A man watching television one night saw a scene that stopped him cold. The main character, a father who loved his daughter, could not change what was happening to her. So he went out into the wilderness as a kind of prayer.
The viewer put down the remote. He did not pick it back up. Not because the action was strange to him, but because it was deeply familiar. He had been doing something similar his whole life without ever having a name for it.
The first time was in his twenties. He had just met the woman he would marry. She lived in an apartment off the Sawgrass Expressway, about seven or eight miles from where he lived. He could have driven. He had a car. But he wanted to see her, and something in him needed to travel on foot that day.
He walked up University Drive and kept going, past strip malls and traffic lights and onto the side of the highway. By the time he reached her door, his legs were tired and his shirt was soaked. But he was happy. He had pushed himself to endure on the way there. She deserved that. Somewhere along the way he had learned that tenderness often needs to move through the body before it can reach another person.
His parents live about five miles away. He has covered that ground on foot more times than he can count. Walking, step after step, past the corners and yards where he grew up does something to his state of being. By the time he arrives, he is fully present and appreciative of the gift it is to see them.
Sometimes the person he moves toward is his son, who has worn the number five in sports since he was too small to explain why. When the man found out that Brooks Robinson, a Hall of Fame third baseman he admired for both talent and kindness, had worn that number too, he walked several miles to the baseball card store and back. He wanted his son to know that his number had been worn by someone worth looking up to, and it felt right to make a journey of it.
Once, carrying more stress from work than he knew what to do with, he hiked fourteen miles to the beach. He did not tell anyone. He just kept going until the street ended, the ocean was in front of him, and the tension had fallen off his shoulders.
That is what these long walks have always been for him. A way of transferring something from the inside to the outside. A way of saying with his whole body that this challenge, person, or moment matters enough to be honored.
A few years ago, his daughter was going through a hard time. He and his wife tried everything they could think of to support her. But he was left sitting with that helpless feeling every parent knows, the one where you would trade places with your child if you could.
Sometimes all you can do is love someone from a distance and hope it reaches them. He had done everything else he could think of and come up empty. So he laced up his sneakers and headed west.
He moved past bus stops and plazas, past vacant lots where the city starts to thin out, past the point where sidewalks end and the land becomes something wilder. It was cold for South Florida, probably in the low forties, but he kept going. He went until the last gas station was behind him and there was nothing ahead but open space.
He stopped at the fence that marks the beginning of the Everglades. The sawgrass stretched to the horizon, and the sky was endless. Nothing out there knew his name or cared what he was worried about. His feet ached. His lungs had worked hard. He had exhausted himself to get there.
Standing at the edge of that wilderness, he let himself want her to be okay in the most raw, undefended way he could manage. He stood there a long time. Then he turned around and made his way home.
When he got back, the temperature had dropped into the thirties. He went to the backyard and got in the pool. The cold hit him like a wall. He stayed in that water and thought about her the whole time.
It was a small act and maybe a foolish one. But it felt like the truest thing he could do. He does not know if any of it helped her, though she is doing better now. He will not pretend the road or the cold water had anything to do with that. But he thinks he understands now what he has been doing out there all these years.
When love gets deep enough, it builds up inside you and needs to move. Some people talk to friends, some write, and some hold on tight until things get better. He pours himself out in the direction of the ones he loves until he is spent.
He has learned that no matter how much people want to, they cannot always change things for those they hold dear. Something about accepting that takes time and distance. Walking is how he works through what he cannot resolve so he can be more fully available and grounded for the ones he cares about.
The scene on television that night touched him so deeply because he had been doing what that man did long before he saw him do it on the screen. Neither of them had a better option, and neither of them needed one. The man on the screen went out into the wilderness for his daughter, and he walked to the edge of the Everglades for his.
People do not always have the answers, but they have the love, and they find ways to keep expressing it anyway. He thinks that might be the most human thing there is.
