2/16/2023 0 Comments A long way home chapter summary![]() ![]() It was his first serious relationship since the divorce. In September 2002, Herwig began dating a woman he met at a party. People offered tips on how to survive: mail freeze-dried food to post offices along the way, rub Vaseline between your toes every morning, use lip balm with sunscreen. And the more he talked about it, the more concrete the plan became. The more people he told, the more he began to think he’d be embarrassed not to follow through. He found himself floating the idea at parties and talking about it with friends. Herwig’s despair over the divorce eventually waned, but his desire to walk home didn’t. “And when you do, you see that there is a lot that’s beautiful.” “I think there’s such an economy of detail in the midwest that you really have to attend to it,” he says. Years later, after he’d moved to Chicago with his wife, he opted to drive home to Minnesota and back on two-lane highways rather than interstates, extending the seven-hour trip by a good five or six hours. He began searching for answers on road trips to small towns in Illinois, Missouri, and Kansas. ![]() So from very early in my childhood I started making this transit between Minnesota and Illinois.”Īs a young adult, Herwig ventured beyond the midwest, but his travels to other regions and countries made him reflect on what it meant to be an American in general and a midwesterner in particular. So what we did for vacations is drive back to Pontiac, where they grew up. “My folks didn’t have a lot of money,” Herwig says. His father worked for a small midwestern chain store in 1963 the company transferred him to Albert Lea. His parents were high school sweethearts. Both his maternal and paternal ancestors settled in central Illinois in the mid-19th century. Herwig comes from a long line of midwesterners. He had been in Chicago for only two years, and he felt comforted by the thought of walking home, of retreating into a familiar landscape, a landscape he loved. His wife had recently left him, and he wanted both to vanish and to prove he was alive. He’ll keep walking, for five weeks and about 550 more miles, through long stretches of Illinois and Wisconsin and Iowa, past his hometown of Albert Lea in southern Minnesota, and on to Minneapolis, where he lived for 19 years. ![]() On the morning of August 14, he’ll leave his apartment in Edgewater, walk south for almost two miles along the lakefront path, west for eight miles on Irving Park Road, south for three miles on Harlem, and then west, right out of the city, on North Avenue. Herwig is a soft-spoken 45-year-old “semiretired performance artist” and the vice president of community affairs at TCF Bank. He knows this because he’s spent an inordinate amount of time walking in recent months–four to five miles every other day and between ten and twenty miles on the weekends. He has realized, for instance, that the heel of his right foot is wider than that of his left and the toes aren’t quite as long. Herwig has been keenly aware of his feet lately. But he had walked nine miles that morning, and his feet needed some air. “I know it’s really bad,” he said, glancing around sheepishly as he rested his bare feet atop his shoes. By accessing any information beyond this page, you agree to abide by the Privacy Policy, Code of Conduct, and Terms and Conditions.Last Saturday at Lula Cafe in Logan Square, Tim Herwig slipped his feet out of his new Gore-Tex cross trainers and peeled off two layers of socks. No portion of may be duplicated, redistributed or manipulated in any form.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |