good evening. i am mary ann brownlow and this post is bill press political commentator and author. before hill center even opened bill had an idea that he wanted

toan create and host an in depth conversation with distinguished guests and overr the years there had been so many very distinguished guests that i had to say no when moore extinguished in our guest. [applause] political editor and reporter neil king and his extraordinary book "american ramble" a walk of memory and renewal and neil will sign the books afterwards. the reviews have been overwhelming to say theth least. without further ado please welcome neil king and bill press. [applause] thank youu maryanne and good

evening. great too see you all and thank you for coming this evening. i wantt to give a big welcome to first to our friends at the hill center. i don't know what number talk on the hill that this is that they are always fun and exciting. i also want to welcome all of our friends from c-span who were watching on c-span around the country and around the world tonight. thank you for c-span and for covering our event tonight. it's very appropriate that c-span is here. the talk of the health program started at the hill 10 maybe 11 years ago now. we had many programs and their first guest was brian lamb the founder of c-span. [applause] and i also want to welcome all of those people who will be listening to tonight's interview

on my podcast the bill press pod. our conversation will be part of that podcast as well. and it's such a great treat to welcome a good friend and a good neighbor neil king for a couple of years ago did a thing walking out of his front door and to central park new york. there are easier ways to get their as you know. know way more exciting and no play filled with more adventures than neil discovered and i wrote all about it in this wonderful r book "american ramble." it would encourage you to it least read it once and they are

copies for you to buy and he will sign after the program. so neil let's get started. you live two blocks away. yes. did you walk over? >> are you kidding? i just want to be sure. start us off on page 11 if you will. set the scene for us. i will say all of the events that have occurred and all books at any of you have read this book is starting and finishing on ninth street. we know what an honor that is. the beginning of this book has a section called the preamble. i spend a lot of time talking

about why i walked out my door and the history ofet the territory. we will get to that. this is at the very end of that chapter. i set out that monday morning nine days into spring eager to see if anything of interest might pop-up along the way. as i turned away from her" barracks five blocks away broke out and recorded rendition of the "star spangled banner." he there was aloud speech in, don't and they did it every morning at eight sharp. it was a version and for those and arching path over rivers and freeways and farmland to where the hutson is built into the big

harboran with labor -- lady liberty. the sun was warm over my shoulder and there were birds in the trees. i had a skip in my step and i could feel a little bliss seeping in. what a great beginning. let's not wrapped that up but by? >> it started out as an idea when mourning corey said what if i just navigated as a pedestrian to new york city and didn't take i-95. what would the pedestrian experience the end so that for a whileil and then i read more and thought more about how others had taken that same trip and by

the time were to 2020 when will the round i had done tons of preparation. so the route you took he decided he would not take anything close to 95, right? you wanted to go the roundabout way which you did and we will get into that. why that routes? >> it's funny because i took the right and came down thend avenu. to go over the chesapeake and up and across and up the jersey shore and that would be a week and a half of the oceans in jersey' shores. the more i thought aboutbo the route the more i realized i had to go to pennsylvania and lancaster county or the i had to cross the mason-dixon line. i had to go to valley fortune had to cross the delaware where

washington did insert things fell into place. how did -- how long did it take you to plan a? >> it took basically your pet is going to walk out my tour in march of 2020. something happened. it didn't disrupt my life by the way so i had to scratch it and so i walked to my door in march of 2021 and everything unimaginable had happened including a couple of months before i left. i walked into a world that was profoundly changed since i originally decided to do so would increase the number of things to think about the magnitudes. yankee took off for 26 days. did you take things with you?

>> i took very little with me and i didn't camp so i was living in an airbnb's and i had to plot those places which is not easy. i had 16 pounds and a fly right into fishing and one pair of shoes. one pack. one pack, it was a satchel. how many pairs of shoes did you wear a? >> i just had onehoim pair. the whole time? so we talked about this on a big fan of travel writers and have read a lot of them in some of the old-fashioned ones like hp morton eric newby bill bryson paul theroux. have you read them and did theyy inspire you and were you following their lead? >> yeah well bruce chapman or

patrick fillmore, yeah. the reading i did do really did inspire t me to the stage for te whole stream of riders in the 1920s, 30s and 40s and had done basically what i was doing which was to travel through the important parts of the country to figure out what the lasting could this young country made up of all these languages ever form into one union? and alexis de tocqueville was a member of that. i read dozens of those books. my attitude was i went to go out as if i wasn't already usually familiar with the landscape and the people between which making up my mind about various things.

