On an early spring morning in 2021, veteran Wall Street Journal reporter and two-time cancer survivor Neil King Jr. walked out the front door of his home in Washington, D.C., bound on foot for New York City, some 330 miles away. American Ramble is the wise, warmhearted account of a journey that was pedestrian in its execution, but miles from that in the depth of King's experience.
King's "ramble" through what he calls "many micro nations" across Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York unspools as a near-perfect blend of planning and serendipity. For instance, he delayed his scheduled arrival at a Lancaster County farmhouse, inhabited by nine generations of the same family, to observe a horseshoeing operation he learned of from a sign tacked to a tree and the sound of hammering. One meeting he returns to repeatedly is a visit to a Mennonite school, where a chorus of eighth and ninth graders serenade him with hymns about the afterlife and provide "a new frame through which to see the entire walk."
Though he embarked with a notion that his trip might provide an opportunity to sample the national mood, when he ends the odyssey in New York City's Central Park 26 days after it began, King admits he's "reluctant to extrapolate from my particulars to argue that we are a happy or troubled land." But in the variety and richness of his many contemporary encounters in this small slice of America, he provides at least some reason for hope. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer