First Steps...

On September 21st, 2006, at approximately 11:30 in the morning, a friend gave me a pedometer.

Ever since my arrival to San Francisco a month ago, i have been curious as to the distance i end up traveling in this massive yet accessible city every day. Being the eccentric capital that it is, San Francisco has malformed my entire “walking experience” as i know it, as i have become newly and more acutely aware of the tilted pavement, carnivals of lost-yet-elated tourists, and random motorcycle drag parades.

But what distances are really crossed in our day to day lives, when we commute for what feels like forever to our jobs and classes, to our AA meetings and cello lessons? Every single day, whether it is across the same crosswalks or pacing the same sales floor, we are adding to an invisible count. Shouldn't someone be keeping track? As reluctant as i am to start a new project amidst my overflowing schedule and existential indecision, what better time than a Thursday night in the middle of September to add to the heap?

Here is how this is going to work. i will not only wear the pedometer from now on, and keep tallies of my daily numbers and progress, but i will chart it out slowly but surely across the map of the United States, as if i were to walk from the Golden Gate to Brooklyn Bridge.

A walk across America, that could take anywhere from 12 to 26 months, the range depending on an average daily distance i can’t possibly approximate tonight. There are a number of mathematical issues to be ironed out, and i won’t pretend to know how to deal with half of them. But here are some basic stats:

The distance between the Golden Gate and Brooklyn Bridge is 2,570 miles.

The average human step is measured to be somewhere around 30 inches.

That’s 63,360 inches in a mile, and roughly 163 million inches from bridge to bridge!

Today we programmed my pedometer incorrectly and threw the instructions away. We shorted me thousands of valuable inches and therefore miles by calculating my step at roughly 22 inches. Interestingly enough, height has little to do with step length according to more accomplished minds. Regardless, i took 20,300 steps and walked 7.35 miles across the Golden Gate Bridge and at work today.

This is a fantastic start, and judging by my sore knees, a pace i can’t possibly hope to match on a day to day basis. However, i will finally make my trips up and down the stairs at work worthwhile as i gradually journey through the nation’s heartland, across God’s country, all the way to the island of Manhattan. While it may seem like a virtual treadmill, perhaps i will be somehow reconnected to the landscapes that i once crossed so recklessly by automobile in the days of my undergraduate impulses.

Also, i think it might be great to learn some history about the progression across the United States along the way. Ocean to ocean, end to end, i will be crossing abandoned railroad tracks, seemingly useless deserts, ski towns, cornfields, and i won’t even begin to mention the South. This website will be a record of my progress, and a place to learn some “westoned” facts about the home of the brave. It is a much needed outlet to do some form of writing every single day, or to further neglect my poetry during self-inflicted dry spells.

So let’s go, one step at a time across the United States of America. I’m starting in San Francisco, California, in September 2006. It could take a few months to get out of the state alone, but perhaps this project will just begin to exist in our lives, like our hair. You update it every once in a while, dye it, snip it. It has something to do with who you are, even if it’s falling out. Just give it a little attention every once in a while, live with it, and try to get to a point where you can actually see it getting longer. Even when this metaphor doesn’t make any sense, even when we feel as though we’re running circles around the proverbial gerbil wheel, I want to get the message out there that we are going somewhere. Every single one of us is walking around the world. I’m just going to make it official.

Daily Progress: 7.35 miles.

Total Distance Crossed: 7.35 miles.

San Francisco, CA