>> there so many different levels toic the book. so many interesting spaces you walk through and walked to and learned a lot about in so many interesting people you encountered along the way and theth big picture of the so many life lessons that you came back with sos let's start you talk about lancaster junction to me that's thoreau wrote. hanover, i'm sorry. say this was one off the things that i had read how there was a juncture at the train station and this was one of the first railun lines that was completed from philadelphia to baltimore to new york in 1834 and in 1863 abraham lincoln took that line at hanover junction there's a

line that goes to gettysburg. you can pause there for half an hour so like you were waiting for the governor of pennsylvania to show up and a year and a half later lincoln was on the train that went this way and kept going straight on this very the long route to take him to springfield for his burial. there is was something that was fascinating about that station. that was one of my pilgrimage destination destination was to go to that destination take about those two things. also lancaster new learned a lot about president buchanan. the only president to come from pennsylvania. joe biden. i'm sorry i'm frome. delaware. oh okay.

we forget aboutt? scranton. buchanan and then thaddeus stevens came -- a. you may have heard about before and you talk a lot about buchanan and stevens. one of the things that was great about the memory in the subtitle wasn't mine it was a national memory and when i walked into lancaster they were actively debating who to rename one of the elementary schools after because they wanted to take james buchanan's name off leaving the last president before lincoln one of these democrats who was a owning confederate from the confederacy. and the moral coward essentially and ever since he died yet meticulously looked after his mansion in thee, jr. league had been very attentive to that. ate

when buchanan was president thaddeus stevens, was the head of the ways and means committee in the house and was way more righteous. abraham lincoln or almost anybody else. congress and was lincoln's in a lot of ways. he was on really pushed lincoln to issue the emancipation proclamation. so on. and they were just then getting underway to sort of rebuild tate his house and now soon going to become a museum. what it should be, which is like a civil rights destination, but that is stevens was one of the great figures of the 19th century, a person who hundreds of times more important than, james buchanan and james, at least in that place, has been held up until now, is finally rightfully, you know. they didn't have to tear a statue down. but if there had been one, i would have been fine with replace. with thaddeus stevens a statue. you know you've walked into the middle of this debate. yeah, which was really great. and it seems that every you'll find out when you read the book

that every city you went to, every town you went to, you connected with the town historian, right? who told the history of the place and showed you the places that weren't that you should you should see terms of learning. know our history. yeah, precisely right now. gettysburg well. oh, i actually i did not go to get his. he talking about valley forge charlottesville. unfortunately yeah. so valley was was a really fascinating thing to me because so i'm sure many of you are familiar but so valley forge the winter of 1770 778 continental army outwits and they don't even have shoes they have nothing but hardtack to eat they're falling apart the have taken over huge portions of the country and they're in philadelphia all sitting around fires and the continental army is freezing in valley forge the valley. what i went to valley forge and i met an historian there who agreed to meet me and she had written a book about what i was interested in, which was not that winter.

it was when we decided to care about that winter. and it took us basically century to care about that winter and we kind of needed have that moment in the late 1800s where all these various kind of victorian sensibilities and other things came together and we needed this symbol of grit and, persistence and sticking it out. and valley forge became that place. and so it's it's a fascinating thing that, you know, we codified. speaking of gettysburg, gettysburg became a more memorial immediately after that battle. and 13 years before valley, forge became like a thing of importance and it's many times since then and now become a huge national park, which didn't happen until gerald ford actually. but that to me was also, you know, i was walking through a landscape we had been fighting over what statues should be torn down, not. and were we erasing history or?

