The last great walk The true story of a 1909 walk from New York to San Francisco, and why it matters today

TRAVEL WRITING USED TO BE EASIER. Back in the 19th century, all Richard Burton had to do was survive hostile natives throwing a javelin through his cheek, slay the wildest of animals and endure mysterious and grotesque illness to come back with a rousing tale of darkest Africa. And even as late as the dawn of the last century, Frank Worsley, Ernest Shackleton's captain, merely had to carry on through a winter trapped on the Antarctic ice, sail 800 miles in an open lifeboat across the Southern Ocean, then traverse South Georgia Island under moonlight in order to reach help and write about his ordeal. But in our Google Maps world, even once sleepy places like poor Provence have become hackneyed and played out. There is, of course, nothing new under the sun. Since everyone now chronicles his travels for any and all to read about, as well as serves as his own National Geographic photographer, the genre of travel writing has had to morph and stretch to maintain any currency. The six books here all come at travel from different perspectives, and each helps illuminate why travel, and travel writing, still matter. David Greene's MIDNIGHT IN SIBERIA: A Train Journey Into the Heart of Russia (Norton, $26.95) employs a classic travel-narrative device - this time along the almost 6,000-mile Trans-Siberian Railway. The epic journey by rail has proved fertile ground for writers in the past, and here it serves Greene well as he returns to Russia (he was National Public Radio's Moscow bureau chief for nearly three years) to try to understand exactly what it is about this maddening country that captured his heart. Greene accepts the famous Russian brusqueness (read: rudeness) and is quick to point out the endless headaches and hassles of Russian society - like the "uniformly unpleasant police" and "the intense love of documents" that are "a thoroughly annoying relic of Soviet bureaucracy" - but he does so with unapologetic infatuation on his sleeve. More than once, while reading, I was reminded of the contention that a true traveler is one who is a better version of himself while on the road, and I couldn't help wondering if Greene would be such a good sport about hostile railway workers and snoring passengers if he was chugging through Ohio. A diligent reporter and an appreciative guest, Greene enlists the help of a Russian travel partner, Sergei - a co-worker, friend, translator and protector - and this Russian Sancho Panza proves a natural storytelling foil. This being Russia, there are tales of babushkas - "They are the engine and spirit of Russia's older generation, and in some ways of the whole country" - and of vodka-soaked nights, but it's meetings with people like Ella Stroganova that resonate with both author and reader. "Progress makes a person absolutely weak," she tells Greene. "He loses his strength because he no longer needs to think how to survive." And then there's the seemingly throwaway encounter with a hotel clerk in a rural backwater who has never heard of Wi-Fi, yet goes out of her way to accommodate. Moving inexorably eastward, deeper into winter and Mother Russia, a composite of Russian life begins to emerge that's best summed up by the man who informs Greene that suffering tragedy is "the way the soul of a Russian person is built." The author, decidedly American in his optimism, reads of a 19th-century revolutionary who anticipated "the end that heralds the dawn," and is ultimately left to wonder, "What is the dawn in a place where someone believes it is his 'duty' to contribute to the 'annals of sorrow' in his country?" An epic journey of another sort is the subject of Wayne Curtis's THE LAST GREAT WALK: The True Story of a 1909 Walk From New York to San Francisco, and Why It Matters Today (Rodale, $24.99). In the early 20th century, Edward Payson Weston, a slight, elderly, charismatic man given to fancy dress, captured the attention of the nation with his journey on foot across the country. Curtis, a contributing editor at The Atlantic, doesn't set out to retrace that famous walk - he follows Weston's route only a few miles, from Manhattan to Westchester County, before exhausting himself. Instead, through extensive research, he places Weston's journey in the context of its time, and beyond. "The allure and popularity of walking matches in post-Civil War America is hard to overstate," Curtis writes. And Weston was the walking king. He began his professional walking career after losing a wager on the outcome of the 1860 presidential election. In order to square the bet, he was forced to walk, in 10 days, from Boston to Washington for Lincoln's inauguration. Although he missed the swearing-in by a few hours, Weston did meet the new president during his visit. Lincoln admired the young man's "great powers of endurance," a star was born and America's "golden age" of walking began. Weston was a natural self-promoter, an early advocate of product placement and one hell of a walker, averaging up to 40 miles a day. Tens of thousands turned out to greet him in Chicago after