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In January 2002, Aaron Huey and his dog, Cosmo, began a walk across an America whose essence had changed very little since Steinbeck's time. Huey, then a wiry 26-year-old photographer living outside Santa Fe, New Mexico, decided to start in Encinitas, California. They passed through scores of unheralded small towns: Moriarty, New Mexico, and Claude, Texas; Anadarko, Oklahoma, and Old Alabam, Arkansas. By the time he and Cosmo reached New York City (3,349 miles and 154 days later), he had visited sorority houses and strip clubs, softball games and church basements in search of the unexpected. Huey grew up in Worland, Wyoming (pop. 5,250), and left home at 18 to study stone sculpture in Slovakia. He started taking pictures while an art student at the University of Denver. In 1999, he traveled by himself across Asia taking photographs of the Taliban's religious schools in Pakistan, villagers in isolated parts of the former Soviet Union and protests in Iran. Many of his photographs he uses a Leica with a wide-angle lens and gets close to his subjects—have been published in magazines and as a book, Children of the Sun. It was the uncertainty of his travels that captivated him. "I just never traveled much here," he says. "In America, the way we travel is so well-planned and predictable there’s no adventure." After three months working as an apprentice to photojournalist Steve McCurry in Manhattan in 2001, Huey was again ready for a change: "I realized I didn't want to stay in New York and work for other people—I wanted to take a big risk." He courted the unexpected. He made no advance arrangements; his only plan was to end up in Coney Island. "I wanted to be totally naive, totally unprepared. I knew if I trained, I was probably not going to like it," he says. A few months before he set out, the photographer had rescued an 80-pound husky-malamute-wolf mix from an animal shelter in Fort Collins, Colorado, and named her Cosmo. Huey embarked one morning with just a few changes of clothes (including a pair of boots he spray-painted gold), a tent, a sleeping bag, 90 pounds of dog food, two cameras—and no cellphone. Cosmo pulled the Comet, a small dogcart Huey had decorated with flames and loaded with the supplies. (Originally, Huey wanted a llama, but it turns out llamas get lonely, and two llamas were just too much.) This one-man, one-dog carnival quickly began breaking down the walls that usually separate strangers in America. "If I was walking alone, nobody would have stopped to talk to me," Huey says. "The absurdity is what made it successful." The longest he walked in one stretch was the 46 miles between the towns of Ozark and Buffalo, Missouri. In May and June, as he headed east of Indiana, Huey often walked all night to spare Cosmo from the heat of the day. The voyage (he titled his journals American Ocean) tapped into America's romance with restlessness, the same spirit Steinbeck had found when he drove in the opposite direction decades before. Day after day, Steinbeck encountered what he called the same "look of longing" on the faces of the Americans he met, and had the same conversation: "Lord! I wish I could go," a neighbor told Steinbeck as he was packing to leave. "Don't you like it here?" "Sure. It's all right, but I wish I could go." "You don't even know where I'm going." "I don't care. I'd like to go anywhere." In our secret imaginations, we romanticize drifters: cowboys, sailors, rootless rebels. The heroes are the ones who are rootless by choice, not homeless by necessity. Even Huey, a self-described "good-looking young white guy," found that it was not so easy convincing cops and wary citizens he was no threat. Cosmo and Comet helped. "If we didn't have that dogcart," he says, "we would have just been bums." The loneliest part of the journey was the beginning—almost 1,000 miles across the deserts of California, Arizona and New Mexico—but once he reached the Texas Panhandle, strangers began reaching out to him. Once, he came out of a convenience store to find a $20 bill taped to the Comet. Drivers who had passed him on the highway in Quemado, New Mexico, left money at roadside restaurants to cover his meals. "I probably stayed in strangers' homes five nights of the week," says Huey. "People just passed me along." Over and over again, people also told him how much they wished they could just pick up and walk with him. Near Chickasha, Oklahoma, a 5-year-old girl's parents stopped so their daughter could walk a mile with him; in Tahlequah, New Mexico, a schoolteacher walked with him all night long. Today, Huey and Cosmo live in Seattle with Huey's fiancée, a troublesome 1987 Volkswagen van and debt. "People were really envious of what I was doing," he says. "Two years later, I'm really envious of it.” |
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