not erasing history. and the is history is a very fluid thing always has been. sometimes it takes us a long to acknowledge that certain happen and the fact that some people are being erased with, our statues are being torn down as part of that process. right. so there are so many other historical places, particularly revolutionary war. you're crossing the delaware. there was boom. and then to me, one of the most interesting places was, the great mound of the great mound. yeah i had on a drive back new york down to washington. you know, if you take the jersey turnpike, you'll see these things that were not so proudly building, but we are building which are these trash mounds, these landfills. and i saw one of them i was like, wow, very landfill. i want to go to the top of that landfill. so i sent them in a dump a dump yeah, but it's a quite a structure we're building and you can see it right there by the

river. so they said, yeah, sure, we would love to take to the top of it. so i arrived there and you know, i went up as the explorer and it was from the top of that landfill that i got my first glimpse, 32 miles away of the tiny, tiny glimmer of manhattan. but, you know, i a bit in the book about how if go to the grand canyon and the top you're in the present and within about 5 minutes you've walked out of all of human history and you go down about 1.9 billion years in geological the landfill. you started that like the eisenhower administration. and then you walked up. and at one point i started i thought i said, where are we now? and the guy said, about 2006. and i was like, wow, that's it that's enron, george bush, second term, you know, and then the present is when you get there and the trucks are dumping stuff in it, it's not it's sort of fun to make fun of, but it's not so funny, but it's just to

see the immensity of this. this is one counties creation. and this is still an active landfill. a very yeah. and the guy that i went with had gone to ohio state university. and when we walked up, i said to, you know, there's this culture of years ago that built mounds all around the ohio river valley down the mississippi. so you might be is would all be aware of these these. and he said, oh, i know. i went to the university and he then started telling me about those maps and he said, our mounds are not like those mounds. so, so many interesting places and many interesting people. so you're walking along, you've got a water bottle and your water bottles empty. you're thirsty. oh yeah. and you encounter a very in the interesting individual all you want is to fill your bottle not so easy right.

tell us you know it was of the things that really was amazing was that by the second day it only took two days for me to realize that when you go out on a walk like this where you have a destination and it's going to take weeks to get there, you start to experience water like bona fide parables like like you have encounters with people along, the road and you're like, wow, this stands for something more than just this thing. and so that afternoon i was walking along in my water bottles empty and i'm walking through this really rich new subdivision of these huge mansions that had been built of baltimore and this young guy in his thirties came down his drive and there was the big house and my bottle empty. and i said, do you have any idea where i can get some water with my cousin? i asked it that way. intention as opposed to could you please fill my water? and so he said and he gave me these very elaborate to this place. it was like two miles away. and i said. wow. okay, thanks.

i appreciate that. and i started walking and then he oh, by the way, i would advise you be careful? and i said what should i be careful of? and he said, well, there are going to be people in this neighborhood that are going to be a little wondering why you're just walking through the neighborhood. and i said really are they and i, i told him then this story about this guy, paul salopek, who's now walking like around the world, essentially. and when he walked across the country of georgia, 54 nights every night, he was put up spontaneously. the people in georgia and i said so. and i ended up walking, oh, while i was leaving the guy, he said oh, one thing i just want you to know when i said be careful, i wasn't talking about me. i think you're fine. i was warning you about the other people in the neighborhood and and in the book. i then go on to muse about our version of hospitality you go back and look at any of the holy they all it's about how do you treat the stranger who comes

down the road and you know, in our case we basically turned hospitality into an industry and rightfully i then filled my water bottle at dunkin donuts, which is where you're supposed to get water. right. there's never occurred to him to say, oh, yeah no, and i didn't ever you. i kept thinking because like it took me like 45 minutes to get out of this ghastly place. and i kept thinking, he's going to show up at any moment, right? like when it just struck me, you know, here's some water. i got plenty water. but, you know, never did. no, didn't happen to me. one of the most magical moments in the book is when you're walking the quaker, the mennonite country, and you come to some kids ball, which turned out to be quite a visit, right? yeah. you know, that was one of these moments. i mean, i just want to impart one obvious fact, but i can't overstate it walking is, you might say, 20 times slower than