he walked from Maine in 1867, and in Cleveland he was once forced to flee spectators who "became a wild surging mob." But by 1908, Weston was nearly 70 and the world was changing fast. The automobile was about to transform not only the country but - and this is Curtis's larger point - human beings in the process. Curtis frames Weston's walk as a bridge between the ages, and his contention that "not walking . . . is one of the most radical things we've ever decided to do" underscores this book. Just as the mind is prone to digressions on a long walk, so Curtis spirals off into eddies on the seductive evils of La-Z-Boy recliners, aging, walkability websites and even the evolution of perambulation itself. But this story belongs to Weston, and Curtis brings the seemingly ageless dandy to sprightly life as he withstands all that the elements, poor roads, overzealous crowds and inept support teams can hurl at him. It's not so much the idea of the journey, or even movement, that Alastair Bonnett has on his mind in unruly PLACES: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $25). Here, it's all about location, location, location. Bonnett is a professor of social geography at New-castle University, and in a series of brief essays he takes the reader to "the ends of the earth and the other side of the street," illuminating why it is that place matters and demands our attention - lest we lose the very essence of who we are. Bonnett believes that "in a fully discovered world, exploration does not stop; it just has to be reinvented," and he demonstrates a keen ability to see meaning in spots most of us would pass without a second thought. A parking lot at Los Angeles International Airport, for example, conveys a sense of our continuing displacement. There, Bonnett contends, "it becomes ever easier to be convinced that mobility - ceaseless, on-the-go motion - has intrinsic value: that going to places is more important than being in places." He looks at the "paradoxical" relevance of "dead cities," ghost towns in China and North Korea, and marvels at islands that never existed yet appeared on maps well into our satellite-savvy 21st century. Bonnett laments the relentless development that serves to "remove the memories, stories and connections that hold people together, socially as well as individually." In Mecca, he points out that "over the past two decades around 95 percent of the ancient city . . . has been demolished." If it's true, as he asserts, that "in the face of puritanical ideologies, whether political or religious, the past takes on a subversive and unruly quality," this is disquieting news. Along a barren strip of lifeless earth beside a highway in Israel's Negev Desert, Bonnett sees "the ferocity and ingenuity with which people hang on to the place they care about" when a Bedouin village (not listed on any map) reconstitutes itself again and again after being razed by Israeli bulldozers. "Place isn't a stage, a backdrop against which we act out our lives," Bonnett concludes. "It is part of what we are." Two anthologies are among the year's finest new travel books. The annual BEST AMERICAN TRAVEL WRITING (Mariner, paper, $14.95) has been the gold standard for short-form travel writing from newspapers, magazines and the Internet since its inception 15 years ago. This year's guest editor - a different one is chosen for each volume - is none other than the godfather of contemporary American travel writing, Paul Theroux. A generation of travel writers owes a debt to Theroux's immersive, first-person narratives, captured with unflinching, sometimes merciless candor. Theroux has lamented travel literature that extols what he calls the "cupcake culture" of holiday making, writing that glorifies spa treatments at posh resorts or the compiling of 10-best lists in lieu of some of travel's more hard-won rewards. In the end, what captures Theroux, and what fills this volume, are compelling yarns from the road - the more arduous the better. In the interest of full disclosure: My own brief article on Calcutta is included. But it's entries like Amanda Lindhout's harrowing, heroic account of being kidnapped in Somalia (co-authored with Sara Corbett) and Michael Paterniti's transcendent recollection of finding his corner of the sky in northern Spain that give the 2014 edition of "Best American Travel" its meat. A deeply personal essay by David Sedaris on losing a sibling reconceives the notion of what a travel story can be, while Harrison Scott Key writes hilariously about a Greyhound bus journey ("Bus People are nothing like Airplane People"). Steven Rinella displays openhearted zeal when he buys a dilapidated log cabin, sight unseen, in remotest Alaska. It's the kind of decision only youth could support, and only love sustain. Rinella grows to look upon the place "like a rodeo rider might view a bull that had just bruised him up. He knows it's a lot of trouble and that it doesn't make a lick of sense, but he's already planning another ride." The same might be said of travel itself, and Thomas Swick gives us an insightful essay on the very notion of taking to the road. He speaks of the boredom - "Travel, like football, is best in highlight form" - but goes on to illuminate the wistfulness and melancholy elicited by travel, as well as the heightened sensitivity it encourages. In essay after essay, a theme runs through this volume - people journey, sometimes great distances, often enduring great hardship, only to be redeemed by human connection. Another fine anthology has been compiled by one of the travel industry's more respected authorities. Don George has served as travel editor at The San Francisco Examiner and at Salon.com. The essays he's collected in AN INNOCENT ABROAD: Life-Changing Trips From 35 Great Writers (Lonely Planet, paper, $15.99) hint at the road's possibilities. There are tales here from such travel-writing royalty as Jan Morris, recalling her first trip to Venice as a soldier in the British Army: "It was not the grandeur of the place that captured me, but the strange lapping of its waters, the secrecy of it all. . . . A sudden burst of sunlight over the waterfront affected me like a melody direct from Mozart." And Tim Cahill, with typically poignant humor, conjures - or, rather, fails to conjure - the location of a transcendent moment from his youth: "the mountain or the deep valley or whatever it was" that "shimmered in my vision," in a story called "The Place I'll Never Forget." Dave Eggers offers an intimate snippet about a whorehouse in Thailand: "He drew her a few pictures in his notebook. . . . Frustrated by their inability to say anything to each other, they lay side by side for the remainder of their time." And Richard Ford writes a wistful, hilarious and slightly disturbing tale of an ill-conceived road trip into the Atlas Mountains of Morocco that features entrepreneuring locals, large bricks of hash and a very naïve American couple. The stories here can read like snapshots, isolated moments illuminated, yet there's a cumulative effect at work, reminding the reader that it's often the seemingly trivial, the fleeting instance, that lodges in our psyches and most reveals us to ourselves. Seen through the patina cast by the recollection of vanished youth, many stories reflect a pre-9/11 world, when we were all so much more innocent abroad, and happily so. Yet other tales have a more immediate resonance. Jim Benning's moving story about driving through Belgium with his father, a veteran of World War II, has an almost confessional intimacy. And Cheryl Strayed recalls a recent, unplanned trip to the mountains of Andorra the day after her 45th birthday, the age her mother was when she died. Innocence is something we yearn to be rid of, until we've lost it. One of travel's greatest virtues, its ability to make us wide-eyed again when we least expect it, is captured in this volume. But when the road eventually grows tiresome, as the road invariably must, the ever probing Pico Iyer sets out to explore what, on first glance, might seem far more familiar terrain. In THE ART OF STILLNESS: Adventures in Going Nowhere (TED Books/Simon & Schuster, $14.99), this global citizen - Iyer is of Indian descent, was raised in California, educated in England and America and now lives in Japan - looks at the value of simply staying put. In lesser hands this tiny volume might be a throwaway of glib, "new age" comfort-speak, but like Henry David Thoreau's equally brief classic on another seemingly mundane exercise - walking - Iyer's thoughtful nature leads him to peel back layer upon layer, nodding toward the infinite. Designed to be digested in a single sitting - as we are told early on - the book ricochets from Mark Rothko to Thomas Merton to Leonard Cohen to Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius to Shakespeare and finally William James, all within a few paragraphs. A lifelong traveler who's been "crossing continents alone since the age of 9," a man who has always found "delight in movement," Iyer pauses to consider the prospect that going nowhere is "the grand adventure that makes sense of everywhere else." He is traveler enough to know that "every time I take a trip, the experience acquires meaning and grows deeper only after I get back home and, sitting still, begin to convert the sights I've seen into lasting insights." Iyer is quick to remind those of us with itchy feet that "stillness has nothing to do with settledness or stasis." On the contrary, "Nowhere," he warns, "can be scary. . . . Anyone who longs to see the light is signing on for many long nights alone in the dark." He concludes that "in an age of constant movement, nothing is more urgent than sitting still." If, as he suggests, "heaven is the place where you think of nowhere else," perhaps it's worth a wanderer's consideration. Plunging effortlessly beneath platitudes, this waferthin volume reminds us of what might just be the greatest paradox of travel - after all our road running, after all our flights of fancy to the farthest corners of the globe, after all our touring, our seeking and questing, perhaps, just perhaps, fellow travelers, there really is no place like home. Andrew McCarthy is the author of "The Longest Way Home: One Man's Quest for the Courage to Settle Down."

