Walk to New York

"In the spring of 2002, in a mid-life funk and in search of meaningful experience, writer Charles Wilkins walked east from his home in Thunder Bay, Ontario, and did not stop until he reached New York City. This is the compelling, sometimes hilarious account of an adventure that began in snowstorms and gale-level winds on the north shore of the world's largest body of fresh water, and ended in hundred-degree heat amid celebrating Hispanics and bare-breasted lesbians. Between the land of wolves and moose and the book's climactic scenes on the streets of Harlem and the Bronx, Wilkins meets and introduces a Chaucerian cast of characters - poets, hillbillies, corporate executives gone AWOL from the rat-race, a baronial black African recently released from one of the vilest torture prisons in Africa. He visits wilderness mansions, mountain shacks, a Toronto cemetery where he once raised havoc as a teenaged employee, and the Baseball Hall of Fame. Throughout, he applies his deft, often fanciful, touch as a storyteller and offers graceful musings on walking - its history, its culture, its decline, and perhaps most of all its ability to replenish the senses and reconstitute a world shrunken by cyberspace and jet travel/"--Jacket.

"The eloquent and irreverent story of a 2,200-kilometre journey on foot from the wilds of northwestern Ontario to Manhattan Island. In the spring of 2002, in a mid-life funk and in search of meaningful experience, writer Charles Wilkins walked east from his home in Thunder Bay, Ontario, and did not stop until he reached New York City. ... Throughout, he applies his deft, often fanciful, touch as a storyteller and offers graceful musings on walking-its history, its culture, its decline, and perhaps most of all its ability to replenish the senses and reconstitute a world shrunken by cyberspace and jet travel."--Amazon.ca prod. desc.