driving miles versus 60 miles an hour. it's hundreds of times more meaningful, hundreds of times richer and all of experiences that i had not just i mean, some of them were just walking and, noticing and watching a spring unfold. right i'd never done that before. like literally, i just spent a month watching a spring. but you also have these encounters that you would never notice. but anyway, this wouldn't have happened. so i'm walking up a road, i look over and i see beside school there's just a woman young woman. she's like ninth grade or so, and she's there with a long floral dress such as the head bonnet on. and she has a baseball mitt on her hand. and then i hear this, this whack, and she backs up and she catches this fly softball and she hurls it back to the right of like what going on? so i go into the playground and there are these mennonite kids on, this huge game, two games of softball, all the young women are wearing these ankle length

dresses and are amazing softball players like fall out slide thing and second base ball thing. and so at the end their they they stop playing they all come over towards me their teacher comes over and you know in terms of the whole welcoming of a stranger the first thing he said, what brings you here? and i told him, he said, kids, gather around. let's hear what mr. king has to say. and it was like, tell us what you're doing? and i started to talk to them they were kind of taken aback by my commentary about just seeing their part of, the country. and then one of the young women stopped for it. and she said, mr. weaver, could we sing for, mr. king? and he said, you have time. and i said, i've got time. and so i went into their school. we went down the basement. they got on the risers there, about 30 of them. and they these two incredible hymns of the afterlife, which

was so bizarre because. these are like, you know, 14 year olds on a beautiful spring day and they're singing about their longing for having but anyway. and was the as spontaneous like that saying a thanks me that i had that i was there and that i had come and was interested in them. basically it was extraordinary. and one last thing, when i was leaving that this hullabaloo occurred and then i went up and i was going to fill my water bottle out of there drinking and mystery goes back into the class and. instead of saying anything about me or anything. and the first words out of his mouth are, well, you know, we were working our vocabulary, so if you'd turn to page 36 and i was, wow, because they're just so in the moment, they're just so focused on things. it was phenomenal. what a magic moment. yeah. so from the guy who won't fill your water bottle.

tell us about peggy brennan. she was also one of the characters. oh, wow. get a vulgarity yeah in the book. well, that you know so the whole walk i'm just walking and out there if you go out on a big odyssey like odysseus or a night or there has to be a dragon of, some kind or something, a cyclops or something, and the dragon was i-95, right? i was like, how am i going to confront and deal with i-95? and so i took this whole arching path and then i identified cranberry new jersey as this perfectly preserved 19th century town. the midway point in new york and philadelphia on the postal the old postal route. and to the right of it or the east of it, are these warehouses, amazon, all this kind of stuff in the woods and then running between them. is this brook and i. i had found before i even left i

was looking on google maps. i said, oh, i'll go there, i'll talk to town fathers and the historic preservation people, and then i'll make my way up that river and i'll go under the turnpike by water underneath it. so when i'm talking them this beautiful morning and i tell them my plan and woman peggy brennan, who's well under 80, she said that's not going to. and i said, why? and she said it's not it's all water. there's no room for a pedestrian. but i have an idea. and so she gets and she gets her phone out and she her son. and 10 minutes later, her son shows up and he says follow me. and we got to his house. he pulls a kayak out from under his house. they take me to the lake. i like six of them. i get in the kayak and they're all waving goodbye while i'm kayaking up this brook. after he had told i was going have to go over this impediment, these trees, waterfall, there's this. but when i finally get all of them, then i'll be able to go onto the turnpike and it was all the back.