Journalist Curtis (And a Bottle of Rum) uses the story of Edward Payson Weston's trek across America in 1909 at the age of 70 as a jumping off point for musings on the lost art of walking, specifically how we choose to get around and what's lost in service of faster modes of transit. While Weston's 104-day journey is not particularly riveting, it serves as an anchor as the author explores peripheral topics like evolutionary theory on how and why our hominid ancestors first walked upright, the dangers of a sedentary lifestyle, and innovative crosswalk technology. Curtis presents Weston's walk as the end of an era, or rather the beginning of "the big bang of American transportation" and the battle for space in the streets between motorist and pedestrian. He then more optimistically points to recent efforts to increase "walkability" in cities, centered around the community-building aspect of pedestrianism. With a few tangential exceptions, Curtis's meandering approach to his subject matter works out, aided by his sense of humor and Weston's own unique brand of quirky belligerence. Agent: Jennifer Gates, Zachary Shuster Harmsworth. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

CHAPTER 1 LEAVING NEW YORK If Edward Payson Weston succeeds in reaching California on foot he will have demonstrated one thing at least, and that is that some old gentlemen have stranger notions than others. --CHICAGO DAILY TRIBUNE, April 28, 1909 March 15, 1909. At twenty-five minutes past four on a clear, chilly late winter afternoon in 1909, an elderly man walked out of the main New York post office, opposite City Hall in lower Manhattan, and paused for a moment on the uppermost step. He was wiry and taut and stood about five foot eight and weighed around 125 £ds. He wasn't remarkable physically, but he wasn't the sort to blend in, either. On this March day, he wore a blue frock coat and a large white hat ("a sombrero in all but color," as an observer described it) and what one reporter referred to as "mouse-colored leggings." In one hand he held a small cane, and with the other he fidgeted with his trademark mustache, a large and silvery thing that draped his upper lip, resting a few inches below twinkling eyes, which seemed to find private amusement in public commotion. Edward Payson Weston was planning to take a long walk. He was off to a late start--inside the post office, a crowd of well-wishers had mobbed him, delaying his departure. Edward Morgan, the city's postmaster, had emerged from his office to greet him personally. With a wry smile, Morgan handed Weston an envelope containing a letter, asking that he deliver it to his counterpart in San Francisco. Morgan reminded Weston that he could collect eighty-five cents upon delivery. Everybody laughed. Morgan also wished Weston well on his seventieth birthday. A few hurrahs were offered. And once the small talk and good wishes tapered off, Weston said his farewells and exited the post office through tall doors. Ahead of him was City Hall, with its Corinthian and Ionic pilasters, a neoclassical pile with French trimmings; above him, the mansard-roofed post office stood with the whimsical sternness of a bulldog wearing a derby hat. But people, more than his Beaux Arts surroundings, defined the scene: A minor mob had followed Weston out of the building, and a far larger and more raucous crowd had amassed out front to witness the first steps of his walk. One reporter sent to cover the scene estimated that ten thousand spectators clogged the streets and sidewalks around the post office, cheering and clamoring for a glimpse of the elderly walker. When he emerged, they let loose with a roar and pressed in to get a better look. "For a moment it seemed that the police guard would be swept away," the New York Times reported. Weston later admitted that the commotion "frightened [him] to death," his anxiety no doubt com£ded by his fear that an eager, oafish spectator might step on one of his feet and hobble him before he even began. This had happened on a long walk he had undertaken two years earlier, and the experience left him skittish and wary. Weston at last doffed his hat to the crowd, then plunged down the steps and into the mob. He slowly made his way forward, thanks chiefly to the brawn of two strapping policemen, longtime friends Ben and Dan Rinn. The Rinns were minor celebrities in their own right--a few years earlier, they had been first on the scene when President Teddy Roosevelt's horse-drawn carriage was broadsided by a streetcar in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. The brothers happened to be nearby on vacation; one ran for medical help, and the other held the streetcar motorman captive until local authorities arrived. (The accident earned a small footnote in history: A Secret Service agent died in the crash, becoming the first agent killed in the line of duty.) A posse of New York mounted police officers aided the Rinns in crowd control, riding into the rabble and parting a way for the walker. Veterans of Company B of the Army's Seventh Regiment, led by one Captain James E. Schuyler, also did their best to keep the crowd at bay. Weston had aided the company in a small espionage matter years ago, and some of the regiment had reunited to escort him on the start of his journey. The regiment had also hired