Planetwalker: Personal Hero

John Francis, Planetwalker

In a few weeks I'll be starting my 400-mile pilgrimage walk on the Camino de Santiago in Spain. Yep, I decided I'm gonna do it. I'll be heading to southern France from Ireland in mid-September. How long it will take me to get to Santiago de Compostela, and whether I'll even make it to Santiago, I don't know. But I don't expect to be back in Ireland before middle of October and back in the U.S. before Halloween.

Reading up on the Camino and getting ready for it has made me think about why I'm doing this--and what even attracted me to the idea. The answer to the first question is complicated, because even while I may have a reason in mind, I think I'm likely to find that will change considerably as I start and go along on the pilgrimage. As for the second question, that's a bit easier.

Apart from the spiritual aspect of the Camino and all the mysterious, intangible stuff that entails (inner peace, healing, confidence, that kind of thing), the fact is the Camino is really about the act of walking. Yes, some people cycle the Camino, some people travel it by donkey, and some even have the cheek to drive it--but the majority of pilgrims undertake the Camino on foot. This is an important distinction to me. I think if the Camino was primarily a cyclist's journey or a rock-climber's or sailor's, I wouldn't be interested. I've always been a walker. Out of necessity and intention. Necessity because I never learned to drive (shocking for an American, I know), and intention because...well, because walking's what the truly cool people in this world do.

Cool people like one of my longtime heroes, John Francis, aka Planetwalker. That's his picture at the top of this post. He may look like a hobo or a wandering musician, but in truth he's a pioneering environmentalist and a genuine visionary--a man who spent over 20 years walking everywhere and refusing to ride in any motorized transport and 17 years without speaking.

Born and raised in Philadelphia, John Francis was in his late 20s and living the laid-back hippie life in Point Reyes Station, California, when a major oil spill devastated the San Francisco Bay Area in 1971. In his autobiography, Planetwalker, Francis recalls how angry people in his community were about the spill. While there were some pretty far-out protests involving dumping oil and dead fish at the headquarters of Standard Oil, the company responsible for the spill, only Francis was the one who came up with the simpler, more personal, more peaceful, and ultimately more powerful protest of giving up driving and riding in cars. In essence, he gave up his own dependence on oil and gasoline. But this being California, where everyone drives and where cars have truly shaped the local layout, Francis' sacrifice meant it took him hours to get anywhere, sometimes even days. Point Reyes being a small community, this also meant everyone in town knew about Francis' personal protest, and some people took it as an offense, as a judgement on their own continued reliance on cars. As Francis went about his way walking everywhere, he'd find people would drive up alongside of him and get into arguments with him about his new mission. So he decided a further sacrifice was necessary, one even more personal--he stopped talking. His vow of silence ended up lasting 17 years, and his vow of traveling everywhere by foot lasted nearly a quarter of a century.

In a car culture like America's, this would've been impressive enough even if Francis just stayed in the Bay Area, traversing the same long roads year in and year out. But no--Francis decided he wanted to take his message farther, and get an education in the environment as well. He ended up walking all the way to Ashland, Oregon, to study at the university there and earn a bachelor's degree in 2 years. Eventually he walked on to Missoula, Montana, to complete a 2-year master's program in environmental studies and even taught class there--remember, without talking. After his master's he would go on, by foot of course, to the University of Wisconsin in Madison to earn his PhD. Along the way of walking countless miles for a good education, he also managed to learn boat-building in Washington state, start a newsletter called Planetwalk about his journey, be interviewed by a show called West 57th (a kind of early version of Dateline or 48 Hours), and play the banjo to keep himself company.

Francis finally broke his silence in 1990 at an Earth Day rally in Washington, D.C., where he was a speaker. Next he was appointed a UN ambassador for the environment and hired by the U.S. Coast Guard to write oil spill regulations. Then he sailed down to the Caribbean, walked throughout the islands, sailed to Venezuela and began walking down South America. After 22 years of walking and eschewing all motorized vehicles, he accepted his first lift in a car in Brazil, after realizing he had trapped himself in his "walking man" persona to the point of turning a sacred and sacrificial mission into a selfish and static one. He tells his story beautifully in this video from the TED talks:

I first learned about John Francis way back in the mid-80s when his West 57th interview with Meredith Vieria aired. I don't even remember why I was watching the particular episode, or why I was watching a newsmagazine show at all since I was only about 14 at the time. (The best I can figure is that since the show was aired on a Friday or Saturday night and since I was a wallflower girl who no one wanted to date, watching the news is how I spent my weekend nights as a teenager. Wild.) Unfortunately there's no video available for West 57th interview, but there is this video of another news program that shows footage of Francis back in the 70s and 80s.

I remember the interview on West 57th really struck me. Probably because I had never heard of anyone before doing what John Francis was doing. I never heard stories like his. Certainly not in the suburban Midwest, where I grew up. Where I come from, it was regarded that all I should be focusing on life was getting my driver's license, getting a boyfriend, getting good grades, and getting into a good college. If you deviated from those goals in any way (and I did in neraly every possible way), you were perceived as strange or lost or hopeless. There was next to nothing mentioned about seeing your country or the world, on foot or otherwise, or taking care of the planet or practicing more responsible consumption.

I never forgot John Francis--never. I started taking more interest in people like him, or people who represented different aspects of his lifestyle. I read about monks and monastic communities. I read On the Road and everything I could find about the Beats. I read everything I could find about old-time hoboes and the early socialist movement in the U.S. I read about car-free lifestyles and the advantages of living car-free--and the disadvantages of car dependence, especially laid out in a book called Asphalt Nation. Learning about John Francis opened up so many doors to learning and life for me. And I think for a long time, I wanted to be like him, live like him--but apart from never getting my license and choosing to walk whenever I could, I didn't know how. Even at 14 I appreciated that as a black man in America, John Francis was challenging stereotypes about what black men, and people of color in general in the U.S., are supposed to be interested in and care about and what roles they are too often still constricted to in our society. But for a long time I was hung up on my own socially inherited limitations and expectations as a girl. I can't do what John Francis did, I would think. I'm a girl. Women can't walk the earth. We just can't. It's too dangerous.

Now, I understand that what attracted me to the Camino de Santiago is that it gives me a chance to live for awhile like my childhood hero, like John Francis, Planetwalker. And I think so much of what I've been doing in the last few years--traveling around America by Greyhound on my own, starting up a tour business for women only, writing about my experiences as a solo female traveler, planning on walking through Spain on my own--is a challenge to my own childhood (and adolescent, and adult) fears and society's expectations about what women are supposed to do, how we're supposed to live and travel, what we're supposed to want and believe in life. It's no accident that I started doing all this crazy stuff within a couple years after stumbling across an article online about John Francis and his newly published autobiography, two decades after I first heard about him and never forgot him.

I know if I do end up achieving a kind of liberation or even greater confidence and awareness at the end of this road I'm currently on, I have John Francis to thank for it--and the courage his story has endgendered in me.