she concocted this plan that became one of the great moments of the whole trip was paddling up the amazon i called it in the amazonia and. so then we went from fear questions. but let's talk a little bit about the lessons that you learned. oh, yeah, what you learned about the american. i mean. you know, i was never on a scientific to come out with a statistically accurate sampling of americans would lead me to some firm conclusion about one of the things and this is on the one hand sort of obvious but needs to be said all the same that if you go and stand with people on their patch of earth their common ground that you share with them at that time and have interactions with people who might basically residing in another century or certainly have distinctly different political views from your own

and and that setting, you're dealing with a fully rounded person, right? with everything about them. that's not just three or four of their political beliefs. and i met quite a few people. politics did not align with mine, but to a person they all had other characters and traits and things that were just so amusing and funny to be said. and so is the other side that we've almost forgotten now that we're breaking into the tribes that we're breaking into and, you know, one guy i met who was an who had all kinds pronounced views on things that certainly didn't align with mine and he i met him in his bar filled with all these incredible vintage. and he just then telling me about the tractors and i it was it was such a great encounter. so, you know, there's a world out there and was my desire was to pay very particular attention to the particulars that i saw and to put out of mind the more

sort of abstract things that we fill our heads with, that fill us with a certain kind of anxiety or venom. and i'm not saying that's the real america, but i am saying to do that for a spell really opens eyes to a different slice the country. i was struck by your summing up on page 340, the love feel for your country can deepen along with the knowledge of the shameful we've done there is ugliness but also beauty in the ugliness. what remember of an era may reflect more than anything our desire to give it the best gloss. yeah, now i am a firm, you know. i know there are certain gov.scot around the country think they've figured out our, you know, mystery to our history or what are what we should be teaching the children about our past and anyone. the things figure that out hasn't given us ample time because it's such a complicated thing.

but the one thing i do know is, if you don't do the valley of shame part of it and it's a long and dark one and i'm and it's an ongoing one and i encounter things almost week and reading that i'm like we did that you know if, you don't continually do that. then don't come out the other side. you a love for this country that is founded in the reality and it's the people that believe if you have a shame for your country, then you're not patriotic. you don't properly love it. it's just such nonsense. i think it's exactly the other way around that by acknowledging and fully absorbing those aspects of our past, it's how you have a better or higher for where we've come and where we are now. so every one of the travel books that we've talked about, yours is a discovery of a certain country, of certain region. it's also soft discovery. yeah. which you learn about yourself.

well, i mean, six days walking by yourself. yeah, a lot of time. yeah. right. the thing i had some really amazing moments of joy along the way and these sort of rapturous moments that i think came about largely because i just decided would devote myself to paying attention and not listening to anything. no music, no podcasts and it had an a cumulative effect those days and it really did become kind of a religious experience, certainly a very spiritual and sort of by the time i got to new york, i just felt that i was sort of glowing. and there was kind of a radiance about things that a lot of that is i still think is there in a way mean it it's it's a funny thing is that you walk at your door the one thing i'll say you've got your book there because you talk that rapture

which came at a very unusual place walking across the bound bridge. yeah, yeah, exactly. there there is a actually a chapter called rafter on the bay bridge. and when i was going up the bay bridge, i, i wasn't really looking for manhattan. it was right there. and when i looked up and saw it, i was overwhelmed by the side of manhattan. and it is, by the way, you know, we've done a lot of disservice to this by a lot of the things that we humans have done. but one distinct service we've done is build the city manhattan because it is a gorgeous, you know, and when you see it on a spring morning with the river there in the harbor there and that thing we and you can go back and read all of scott fitzgerald you want where he talks about in many others that gorgeous site and it was a gorgeous site so i described here this weird rapture though went beyond gratification. i had seen this skyline before a

thousand times over the years. i caught sight of it from all directions. and as a cab driver and a common traveler, but on this morning, the sight of it physically astonished and stunned me. the days and all those steps had pried open a part of the human spirit that magnifies the potency of otherwise simple things and grants the commonplace, a touch of the divine. you. so the second time through your book i suddenly said you what i remember now, something that really struck me once about union station. okay, so i went back to union station to double check it and there on the left you're facing union station on the upper left side of union station is this quote from samuel johnson.

