Southerner by Choice

In his books, Peter Jenkins has taken us across America and around the world. But when it was time to put down roots, the Connecticut Yankee chose to settle in the South. I wanted to know why.

We had met before, Peter and I.

I was 11 years old that summer of 1974 when he was in the midst of his walk across America. The 22-year-old adventurer stopped to rest on a patch of grass beneath a hackberry tree just off County 129 outside Cornersville, Tennessee. Me? I was sitting in the yard, dreaming of faraway places.

Our encounter was brief. Yet, I still have a snapshot in my mind of a young man with an enormous pack strapped to his back. I peppered him with questions as he drank from the water hose. Then he and Cooper, his furry canine companion, walked away and melted into the horizon.

By the time Peter finished his walk-4,751 miles from Alfred, New York, to Oregon's Pacific coast-I was a junior in high school. An enthusiastic reader, I traveled with him through his first book, A Walk Across America, later joining him for The Walk West.

I was living in Alabama before I encountered the intrepid writer again, this time as he plied the waters of the Gulf in Along the Edge of America. In this book, Peter talks about putting down roots in Middle Tennessee. I was surprised. Pleased. Curious. This man who had been around the world had landed less than 30 minutes from where we met that day. I had to know why.

A Journey Remembered

Today, Peter lives at the end of a winding gravel road in a blue-gray farmhouse on the western edge of Spring Hill, Tennessee. "If you had told me at the beginning of my trip, 'Peter, 30 years from now you're going to be living on a farm in Tennessee,' I would have said you were totally insane," he says with a wry smile. Life has a way of throwing you curveballs.

As I walk in the door, the smell of homemade banana muffins envelopes me in a warm embrace. We gather around a rustic kitchen table, nursing mugs of hot tea with honey, and try to remember 1973. America was in turmoil. We had just pulled out of Vietnam, the draft was over, and the country was polarized as never before. Disillusioned, Peter decided to give his country one last chance.

"My walk across America was about trying to figure out who I was and what I was going to be and how I fit into my own country, if I was going to fit into my own country," he remembers.

Peter fell in love with the America he found. He walked beside mountain men and hippies. He benefitted from the kindness of strangers. And he wrote it down, painting a compelling portrait of the country with the stories of diverse men and women.

"I was trained as an artist and sculptor," says Peter, who earned a degree in art from New York's Alfred University before hitting the road. "I take these people, and I sort of lift them up on a pedestal. It's time to shine the light on their lives, to show how interesting and inspiring they can be."

A New Englander Goes South

He thought this walk of his would take five months. It took five years. But when he finally quit wandering, he came back to Tennessee.

"After spending five years walking across the country and living in almost every possible element of the American way, I just decided that the South was where I wanted to be," Peter says. "I'm the kind of person who can feel at home anywhere, but I've never felt as much at home as I do here."

Peter remembers being drawn to the beauty of the rolling hills, to the warmth of the people. He admired the Southern work ethic, the artistic heritage, the food, the attitude. Indeed, he felt a kindred spirit with those who loved the land as much as he.

He captured those qualities in A Walk Across America. Thousands of schools across the country require that their students read it. More than 25 years after the book was published, he still receives fan mail.

Return to America

Still, Peter sometimes grows tired of being known as the man who walked across America. "It's just that I've done so much more than that," he says. Indeed, he was a member of the first team of U.S. climbers to reach Mount Everest from Tibet. He chronicled that journey in his book, Across China. In 2000, he moved to Alaska for a year and a half while he researched Looking for Alaska, a book he feels contains his best writing yet.

Peter has begun the journey he'll chronicle in a new book. The original route from New York to New Orleans will form the backbone, but he'll detour through states and regions he's not previously explored. The biggest difference: He will ride a motorcycle.

Peter shows me the tattered backpack he toted from New Orleans to Oregon on his walk west. He hasn't worn it since 1979, but he reluctantly shrugs it on. It feels odd, he says, after all this time. He grows quiet as the ghosts of the past stroll through his mind.

When Peter and I part, I still have a thousand unanswered questions, but I know enough. I'm proud to call this man a Tennessean, a Southerner, and a friend. -CASSANDRA M. VANHOOSER

Copyright Southern Progress Corporation Sep 2006
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