the Metropolitan Band to follow him during the first part of his walk, and it was noisily striking up a brassy tune, which attracted even more gawkers and followers. As a path opened in the crowd, Weston started to gather speed and gradually hit a stride of about three and a half to four miles per hour. "He is a marvel of endurance and determination," wrote an admiring reporter in the Times-Leader of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. "He is more like a tireless machine than a human being." At minimum, Weston would need to be a marvel. His plan was to walk that afternoon and evening to Tarrytown, about thirty miles up the Hudson River. He would follow the Hudson the next day toward Albany, then turn west and go on to Chicago and then on and on, across the windswept plains and over and around the formidable Rockies and High Sierras, eventually arriving in San Francisco after some four thousand miles on foot. He told everyone who would listen that he was confident he would make the trip within a hundred days. This pace would preclude much dawdling, and essentially meant he'd have to walk forty miles every day, not counting Sundays, which he always took as a day of rest. Even if he succeeded, this trek would not be his longest walk--years before, in England, he had once covered five thousand miles in a hundred days--but this would surely be his most challenging. And by any measure, it would require a lot of steps: approximately 8.2 million, or more than eighty thousand each and every day of his walk. A typical American today walks an average of roughly five thousand steps daily, or somewhat less than two and a half miles, doing errands, foraging around in the kitchen, chasing after a football in the backyard, crossing the shopping mall parking lot, walking down a row of cubicles to discuss with a colleague a recent memo. Weston would do that sixteenfold every day. What's more, Weston embarked on his cross-country trek in an era when the nation was not well suited for transcontinental crossings unless you were traveling by rail, in which case you could argue that the cross-country transportation network was at its apogee. While sleeping in a plush, well-tended Pullman car, you could make it from New York to Chicago in sixteen hours. (Today, it takes about twenty hours on Amtrak.) Three years earlier a train had made it from San Francisco to New York in seventy-one and a half hours, and the Harriman Special regularly made the trip in five days. But walking anywhere outside cities could be slow and sloggy. Roadways were primitive at best--outside the cities, hardly any long-distance routes were paved with macadam or brick or cobblestones. Most were composed of loosely compressed dirt liable to turn rutty when wet and dusty when dry. Hotels and inns could be found in the small towns Weston passed through in the East and Upper Midwest, but, like the towns themselves, these became more fugitive and widely scattered as he pushed westward, and he would have to count more on the kindness of strangers. Weston faced another danger: Noisy, belching horseless carriages were taking to the roadways in ever-greater numbers. In 1909, some 126,593 cars had been manufactured--more than half of them touring cars, acquired for recreation rather than commerce. Inexperienced drivers, who had to be wealthy enough to splurge on what was still a novelty, would weave pell- mell down rough, potholed streets. Walkers, once kings of the road, now found that they had to scuttle to the margins to avoid being hit, and almost every day some metropolitan newspaper ran an account or two of a pedestrian run over by an automobile. A 1905 book titled Automobilia was filled with poems, anecdotes, and jokes involving these new conveyances. Among them: "Have you made a record with your automobile yet?" someone asks a driver. "Oh, yes" is the cheerful reply. "Two dogs, a chicken, three small boys, and a street cleaner, all run over in less than an hour." The day Weston left New York, a man named Arthur Subers was crossing a street in downtown Chicago on foot. He was run over by not one, not two, but by three automobiles in succession. Subers miraculously escaped without serious injury. It was, perhaps, the first triple pedestrian-automobile accident in history. Subers had gotten in the way of progress, and progress would not be stopped. Three weeks before Weston set off from the front steps of the New York post office, an essay appeared on the front page of the influential Parisian newspaper Le Figaro. It was titled "The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism." The essay was by and large an obituary for anything that moved at a pedestrian's pace, and a celebration of anything that zipped along speedily. It was written by a lavishly mustachioed Italian writer and theorist named Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, who recounted a recent episode in which he was driving an automobile and encountered two oncoming cyclists-- "their stupid swaying got in my way," as he put it. He avoided them, but his car ended up in a muddy gully. He emerged from the "maternal ditch" as if being born anew into a world where speed was now sacred--it ennobled man, and those who did not embrace swiftness (like those on their stupid bikes) would be left behind and one day