Introduction
The slick bicycle people blow past me one by one on their two-county hill. For them, in their tight black pants and cartoon-colored shirts, this is probably just a morning's sprint, but to me it has the feel of a minor pilgrimage. This spirit that is inspiring my journey compensates for whatever cycle envy I may be experiencing as I creak along with my jury-rigged panniers on this ancient friction machine.
I left my home in the Mission District at 7 a.m. to make the 45-mile trip to Point Reyes Station to meet one Dr. John Francis, writer, artist, U.N. Goodwill Ambassador, and sometime legend in West Marin. Francis has spent most of his adult life traveling the hemisphere, picking up university degrees and promoting environmental awareness. For 22 years he demonstrated his conviction by eschewing all forms of motorized conveyance. And for 17 of those years he didn't speak a word, communicating with gestures and in writing. In the face of this kind of commitment it seemed only appropriate that I make a show of good faith by biking to the interview.
Planet Walk
Francis started an organization called Planet Walk, and for all the support Planet Walk gets from friends and sponsors, it is at its core an organization of one; one man walking around the globe promoting environmental and social harmony in as grassroots a fashion as he can. He is currently preparing for the next leg of his journey, a 700-mile walk across Cuba. This is the ostensible point to this story, but what is really inspiring are the sacrifices this one man was willing to make for the sake of his principles, to make his life into a living question: "Are there other ways to live on this planet?" And in these troubled and troubling times I find myself increasingly gravitating toward people who are asking these kinds of questions.
The Journey
Whatever wooziness I experience as I churn my way toward Tomales Bay is mild compared to the existential nausea I usually feel when I'm motoring north on 101 or idling at one of the many stoplights on Sir Francis Drake Boulevard. Don't worry. I won't trigger your own gag reflexes waxing poetic on my newfound communion with nature. Let's just say it's a damned fine day to be moving at 10 miles an hour through this beautiful corner of the earth. For all my years of San Francisco living, it's a trip it had never once occurred to me to make until I heard the story of John Francis.
To condense the odyssey of anybody's life into a few paragraphs seems mildly criminal, and in the case of Francis it seems positively felonious. A book would hardly catch the details. (Actually, we'll see about this: Francis has just signed a contract with Chelsea Green to write the story of his adventures.) Anything shorter runs the risk of begging more questions than it answers.
1971 Oil Spill
The year was 1971. Two oil tankers collided in the waters off the Golden Gate, spilling 440,000 gallons of crude, catalyzing one man's troubled mind into a whirl of questions: What is my part in this? Why are we living our lives at 60 miles per hour? How can one person make a difference? Then a friend of his died shortly after the spill. Francis commemorated the man's life with a memorial walk from his home in Inverness to San Anselmo and back. In hindsight you could call it a spiritual crisis, some kind of grief that was pushing Francis to break out of the boundaries of his life.
He decided to see what would happen if he stopped traveling in cars. After a few months of walking, his world view was starting to polarize: the elation he felt at his newfound freedom, the despair he felt watching the world pass him by. He could see that if he continued his decision was going to transform his entire life.
Years of Silence
And yet, so threatened were people by the statement he was making that he found himself embroiled in many a pointless argument. On his 27th birthday he decided to treat himself to a break from all the noise by spending the day in silence. And in the bizarre, inconceivable way that time accretes, that day turned into two, and those two into a week, a month, a year. Before it ended, Francis' birthday gift turned into 17 years of silence. "You have to experience it," he says, looking back on those years, "You can't explain silence by saying something." But for those of us who are more inclined to view such behavior as an aberration, he will point to its virtues: It quieted his mind, it gave him the opportunity to really listen to others, and it kept his intentions from getting diffused in chatter.
Academic Achievements
Compelling, and well precedented, is the narrative of the sadhu, the silent, wandering holy man who lives completely on the margins of society. Certainly Francis has been no stranger to the margins. Over the years of his pilgrimage he has spent plenty of time painting in the wilderness or strumming his banjo along the side of some blue highway. But what makes Francis' life so remarkable is the extent to which he continued to work within the mainstream. For in those years of silence he earned a B.A. in Oregon, an M.A. in Montana, and got his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin.
Legacy and Reflections
Looking down the metaphorical road Francis sees Africa, Asia, Australia. When he first started he estimated that it would take him 18 years to make it around the globe and back. "The 18 years came and I realized while I was doing it that, at the rate I am going, it would take a lifetime," says Francis. "And whether I got around or not wasn't really the point, that it was my journey and it would take my whole life."