A Two-Day Walk Across Dallas

The books I read while growing up in the quiet, leafy Lake Highlands neighborhood of North Dallas tended toward the hardscrabble and violent. Many shared the oddly particular narrative of domesticated city kids winding up in the wilderness and learning self-reliance and courage while struggling to survive. It’s no wonder that after tattering the pages of The Boxcar Children, Hatchet, My Side of the Mountain, and Where the Red Fern Grows, ten-year-old me believed that life was meant to be lived mostly outdoors and that it was likely to involve fire, knives, animal attacks, and at least one of my friends dying accidentally from an axe to the belly.

My parents, God bless them, did their best to fulfill this vision (save for the axe-in-belly part). We were regulars at Texas state parks and pulled our Jayco pop-up camper behind a brown Chevy Astro minivan to every corner of this beautiful country. But for the most part my exalted vision of a life of wild adventure has always collided, like a squirrel under the tire of a Mercedes-Benz, with this inescapable fact: Dallas.

Where the only defining natural feature, the Trinity River, is seen by most as little more than a muddy drainage ditch that sometimes floods, always stinks, and produces a disconcerting number of dead bodies. Where flat concrete, soulless strip malls, and behemoth industrial plots are strewn across the native blackland prairie. Where those who seek adventure, and have the money to do so, hop on U.S. 287 and escape to the Rockies or the Sangre de Cristo Mountains at every opportunity.

For most residents, Dallas is the place you come back to. The place where you sit motionless on Interstate 635, stare at the heat haze radiating off the roof of the car in front of you, and wonder why in the world John Neely Bryan chose this crossing for his little ferry business. It’s the perfect manifestation of what Texas author John Graves, in his classic book Goodbye to a River, called “the prickly, machine-humming place that man has hung for himself above that natural world.”

Yet I’ve always been determined to scrape back the city’s metropolitan veneer and find adventure right here in the in-between spaces of my beloved hometown. Before I could drive, I’d run from my house down to White Rock Creek after heavy rains to marvel at the churning brown floodwaters that carried shopping carts, tires, and other urban flotsam downstream. In high school I once procured a couple of canoes from a friend who worked at REI and led some curious classmates on a slapdash expedition down the Trinity that I dubbed Operation Trinidad. A year or two later, another friend and I spent a morning trying to reach the rooftops of Dallas’s highest buildings—we failed—and finished the day “fishing” in the circular water feature outside city hall. (We were quickly run off by baffled security guards.) This same friend, twenty years later, joined me to bushwhack the “path of most resistance” through the Great Trinity Forest, just to see what was out there. (Answer: a lot of Styrofoam cups.)

Nowadays I’m mostly content with my ordinary family life—carpool, Home Depot runs, Saturday morning soccer, Sunday morning church—all neatly organized in a carefully Tetris’d schedule. But from time to time the itch returns, and I find myself staring at the Google Maps satellite view of Dallas, zooming in on curiosities and daydreaming about what might be next.

May 31 12:20 P.M. My reflection in an office building on the northbound side of Central Expressway, south of Meadow Road. May 31, 12:20 p.m. My reflection in an office building on the northbound side of Central Expressway, south of Meadow Road.Photograph by Jeffrey McWhorter

This is exactly what I was doing one spring day when, puzzling at the funky outline of Dallas’s city limits, I drew an as-the-crow-flies line from the northernmost tip, which curls around Addison and juts well into the upper reaches of Carrollton, to its southernmost border, an empty field across the street from Lancaster High School. Precisely 28.06 miles, according to Google. “I bet I could walk that in a day,” I silently mused. I took a screenshot, left it on my desktop, and resumed the more adult responsibilities of my life.

But the seed of an idea had been planted. As the months passed, I kept returning to that screenshot. What if I walked across Dallas with a camera, an audio recorder, little planning, and few expectations? I established a couple of guiding principles but only one hard-and-fast rule: I had to walk the entire way. I would use my phone only for navigation and essential communication (read: letting my wife know every few hours that I was still alive). I had a general sense of the route—south to north through the city center—but nothing too specific. I’d just keep moving and go where the spirit led me, taking photos and recording short interviews and personal audio memos along the way.

I eventually set the date, an unremarkable Saturday late last spring. Before dawn that morning, my 77-year-old father, ever the enthusiastic wingman, drove me in his tiny Mazda convertible to the empty parking lot of Lancaster High School. At 6:12 a.m., with a pack on my back, a camera on each shoulder, and an audio recorder around my neck, I bade my pops farewell and crossed Wintergreen Road. A faint smudge of pink tinged the eastern sky over a sleepy pasture to my right. The 61-degree air chilled my face and arms. My steps were quick, and I was happy.

