That's a long way to walk

One of Steven Wright's jokes is that anyplace is walking distance if you have enough time. Timothy Scott's got 4 months, and he's walking from Virginia Beach to California.

I saw him yesterday evening in Durham, wearing a green safety vest and pulling a small, homemade trailer, but i didn't think too much of it. When i saw him again this morning on Highway 70 outside of Hillsborough, i had to learn his story.

Turns out, through a series of unfortunate happenstances, that his wife and kids are stuck in Mexico, he's lost his job, and there's little chance of everyone getting back together for a happy ending. So he's doing what anyone else would do under the circumstances, and that's walk to California, and then into Mexico, to try to raise enough money to reunite his family.

Yes, it's a bit Quixotic. But there's a reason why, 400 years after its publication, we still read about Don Quixote de la Mancha's adventures.


Timothy's got a FaceBook page, and he's working on getting a PayPal account set up so he doesn't have to carry everything around in cash. I wish him the best and hope he runs into some more bloggers and reporters on the way so we can keep track of him. He's figuring on hitting the California-Mexico border sometime in November. I don't know if there are any windmills between here and there.