One spring morning in 1912, Vachel Lindsay left his Illinois home and started walking west toward the Pacific Ocean. He set out with little more than the clothes he was wearing and a small pack half-full of poems he hoped to trade for meals and places to sleep along the way.
No family, job, or dreams of fortune beckoned Lindsay to California; no editor commissioned his tour. Instead, the 32-year-old self-published poet and dreamer went walking west to find inspiration for new rhymes and audiences for his old ones.
He crossed 1,200 miles of America's heartland by foot and emerged nine months later on the threshold of international fame.
Lindsay strolled into literary history as America's greatest walking poet. Little known today, he was -- for a time -- as much a celebrity as Garth Brooks, as much a cultural phenomenon as music videos. His "concerts" packed the early-century lecture halls. His poems, inspired by three cross-country treks and thousands of smaller walks, spoke to the soul of his people.
Many turn-of-the-century writers went "tramping," as it was then called. Like Thoreau and Walt Whitman before them, Carl Sandburg and Robert Frost went vagabonding in search of adventure. And, like Jack London and Mark Twain, they found their voices in the dust of the open road. But few writers have ever gone so far afoot, or benefitted so directly from their walks, as Vachel Lindsay.
Lindsay was born, so the legend goes, in a bed Abraham Lincoln once slept upon in Springfield, Ill. Frail and nervous as a child, he grew up between the ominous shadow of a tyrannical father and the inconstancy of an eccentric mother. Bothered by a feverish mind full of thoughts and dreams, he found outlets for his feelings in art, poetry, and long walks.
I want to go wandering.
Who shall declare
I will regret it if I dare?
To the rich days of age --
To some mid-afternoon --
A wide fenceless prairie,
A lonely old tune,
Ant-hills and sunflowers,
And sunset too soon.
("I Want To Go Wandering")
He dreamed of a life as a traveling rhymer, a troubador of ages past. Unwilling to settle for conventional employment, he figured he could sell his poems to finance his adventures. Late one night in New York City, where he was attending art school at the age of 26, Lindsay printed up copies of two poems and set off down 10th Avenue trying to sell them door-to-door. He visited bakeries, drug stores, and Chinese launderers -- anyone open at the midnight hour -- and turned to his apartment encouraged by his profits: 13 cents.
Not long after, Lindsay went out on the first of three long walking trips. In the spring of 1906, after traveling by train to Florida with a friend, he walked north through the Okefenokee swamp to Atlanta, chanting his rhymes along the way for anyone who would listen. He kept up his walk until he reached the home of relatives in Grassy Springs, Kentucky, covering more than 600 miles in two months.
Then, two years later, he strolled homeward from New York as far as Ohio before he hopped a train to Springfield. Along the way he stayed at Salvation Army hotels or in private homes, often asking for hospitality in exchange for a poetry reading.
Eleanor Ruggles, Lindsay's biographer, wrote that on these walks "the space and freedom and the easy comntacts with simple men shook things into place in his mind, soothed his nerves and freshened his imagination so that while he was stimulated to produce poems the fever in his brain subsided."
Of no walk was this more true than Lindsay's trek of 1912. He left Springfield determined to cross the Great Plains and the deserts of the Southwest by summer's end, then walk up the Pacific Coast to Washington state in the fall. The following year he would return across the Colorado Rockies. Along the way, Lindsay proposed to live by a set of idealistic "Rules of the Road" he outlined as follows:
* Keep away from cities.
* Keep away from the railroads.
* Have nothing to do with money. Carry no baggage.
* Ask for dinner about a quarter after eleven.
* Ask for supper, lodging and breakfast about quarter of five.
* Travel alone.
* Be neat, truthful, civil and on the square.
* Preach the Gospel of Beauty.
Lindsay kept to his rules, by and large, but the trip was disenchanting. He found few allies in his pursuit of truth and beauty. The people he met had little energy for aesthetic ideals or political visions, their lives fenced in by hard times and limited horizons.
At Wagon Mound, N.M., Lindsay boarded a train for Los Angeles. Feeling depressed and defeated, he walked the city streets at night. The words and rhythm for a poem came to him then, all in a flash, and he wrote "General William Booth Enters Into Heaven." Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, had died just a month earlier. In his poem, Lindsay describes Booth gathering the lowly masses and leading them back to the heartland of the country, its spiritual center:
... and still by faith he trod
eyes still dazzled by the ways of God.
The response to "Booth" was immediate. As soon as it was published, Lindsay became a lecture hall celebrity. A gifted and engaging performer, he was invited to recite his poems in cities all across America and his performances packed houses. But "Booth" was his unmaking as well. The more he recited the less time he had for tramping and composing, and the more his livelihood became dependent on recitals. Lindsay still took walks, but by 1919, in his late 30s, he had few friends who had the time or inclination to join him. "If I do not walk, I explode and I am so dog lonely I cannot bear to go by myself any more," he told one of them.
Aside from a six-week tramp through Glacier National Park with an English journalist in 1921, Lindsay led a progressively home-bound and lonely existence. He married a student he met on a lecture tour in 1925, Elizabeth Conner, and they had two children, but the poet grew increasingly despondent. He ended his life with suicide in 1931, dying in the room above the one in which he was born.
Like his 1912 tramp, Lindsay's career began with high ideals and expectations, crossing miles of open country full of great wonders and hard realities, and ended in despair. His poem "On The Road To Nowhere" could have been his epitaph:
On the road to nowhere
What wild oats did you sow
When you left your father's house
With your cheeks aglow?
Eyes so strained and eager
To see what you might see?
Were you thief or were you fool?
Or most nobly free?