May 9 10:42 P.M. Gear and provisions arranged on my back patio the night before the journey. May 9, 10:42 p.m. Gear and provisions arranged on my back patio the night before the journey.Photograph by Jeffrey McWhorter

When asked to give aspiring photographers a word of advice, renowned Magnum photojournalist Abbas Attar quipped, “Get a good pair of walking shoes . . . and fall in love.” His words became a mantra for many street photographers in bustling cities like New York, San Francisco, Havana, and Paris who surreptitiously compose complex images that teem with the buzzing energy of everyday life. Such a pursuit in Dallas is almost laughable. Aside from the AT&T Discovery District and Klyde Warren Park, most of my journey featured long stretches of concrete and cars punctuated by occasional encounters with perplexed people to whom I had to quickly explain, often in stumbling Spanish, that I wasn’t trying to sell them anything. Nevertheless, Attar’s words captured well what I set out to do.

All told, I walked 52.44 miles over 35 hours and 50 minutes and met 231 people. (I’d originally hoped to finish within 24 hours but ultimately decided to split the journey across two days to allow myself more time to linger with the people I met.) There were, as expected, miles of dark-city silence and plenty of curious inanimate objects—a basketball impaled on a fence post, a handmade sign zip-tied to a fence advertising 42 farm-fresh eggs for $18 from the “Egg Lady,” a discarded dumpster quietly rusting next to a rain-soaked sofa and a long-abandoned fishing boat—but most memorable were the serendipitous encounters with the folks I happened upon.

I didn’t capture the whole of Dallas, of course. I didn’t sniff Fair Park. I never saw White Rock Lake or Love Field, Pleasant Grove or Preston Center. What I captured was one meandering line cut right through the middle, like one of those paper-thin slices of a human body on permanent display at the Perot Museum of Nature and Science. I saw what I saw, and I missed what I missed. Whatever was happening two blocks to my left, two blocks to my right, twenty minutes ahead, or twenty minutes behind would remain forever a mystery to me.

When people have asked, with wide-eyed curiosity, what the journey was like, I’ve been tempted to try to deliver profound insights about what it means to be a Dallasite. In fact, stereotypes were mostly confirmed. Highland Park is still swanky and South Dallas largely poor. There are a lot of churches and not many hills. We are indeed a city of immigrants. To reduce the walk to generalizations is to undo its purpose.

May 10 6:07 P.M. Pausing for a brief rest as I cross the Trinity River on the Jefferson Boulevard Viaduct. May 10, 6:07 p.m. Pausing for a brief rest as I cross the Trinity River on the Jefferson Boulevard Viaduct.Photograph by Jeffrey McWhorter

This was no righteous quest, no spiritual pilgrimage. I was under no illusion that by my plodding steps I might knit back together the rupturing fabric of American society. I was just a curious North Dallas dad who wanted to see what lay between the cracks in the sidewalk. I met my neighbors, a few of them at least, and gave them my attention, which, it has been said, is the simplest expression of love.

This is why, when the sidewalk abruptly ended at Dallas’s far northern edge along Midway Road, and I finally stepped onto the grass of Carrollton at 12:18 a.m. after my second day, the overwhelming emotion I felt was gratitude. For ninety-something-year-old Sandra Hicks and the way she called me friend. For the exuberant joy of Justin and Ariel White as they learned, surrounded by family and friends in the middle of downtown, that they were having a baby girl. For the laugh I shared with Anthony Dias over his Donkey Kong shirt, the slice of supreme pizza Jose Lopez insisted I take, and the encouraging words Ann Zimmerman Gallant, a retired journalist, gave me as she shopped for milkweed.

For the dignity of simple labor and the delight of Saturday afternoon baseball in the park. For the familiar comfort of well-worn boots and the refreshing chill of bottled water kindly donated by a Honduran family on Easter Avenue. For a wife who doesn’t roll her eyes at my boyish excursions and for a dad who faithfully waited to pick me up in Carrollton after midnight. For the slowness and solitude that allows one to notice the way tall grass pokes through the top of an abandoned traffic cone, and for that brief moment when glowing city lights match the day’s fading twilight.

All in Two Days’ Work Walking-Dallas-Jeffrey-McWhorter-sidebar May 10 6:20 A.M. Horses grazing in a pasture at the southernmost tip of the city as the sun rises behind them.

May 10
6:20 a.m.
Horses grazing in a pasture at the southernmost tip of the city as the sun rises behind them.