As a very foolish 21-year-old, I spent about three months aimlessly traveling around this country on a bus. Back then, you could buy a one-month Trailway ticket for $99 and have as many rides as you liked. I went all over the place – and I was all over the place, confused about what I was doing or why. I read a lot though and one of my books, very predictably, was Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road”. I think I may have fantasized that I was Sal Paradise.

38 years later, I’m still quite confused, but I know I’m not in Paradise. I’m in Newark, New Jersey! All sorts of things have happened since. Although I still have a bit of the lone wanderer in me, I’m happy to be in one place. But my reading continues to explore what this country means and on this trip, my best insights, so far, have come from Neil King Jr’s “American Ramble: A walk of memory and renewal”.

It’s a lovely and insightful book, in many ways. Among many other good things, it challenges one of the great American taboos – walking! This is something I’ve come up against many times over the years. So I really identify with Mr King when he starts walking along what seems like a reasonably safe pavement/sidewalk, only to find himself thrown on to the hard-shoulder of a busy six-lane highway.

Somehow, Mr King manages to mostly avoid this experience and find a walking path from Washington DC to New York City, taking him through some of the most significant places in the short history of the United States. Too many to list, but one passage sticks in my mind. He relates being under the New Jersey Turnpike, a massive road that’s emblematic of how some of the landscape has been disfigured – and he sees a deer!

I’ve had similar experiences, seeing fragments of nature in some of the most unexpected urban places. It always reminds me of how close, both in time and space, this country is to its rural past – and a land that was occupied by people with a very different set of values. I’m often struck by a sense of this being a country where beauty is tantalizingly within reach, but just out of grasp.