so it is in traveling. a man must carry knowledge with him if he would, home knowledge. wow. that's fast. because i actually in here when i say the meaning, you bring, does that fit to your experience? absolutely no. and you know, i to the extent that if somebody says, oh, rambles, he rambled, how do you ramble? what what what qualifies as the ramble? my thing is you pick a place that that is important to you matter how far away it is, you leave your house to get to. because i think that continuity of where you live, your normal life and this place you want to go to is really important and you spend a certain amount of time, preferably really studying and about and steeping yourself in what's in between the stories, the travel, the who moved, what their when the geology and the more meaning you bring you, the more meaning you

in return. it's it's a trade and it's not just the people you meet, it's when you arrive at at the susquehanna river and you've read a lot about that river and you know all that river is and you fully respect that river. it pays you back when you arrive at it. and it gives you things in return. it's it's a transaction. the regret is that we all couldn't go with neil on an american ramble. thank you. questions about road, the people, the places the was the question right we have to please use the microphone so that c-span can pick up our questions. we have another microphone here, just one. okay. okay. got to please. have you heard from anybody since the book has come out, any of the people you encountered? that's a really interesting

question. everybody here, the question. yeah. more importantly, have you heard from water guy from outside outside of reisterstown? a lot of people have said you should bring him the book. i'll have to do that. you know. so the one thing i haven't really tried to convey is my firm belief that are we all live under a certain sort of regulated time. that's the time that goes fast. the time we rule when it's over and then there is this other form of sort of touch time that you can seize yourself that has a higher. i don't know, resonance and meaning about it. and the whole of this walk took in that kind of time. so i know and i, i was in new york two nights ago and we had a party, the guy who took me across the hudson in a boat was at the party. i mean, i, i remained in touch like my friendship touch with probably i don't know 20 people from that thing.

the, i mean including the mennonite so i was up at the same school two weeks ago and 200 people came into the basement and i talked with them and then 50 of the kids sang songs for half an hour and i'm how did i form a bond with them? i was only with them for 45 minutes. two years ago, but i they invited me up last christmas and i went for a christmas concert. and i think a lot of it is if you put yourself out and really open and interested in other people and what they're about, they they respond. so follow up. so when you met people, obviously you put a youth. i'm sorry, did you tell them i'm i'm neil king i'm expert wall street journal reporter and i'm writing a book. at what point did conversation. yeah well, for the most part i kind of did at least i made it clear that i was walking that i was a writer and that became an issue later when i was writing a

book because some people had to go to and make sure they knew they were going to be in a book but that's a different thing. yeah, we have a marianne's coming around with a microphone microphone for oh, right here. yeah. neil, thank you for doing the walk and for sharing your story with us. i really enjoyed the book and. found one of the more beautiful parts it to be the dedication to your brother whom you said noticed things others missed. it seems some ways this walk for you was doing just that. absolutely. help us understand your perspective on life. perhaps after the walk. yeah you know, one of the things that was so interesting about the reading back reading was i, i recreate in the book, which you will now if you read it this walk that jefferson and james madison took lake champlain in 1792. and i was so fascinated by that thing because jefferson had had

a and then madison had dyspepsia or something like that. and both decided they wanted to go up there and. jefferson's travel were filled with. the most incredible details. i was just cheese. and like they go over the mountain and they come down to lake champlain. and he says, we've noticed there are no more persimmon trees on side of the mountain. and i'm like, what? like nobody notices the lack of persimmon trees. and i like and you know, he crossed the delaware here and he wrote, i heard the first katydid and i was like, wow. so it the spring he first the first katydid. and, you know, i read a of thoreau's jottings like that too he would throw his for noting when certain flowers first bloomed and when the last leaves are what trees at the end of the season and all of that stuff and you know, immersing yourself and it's an antidote you know, we spend so much of our time now. i'm not saying the things that we salivate over on television

aren't worth being worked up about, but there's something else going on in the world. it's also worth noticing. and, you know, the more you at least counterbalance with that kind of of tactile while, you know, the unfolding of the season, the whole event is just and that it was an exercise in noticing for the most part you were oh let's forget the water bottle jerk pretty well receive it absolutely right. yeah. did you ever think about what your reception would have been if. you were a 55 year old black man walking doing that. well, i did a lot and i wrote about that a fair bit. i have two thoughts on that subject. the one is i wouldn't for a second act as if i faced risk being what i am walking down the road than all kinds of other people. black man, you could go on. i probably face the least risk of anyone actually in some ways,

