts of letters, and forgotten details of places I passed days or weeks or moments in.

I see among those lines a young woman who wanted at once to be found and to be lost, as if a trace left of her could be a shard. She didn’t write about the losses she carried with her—a difficult early departure from her childhood home, the letting go of a daughter to adoption as a teen, the death of a best friend, the end of a marriage. She didn’t write, Haven’t I already caused enough?

Do you know what I mean? Have you ever longed to make an impact on while also fearing you’re only good for trampling over? Have you let yourself down in the pursuit of not letting others down? Quieted yourself for fear of being misunderstood? Or what impulses have butted up against each other in you? What misbeliefs about yourself have held you back?

I know you don’t need to be disavowed of any notion all will be wrapped up by the end of this walk—that the young woman who set off in summer will emerge in winter free of guilt and shame; having mastered the art of distilling sorrow; able to fill her part of a room, of a page, of a relationship with wisdom and grace, certain of her own worth.

To write about this journey had been a goal since the Charleston Greyhound station. A consummate reader, I dreamed of owning the title published author. But when I hadn’t made it happen after a few years, I chalked it up to yet one more missed opportunity, one more way I’d failed to show up for myself; tucked the logs into a box; and more or less forgot about them.

Let’s say the story was just waiting to emerge 17 years later. Serialized for you, the gift of readers (like a murder of crows or a kettle of hawks) I’ve found here. We’ll reencounter together the young woman who boarded a bus under a sun that shone for hours that seemed endless, the one who watched leaves turn crimson and honey from the belly of an aluminum canoe in Vermont, the one who curled into the arms of a Frenchman as snow melted into the St. Lawrence, and all the people who allowed her to be a momentary character on their paths along the way, to leave a bit of herself in their hearts.

I’m writing as I go. So, I mean it when I say you, fellow time traveler, are helping me shape this story—by watching through your window, by stepping out to respond here and there.

I can’t tell you how much it means to have you Walking the East Coast with me. I’ve posted the first four chapters already. So far, I’ve heard accounts of your own experiences on buses and trains, learned of one reader’s love for Baltimore and its bay, and added new music recommendations to the soundtrack of this journey. I can’t wait to see what comes next.

Yours from 2007 and now and tomorrow,

Holly

Contents

1

Empty and Full on a Northbound Greyhound

2

Baltimore Blue

3

Mike D and the Exquisite Jade Lincoln

4

Looking for Love in All the Places

5

Of Bears and Ants

6

Coming May 11

…

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Wanna invest in this unfurling?

Thank you.

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PS. The soundtrack of this trek so far.

Thank you, Jeffrey Streeter.

Thank you, Julie Gabrielli.

I listened to this one on repeat while writing chapter 2.