Road Worthy (1)

Charles Wilkins is my soulmate. I’ve never met the guy, but I have travelled 2,200 kilometres with him, all on foot. Even when I was sitting on Toronto’s subway, book in hand, laughing and disturbing other people, I was really on the Trans-Canada Highway, somewhere north of Nipigon, checking out Wilkins’s peeling feet and listening to the hoarseness of his flu-infested lungs. You cannot read Walk to New York: A Journey out of the Wilds of Canada without trudging alongside this funny and intelligent man, who is literally walking away from a marriage and hoping to start finding new direction in his life by putting one foot in front of the other for 63 days.

If you, like I as a cyclist, have spent many years on the margins—on the skinny edge of pavement beside North America’s roads, or the soft shoulders that sandwich those never-ending lengths of asphalt that are both nightmares and dreams—you will recognize the characters Wilkins meets along the way. The...