San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
Journalist Sebastian Junger and his search for “Freedom.”
In new book, Sebastian Junger covers hundreds of miles on foot in hopes of finding ‘Freedom’
Pandemic life has put an emphasis on freedom. Whether it was in the form of disgruntled antimaskers complaining about their rights being violated, or it was the cautiously quarantined longing for a return to better times, the past year has laid bare our often divergent ideas of what it means to be free.
These disparities are at the core of “Freedom,” the new book from Sebastian Junger. While the book is, on its surface, an account of a nearly yearlong trek on foot across the northeastern United States, its essence is its exploration of humanity’s conceptualizations of independence, liberty and selfdetermination. Mixing history, memoir and philosophy, Junger actually never intended to write about the 400-mile trip at all.
“I was thinking to myself, how am I going to write a book about freedom without it being this unbearable philosophical tract,” says Junger, who spent nearly a year walking from Washington, D.C., to western Pennsylvania almost a decade ago. “So inevitably I thought, ‘What’s the freest I’ve ever been?’ Of course, it depends on how you define it, but by the definition I use in the book — that for miles we were the only people who knew where we were every night — that’s not a bad definition of freedom.”
At the time of the journey, Junger was already an accomplished author and journalist, having penned bestsellers such as “The Perfect Storm” and “A Death in Belmont,” as well as working as a war correspondent for Vanity Fair and ABC. The original concept of the trip came in the fall of 2008 when Junger was traveling by train with photojournalist Tim Hetherington. Junger recounts wondering what it would be like to live as a “somewhat vagrant” along the railroads that crisscross across the U.S. The two had spent plenty of time together walking for hours
while working on “Restrepo,” their documentary about the Afghanistan war.
“I mentioned to him at the time that there’s a way to walk along this entire thing. There’s always a dirt bike trail or a cornfield or a maintenance road, whatever it is. You can stitch together a route through the entire thing,” Junger says. “And so I told him that maybe we should walk from D.C. to New York sometime when we were done with the movie.”
Unfortunately, Hetherington was killed while covering the Libyan uprising in 2011. Junger still felt compelled to take the trip, however, and recruited a few friends to come along. He did no research on how to travel up to 30 miles a day on foot and says he simply “loaded up a backpack” and took the train to Union Station in Washington, D.C., and began walking. And while he says he “constantly” thought about giving up, he soon found something of a rhythm.
“There’s no way to carry that much weight for that far and not wrestle with that inner voice saying, ‘Come on, you don’t need to do this. Just stop,’ ” Junger says. “It’s just part of doing something that’s physically hard. You just figure out a way to negotiate with that voice or ignore it.”
Readers who’ve enjoyed classics such as Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden” or Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” will certainly find something worthwhile within Junger’s journey. And while “Freedom” has much more in common stylistically with modern classics such as Jon Krakauer’s “Into the Wild” or Bill Bryson’s “A Walk in the Woods,” those books often used the journey’s encounters as a convenient jumping-off point for the author to contemplate their own existence. Conversely, Junger spends the majority of his time contemplating larger existential questions that affect not only him, but all of humanity.
“When you’re documenting human events, it often requires 300 pages or so to do it adequately. But my last two books, ‘Tribe’ and this book, are about an idea. I don’t have to cover a certain amount of human territory to get the story told,” Junger says. “The more succinct you can be, the better people can absorb that idea.”
The book is split into three parts — “Run,” “Fight” and “Think” — that, for Junger, are the three concepts that are at the core of what it means to be free.
“If someone is going to oppress you, you can run away from them. And if you can’t run away from them, then you outfight them. And if you can’t outfight them, then you’ll have to outthink them. And if you can’t do that, you’re not free. Game over,” Junger explains.
Still, Junger weaves broad and complicated topics into the narrative and does so in an accessible way. He doesn’t get bogged down in the minutiae of the history of the region, nor does he meander or ramble when reflecting on his own existential dilemmas. He is concise and focused, but still manages to be both informative and vulnerable.
“The poor have always walked and the desperate have always slept outside,” Junger writes early in the book. “We were neither, but we were still doing something that felt ancient and hard. Most Americans did not own a car until after World War Two, and traveling often meant walking out your front door.”
“I mostly thought that it was a way to encounter my country and encounter myself in the most raw, unfiltered fashion possible.” Junger says. “It wasn’t therapy, it wasn’t all the things you think it might be, it really was an attempt to understand something about myself and my country.”
When taken together, “Tribe” and “Freedom” do seem to be thematic companions. Asked whether he sees the books as being related or even as part of a trilogy, Junger says he wants to continue exploring dense ideas. A recent health scare has him already thinking about another book, one where he’d like to explore mortality itself.
“So I think the last thing that is important to the human experience is life itself and how the dying process unfolds,” Junger says. “So I’m going to write a book called ‘Pulse’ about what keeps us alive and what happens when that stops.”
Junger laughs and then adds, “another short book on a broad topic.”