Alan Cook on Deep Planning for the Walk

Alan Cook, my indispensable manager, offers his thoughts on the walk in this email, which he's allowing me to post here for everyone to read (and, of course, to comment on).

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Kevin,

Now that the Walk is going into Deep Planning mode, let me express some of my thoughts about strategy for KW Phase II. (Feel free to post as much of this message as you want on the blog, in one or more installments.)

It seems to me that you have a number of different goals/objectives for the walk -- which, while not necessarily contradictory, pull in different directions (and in some cases, lead to dilemmas on particular issues.)

The four goals I see are:
(1)to WALK across the U.S.
(2)to make a "self-planning" "pilgrimage" across the U.S.
(3)to cross the U.S., visiting as many religious institutions along the way as possible
(4)to explore the religious diversity of the U.S.

To take them one by one, and say why I think they're different:

(1)TO WALK ACROSS THE U.S.
This can and has been done. However, ALL of the people I'm aware of who've done it (Steve Vaught, etc), have had much more ample funding than you have, have planned their routes in great detail in advance, and have had an extensive support team, including a chase car driver for at least part of the way. Moreover, the walkers who have been successful [have] been single-minded in pursuit of that goal. If you read Steve V.'s blog, you'll see that for much of the time he had no other thought in his head than putting one foot ahead of the other and getting down the road. I don't know of anyone who's incorporated other major goals (interviewing people, etc) into a walk of this sort.

(2)THE SELF-PLANNING PILGRIMAGE
Here I'm thinking about the adventure, hero's journey, whatever-comes-next, serendipitous, relying-on-the-kindness-of-strangers aspect of the trip. A few thoughts:
-- There's somewhat of a tension here with Goal (1), because as you've discovered, one of the forms of aid that people are most likely to offer to a traveler is a RIDE.
-- You originally planned to rely on offers of places to stay and for directions for where to go next. We've seen that that doesn't work. In populated areas, [a] self-planning trip requires that you either spend a LOT of money on motels, [or] go the route of genuine vagabondage: homeless shelters, soup kitchens, sleeping under bridges, the occasional night in jail. I understand your reluctance to go that route, and I wouldn't advise you to do it. In unpopulated areas, the choice is between having a chase car to ferry you to a motel/campground at night, or carrying a lot of survival-type equipment that isn't a lot of use on most of the route (and still risking encounters with the law.)

The bottom line: self-planning won't work without a lot more money. The alternative: detailed advance planning prior to the Walk. The trick will be to combine advance planning with flexibility: i.e, to have a number of potential hosts lined up in an area as long as possible beforehand, and the ability to stay in contact with them so as to make more definite plans as your date of arrival gets closer. We can talk in more detail about how this would work; one strategy would be to choose a route, i.e, deciding what states you'll be going through, and then planning state by state.

(3)TO CROSS THE U.S., VISITING RELIGIOUS INSTITUTIONS ALONG THE WAY
Breaking it down, there are actually a number of different things you were hoping for here:

(a)to be offered a place to stay;
(b)to interview clergy and laypeople;
(c)to participate in worship and practice.

Re (a): We've seen that blind mailings don't work very well, and I think we have to accept that even with maximum publicity, not that many RIs are going to be willing to host you in the manner that you originally envisioned. Which is why I think it's a better idea to locate CSers who have religious affiliations, and have them arrange for visits to their congregations, etc.

Re (b): Interviewing people, and being able to post the interviews to the internet, requires carrying some heavy high-tech equipment that I can't imagine either a serious cross-country walker or a homeless person encumbering themselves with. In other words, electronic media pretty much commit you to a chase car to haul your stuff around.

Also, if you want to interview the most knowledgeable and interesting people, it would help to seek them out in advance, and set up appointments for interviews.

re (c): Just about all RIs welcome visitors to their regular services, and you might get to talk to people there. So you might want to show up in town, check out the calendars of the local churches, and decide on places to visit. You could probably stay pretty busy for a while in any town of any size. The one-night-per-stop policy reduces your chances of having insightful interviews, or participating in various aspects of the local practices.

(4)TO EXPLORE THE RELIGIOUS DIVERSITY OF THE U.S.
I make this one distinct from (3) because, as you're aware, the diversity of American religion is not evenly distributed across the continent. Rather, non-mainstream religions are heavily concentrated in major urban areas. The exceptions are a few monasteries, meditation centers, and the like in remote areas. While these exist, they're few and far between, relative to the vastness of the country; they require advance planning to visit and frequently charge fees, albeit modest ones, to stay there. If one wanted to talk to representatives of as many of the different religions practiced in this country as possible, one would do far better to spend six months each in NYC, LA, Chicago and Houston than two years crossing the entire continent.

Not that I'm proposing that you do that: I'm just using that as an illustration of how this Walk goal is in a certain tension with the other goals. The practical question here is: To what extent should you deliberately seek out diversity? To what extend should you allow that goal to determine your itinerary, both in terms of places visited, and amount of time spent in each place?

I realize this e-mail has gotten more disjointed as I've gone along. Basically, I'm just trying to suggest some higher-level reflection on what the point of the Walk is, and using that to inform the concrete planning in the months ahead.

Enjoy being back in Alexandria, and being an armchair traveler for a while.

A.

P.S.: I'll get back to you on the skepticism stuff.

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Reactions are welcome. I'll likely add my own thoughts later, but computer access is limited. Dad plugged his computer back in; the family still has Verizon DSL service, but will be switching to Verizon FiOS in late October. I can't rely on having consistent access to this computer, so I ask your pardon if a great deal of blogging gets done from the BlackBerry. Even B-Berry blogging may be problematic, as our neighborhood lies in one of those "dead zones" that Verizon claims, in those funny, horror-movie spoof commercials, to be able to handle. We'll know more in October.


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