awaken to find themselves on the refuse heap of civilization. The decaying past was slow moving, embraced only by nostalgists who longed for a static landscape and lowing cows. "We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed," Marinetti wrote. "A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath . . . a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace." Marinetti and his followers saw in speed not just dispatch and expediency and inevitability, but also an aesthetic and moral good, and something that would improve the lot of all mankind. Unknowingly, he was laying the theoretical foundations for streamlined designs in cars and trains and for ever-widening road networks. In his other writings he noted that "slowness is naturally foul," and he heralded "a new good: speed, and a new evil: slowness." Marinetti and his followers called for a great public works project in Venice to fill in "the small, stinking canals with the rubble from the old, collapsing and leprous palaces." To the north, he wanted to straighten the Danube, allowing it to flow unhindered and expeditiously. The future was sleek, the future was fast. For a time, Marinetti was influential among the emerging fascist movement, and he pushed (unsuccessfully) for futurism to be made the official state art of Italy. It was into this world that Weston, the walker, walked. "Walking with elasticity of step and freedom of action that was the absolute contradiction of age," Weston pushed on through lower Manhattan with "a springy step and a generally jaunty air," according to the New York Times. Another correspondent wrote that he looked "as blithe and as vigorous as most men half his age." The Atlanta Constitution marveled at the huge crowd that had turned out to "cheer the plucky old trudger." The Boston Globe's headline: "Weston Off on His Long Walk; . . . Elderly Athlete Cheered by Thousands at Start." Behind the public tumult and outward pep, Weston's nerves were undoubtedly running high. While publicly confident, he was privately worried about whether he'd actually make even the first thirty miles to Tarrytown. He'd started preparing for this walk months earlier by walking twenty-five or thirty miles daily. At the outset of his walk he was on his home turf, having lived in New York for many years. But his warm-up walks hadn't gone terrifically well. One of his feet came up sore, and his doctor advised him to ease up on his training regimen. So Weston walked just five miles daily immediately prior to his departure, and five miles was barely a warm-up for a walker of his stamina and habits. The afternoon he departed, he later said, he was still "suffering from great pain," although he was confident he could work through it; he always did, he said, insisting that a good walk was the best tonic known to mankind and could cure just about any malady, including that of the foot. Surrounded by the jostling crowd, Weston turned north up Lafayette Street past City Hall and continued onward to Fourth Avenue. Those on the fringe would surge ahead and jockey for the best viewing positions along the curb to watch as Weston passed by. He soldiered on through the teeming assemblage, glancing upward at the buildings from time to time to ensure he was still headed in the right direction. All the commotion no doubt provoked some nostalgia. Decades earlier, from the 1860s through the 1880s, a much-younger Weston had drawn crowds even larger than these--along with similarly fawning newspaper coverage--for his astounding feats of pedestrianism. The Walking Man, as Weston was known, possibly the most indefatigable long- distance walker ever to stride across our planet's surface, was born on March 15, 1839, in Providence, Rhode Island. His father, Silas Weston, was a descendent of Mayflower passengers and worked mostly as a school principal and teacher, but sometimes as a shopkeeper. He stood six foot four and liked to play the bass viol. Edward's mother, Maria, wrote children's books. They had two girls and two boys, with Edward being the older of their sons. He weighed four and a half £ds at birth and was so frail he wasn't expected to survive. As a child, Weston was considered a sweet and obedient boy, though weak of constitution and often somewhat sickly. Still, he was perpetually restless. ("There was no keeping him still," his Sunday school teacher once recalled, adding that he "was the most uneasy bright boy I ever saw.") His father left New England in pursuit of adventure and California gold in 1849 and remained in the West for three years. When he returned (largely gold-less), Weston was captivated by his father's tales and wrote up several of his accounts. He had these printed in pamphlet form, which he then sold along with the newspapers he was hawking as a newsboy on the passenger rail lines to New York and Boston. When Weston was fifteen, his mother recruited a friend who was also a coach in an effort to improve her son's health. The coach first instructed Edward to abandon coffee, then put him on a regimen of milk and vegetables. He also instructed him to undertake short, vigorous walks every day. Excerpted from The Last Great Walk: The True Story of a 1909 Walk from New York to San Francisco, and Why It Matters Today by Wayne Curtis All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.