because for a while i'm trained in this kind of thing. i'm a journalist for you on other hand, i would not just hesitate but not say any one set of type of person shouldn't do this. and it's really amazing. i did an event in philadelphia and there was a guy probably 55 year old black man sitting in the front and. he asked me a question along those lines and when i answered he came over and introduced himself and i knew his name because he had actually last year walked from harriet tubman's birthplace to the canadian border and he introduced himself, ken johnston. and i said, oh my god, we have communicated. i hadn't met him in person. i said, why did you ask me that question? he said, i just wanted see your response. but part of what his point is, if you're predisposed opposed to doing something like this and and feel that you're good at it, that's a different i mean, on the other hand, you know, we've

all seen the atrocious things that have happened in the last few weeks where and that level of just like insane. if you see the world in a way, you fear or feel fear for a person looking through your door them and you just shoot as a result of that. that's like a mental illness, right? and that is out there. and the one thing i didn't do, by the way when you take a walk like this you notice that the people that are the most intent on multiple no trespassing signs generally live houses that you would never want to go onto their property like you know you have got like five cars and their dogs at the ends of like i'm not going to go on your property, you know, and they're like no trespassing everywhere. okay. got it. right. yeah, great. neil, you just said it was it was an exercise in noticing and heard you quote mary oliver before attention is the beginning of devotion. you know, life, as we all know,

has a way of of the noise it the distraction of it, the just incessant bombardment can numb us all having done this, do you feel you can access that more quickly, more readily, that sort of paying attention, steeling yourself and getting back to that place? yeah, i do. i'm not acting as if i might, you know, on some higher plane or something like that. i do think it like kind of carved out a space of sorts that is, but that's also i'm not acting as if i don't get into all the distractions that everybody else suffers from. and one of the ironies of having written this book about walking to new york is i've now spent hundreds hours driving back and forth between place and. you know, this morning i drove back down through most of the same territory. and, you know, it's just it's just brain dead time that is just it evaporates know and that

again, going to the different forms of time time, time spent going back and in a car is not remembered. time it's that time that, you know, is going be the last thing you think about in your final moments on earth. weirdly enough, this walk probably will be among those. and, you know, it's this crystalline quality that certain stretches of time can have. the next question is from someone who is mentioned in your book, more than mention bill press. first time, long time talk reference for a long time listener. first time caller exactly. like bob woodward, my business partner. we did a radio show for 14 years together. indeed, indeed was a great run. neal i've been struck by how many specific experiences you had on your journey that resonate with current events. you mentioned somebody getting shot through somebody's front

door, for example. the one thing i'm thinking about is we're finally having a serious debate about solitary confinement meant. and you had an experience about the origination of that can you talk about any one of those experiences that seemed inform your opinion or your observations about any current? wow wow, you can use the one i gave you. well, it's that solitary confinement would be one example. okay. yeah, there is. i mean, just a pause on that i had to wrestle a little bit with how i would deal with the city of philadelphia so it's across there's like you could write, you know, books about that. so and i was i decided to focus in large part on the fact that there was this really fascinating prison. there, eastern state penitentiary, which ironically was one of the things that drew alexis tocqueville to come to the united states, because he was in the u.s., too, to write about our prison system. and it was only when he was here

looking at our prisons that it became taken by the democracy aspect of american design to write about that. but that you know, at that time, i solitary confinement was seen as like a very humane thing because the alternative, it was being thrown into a place like things where you are surrounded, all kinds of other criminals. there are going to be beating on you while you were, you know, was like a a matter of be like if all of us were in prison, i would have locked the in here. we would be all together and we would you know. you would always prefer to be in a solitary. but yeah, that's an interesting example of how our view these things can change so much and what something that seemed at one time to be humane becomes anything but over time and i certainly would see it that way now. yes, sir. hi, john. hey, bill. neal, what a wonderful story. and i'm waiting to hear bill's memoirs.

