Mac's Walk to Washington

INTRODUCTION

When he was 58, John McNulty walked halfway up the east coast, from south Florida to Washington DC, along US Route 1, a distance of over a thousand miles. It was 1982. He walked alone, carrying a pack weighted with 35-50 pounds of supplies, and he slept outside most nights. It took him almost three months to complete his journey. His reasons were complicated, but mostly, he walked to prove a point.

If John McNulty had been anyone but my own father, I could have written the complete story of his walk 30 years ago when he asked me to. I was in my 30s then, writing for a living- mostly “human interest” stories for local newspapers. I could have knocked off the assignment in a week or two. But John McNulty was my dad, and that has made all the difference. My thoughts were confusing and contradictory, and they cancelled each other out: I was the only one who could do it; I didn’t have the time. I had to get this right; I was overwhelmed by the details. I was too close to the subject; I didn’t know enough to do the story justice. I couldn’t tell his story; I couldn’t not tell his story.

“Walk” was hardly the term to describe Dad’s undertaking. It was a slog, an ordeal, an adventure, a trial, a staggering task, an unlikely attempt, a long shot, a one-man protest march. It was Dad’s way of proving to the US Postal Service that he was fit to do the job from which he had been fired five years earlier, after nearly 11 years of excellent service. He was terminated because he refused to accept the Postal Service’s offer of a disability retirement. There was more to the story, of course, and the prospect of trying to get it right overwhelmed me. For years, I did nothing about it, even though Dad hinted, from time to time, about "the Book."

I started to feel a sad urgency to tell the story of The Walk when I wrote Dad’s obituary. He died in 1998 when he was 73. In researching the dates and places of Dad’s life, I referred to several newspaper articles about The Walk, which had been published years before, in newspapers from small towns along the route. The most detailed of these were the stories by Rick Pierce, a reporter for the Pompano Beach Sun Sentinel, the daily paper we read in the town we lived in, Pompano Beach, about 30 miles north of Miami on the east coast of Florida.

Pierce had written several feature stories about Dad as he progressed north on US Route 1 in 1982. This was after my brother Thom had gone down to the Sentinel’s offices with a disorganized box of letters and documents hoping to convince someone that our dad had a story to tell. Rick Pierce was interested. He interviewed Thom, and then got hold of Dad several times, interviewing him from phone booths along the road.

On the raw November day when Dad trudged across the then-named Rochambeau Bridge into Washington DC to complete his trek, Rick Pierce was there to walk along with him, and get a photo of Dad’s craggy profile with the capital in the background, for his page-one story. The headline was “Me disabled? Hell no!”

Pierce’s stories sparkled with details that showed Dad’s personality. “If they’d have accused me of anything else- but disabled!” Pierce quoted him as he walked along beside him for the last mile or so. “I pride myself on being physically fit.”

Before I could finish writing the obit, I had to call the Sun Sentinel and ask if Rick Pierce was still there, so I could tell him the sad news. Pierce was indeed still writing for the same paper, over 16 years later, and was at his desk that afternoon to take my call. When I explained who I was, Pierce told me that, of all the people he had written about in his career, John McNulty stood out as one of a few he would never forget. He offered his condolences, and we chatted a bit about The Walk, and about the character who was my dad. I hung up the phone in the motel room, feeling somehow panicked because my father was gone, but more so because I knew I had missed out on knowing him well.

I had always told Dad I would write an article, or maybe a book about The Walk. I think he imagined that, at some point, he and I would sit together for hours while he told me the details he alluded to in the letters he mailed from the road. “This will make a good story when I get back. Remind me to tell you”, he wrote. But the time and place for those conversations never materialized. We were not a close family, although there was no trouble between my dad and me. That’s just the way things were in the 1950s and 60s when I was growing up. I did not know or expect anything different. I knew, without his saying so, that my dad approved of me and was proud of me. We enjoyed a lively correspondence over the years after I left home, but to call it a warm relationship would have been a stretch. When I thought of my dad, I felt mostly awe - at all he seemed to know and be able to do. He was always working, but he seemed to find time to read everything he could get his hands on. His car was full of newspapers, and magazines like Popular Mechanics, and there were encyclopedias and stacks of history books lying open around the house. When he had a day off, he would try to get us kids interested in whatever project had caught his imagination. Let’s see what dry ice does. How do peanuts grow? When I was 14, he made me a bicycle out of spare parts, and painted it red and white. When he presented it to me, I was embarrassed to ride it.

I also felt a little fear of my father, recalling the way he would rage, bellowing in a slowly building, rumbling crescendo, “Jum-ping Je-sus God-damned Christ AL-MIGHTY!” at even the slightest household mishap. We were used to being referred to as “Goddamnkids,” as if it was all one word. Sometimes, we were “a pack of God-damned savages.” It was understood in our family that it was always a good idea to avoid Dad’s “temper.” What we know now, and did not understand then, was that Dad lived with the personality-changing effects of traumatic brain injury after sustaining a serious skull fracture on the flight deck of the USS Enterprise in 1942 in the Battle of Midway. He was still a teenager when he volunteered to serve in the Navy a few months before Pearl Harbor changed everything.

I was not around at the time of The Walk. I had left home for college years earlier, in 1967, and never looked back. A few years later my parents divorced. During the time Dad was struggling with his situation at the Pompano Beach Post Office, and then fighting the entire US Postal Service to get his job back, I was busy making a life for myself in New England. I was too involved in my own adventures at the time to give my dad much attention.

Our brother Thom was the one who was at Dad’s side in Florida when he was planning The Walk, helping him prepare, calling newspapers along the way to explain his mission, sending new shoes (He wore out at least three pairs.) and money Dad had saved up to General Delivery Post Office addresses as he made his way north. For years after The Walk, Dad never asked me how the writing project was going, and I avoided the topic with him. The six cardboard cartons bulging with legal papers, letters, official forms and news articles he had mailed to me over the years had become my personal monument to procrastination and guilt.

Now that I am even older than he was when he set out on The Walk, I can’t imagine how he persevered mile after mile, day upon day, sleeping under bridges most nights. “Slept like a guard dog, ” he would write. He carried heavy cans of Spam and beans, and snacked on peanuts and raisins, and was probably always looking for coffee.

I suspect the sign he had pinned to the back of his pack , “Am I too ‘disabled’ to work as a letter carrier?? The USPS says I am!” garnered him many curious stares, some local publicity along the way, and maybe a cold beer here and there. It would be years before I would come to understand the ideals that kept him going.

I love to walk; I spend a couple of hours almost every day simply walking with no destination, and every single time I leave the house on foot, I think of my dad and how tough he was. Especially when I get a little too far from home, or when the daylight is running out, or when I’m just plain tired, it’s my dad’s grit, not mine, that pushes me forward. It’s his spirit that urges me to question “accepted wisdom.” It’s my Dad’s example that makes me want to stay strong enough to keep walking, and to scramble to the top of the next hill to see if there’s a view.

Mac's Walk to Washington

Friday, January 17, 2020

North 1

North 1

John McNulty's Thousand-Mile Walk to Washington, DC

Table of Contents

Dedication

Introduction