i'm going to come come to early. look in 81. when i finished undergrad, i had the best job of my life. i traveled around the country, 44 states selling hundred dollars sets of cookware to single women. i did it as it was like is hope to stardom. but but one thing i learned there were there were these kind of regional quirks. they were usually i'm selling units to a mom and her daughter. if would, say, in the rio grande valley, they would get up all of their friends their neighbors would come over and i'd be talking to a 12 or 15 people when i was in south louisiana. would every every house i went into the only word that happened in the country, the dads bring me a beer. when you were like north of burlington in durham, they have like the north, just the oddest accent ever heard. people sound like they have morals in their mouth and in anywhere. i'd say these quirks around the country were there like did you

notice like when were walking around it it seemed like how was south jersey different from north jersey? how was lancaster different from 30 miles away? yeah, no. i write about what i called micro nations and i actually gave to these various places, i call it the kind of greater washington, greater capital. and then when i got into maryland, it was self land because i was actually, you know, northern maryland is actually quite southern in a lot of ways on, that area of york county as well. and, you know, going across the susquehanna from york county into lancaster county, i think is one of the biggest cultural leaps anywhere in the country, because you're going from a very frontier ish place with a very different of approaching farms and land management to this very prim and very exacting anabaptist way of farming and the were like really big and proud. and these huge grain silos. it was a striking difference and

i, i sort of trace those as i go somewhat in cheek. i'm, i'm, i'm walking, i'm not sociologist, but you know, the imprint of who settled where when is is a very much of an ongoing feature in american life everywhere. you know and and it may that way for centuries more despite all the movement you know some of these ideas just don't really change not much another thing that raise your hand if you have a question i'm here answering with the nothing that struck me and that you point out is you can be walking in you're talking to the people you're to think about the history but but you have sometimes stop and recognize that what's really striking is the land. yeah yeah this land of ours is beautiful and of ours which you certainly saw a lot of them came to appreciate. yeah, i have one living at the end of the book where, i kind of summarize some of my

conclusions. i have little riff on how it wasn't really, you know, we americans like to think it was the principles that we came across the atlantic with whether it was like adam smith or or our them and strength and our resourcefulness, our persistence and all that. and i'm not disputing that those things were of some value, but the one thing i think we diminish is the place that we found and you know, that was by the way, very inhabited from the first encounters all along the coastline, i think way more inhabited than a lot of people are aware. but those people had done no damage to the place and. so we arrived on these shores that where so much of our greatness that was to come because of this place right. and we've some ways done that place relatively few favors and we continue to do it relatively

few favor. but the beauty of the land really. absolutely. yeah. here we go on this side of the room with a question right here. okay. thank you for just waiting. just a second. american ramble by the author. yes. so i grew in the west. and as you're talking about this, i'm thinking this is a very east coast kind of a thing. yeah. how do you think this trip would have been different in different parts of the u.s.? yeah, very. you know, i grew up in colorado and i'm like 14. yeah, yeah, yeah. i, you know what one of the things is that and i just read by the way, there was a guy, rinker bock, who wrote a fantastic book called, the oregon trail, which i couldn't recommend. it's such a good description of that, that whole passage. and he then did it, his brother in a in a covered wagon. it's really fantastic story,

but, you know, once you go further west, the density of the stories becomes less. and particularly when you get out into the more mountain west, there's just not as to write about in terms the human side of it. so you would have to travel larger distances to have kind the narrative thread. in my case i was, you know, there was all these civil sites, there's the construction of the railroad, there's the canals, there's the all revolutionary war sites, there's so much that was. but i'm really drawn to doing some things out that way. so longer, no longer walks the ramble, a walk, memory and renewal. neil king and thank you, neal. thank you. thank you for doing the walk thank you for writing the book and thanks for being here. thank you all for being here.

this is amazing. amazing city books for this year and they will be glad join you and and sign your book for you. and thank you all for coming. we'll see you at the next edition of the talk of the hill. good. thanks. all right. oh, fantastic. thank you. i really.

well, it has been my name is julio ottino and that, you know, the mccormick sch