Just Passing Through?

A few weeks ago, I received a big envelope with a calendar in it. It was called "Wisconsin Horsepower." The postmark was also from the Cheese State.

I did a double take. Whom did I know in Wisconsin?

I opened the calendar and two letters fell out, both from someone named Jim Bragg.

I searched my gray matter. Jim Bragg. Jim Bragg. Nothing.

I read the title of his letter, "Coast To Coast," and I suddenly realized who had sent me the packet. Jim Bragg was the 70-something man who stopped in Waitsburg on his walk across America!

The near Hobbit-like shuffler, who was my first official guest at the Seven Porches Guest House, was a retired dairy farmer from Wisconsin. I remembered because we visited about his background and adventure for quite some time during his stop here. I wrote about it for the Times.

The opening to his form letter was moving.

"Words aren't adequate to explain the range and depth of my experience as I walked across America," he wrote. "The beauty and diversity of the land is amazing, especially when you have time to absorb and digest more details while you move along in a very slow fashion."

Bragg went on, musing that after a while, "the journey became more important than the destination" and "the experience became as much internal as external."

He said "people encounters along the way were the absolute highlight of my travel. It has so enriched my life. It has been such a blessing."

At the end of his letter, there was a note just for me (and Dizzy, my dog).

"I enjoyed Waitsburg," Bragg wrote, signing as the "Gimpy Geezer."

"It was nice to relax in your home and I liked the community," he continued. "I continued slowly and arrived at the Pacific Coast on Oct. 15 (he stopped in Waitsburg in early September). It took me four summers to walk from the Atlantic to the Pacific, but it really was a worthwhile investment of time and effort. Thank you for being a part of those memories."

I was delighted. Following roughly in the footsteps of Lewis & Clark after crossing the Idaho border, Bragg had reached his monumental goal.

My first thought after receiving Jim's gift was to share his good news story with our readers, some of whom commented to me how much they enjoyed learning about his trek west.

I also thought many of our readers could relate to his background as a farmer, which brings me to his note about the "Wisconsin Horsepower" calendar, which highlights in photographs the way several Old Order Amish families in North Central Wisconsin use teams of horses to till the soil, harvest crops and do other jobs on their dairy farms, much the same way farmers here prepared and harvested their wheat crops decades ago.

Bragg, who owned his farm for three and a half decades, said his earliest memories of growing up involved horses and cattle. Even though Bragg didn't have the kind of agricultural operation that required horse power, he admired the Amish farmers' spirit and intention of keeping their methods down to earth.

"Amish farming is done with four-legged horsepower," he wrote in a separate comment about the calendar. "It is not an easy way to do the necessary fieldwork. However, it does provide a close connection to the soil. A slower pace and quiet moments allow one to listen to the peacefulness of the landscape. The soil becomes a part of you. It is not a commodity. We are just passing through. The land endures."

What a great metaphor for Jim's own coast-to-coast trip and stops in the Touchet Valley. Everything he observed from his slow and quiet vantage remains largely unchanged or at least unmoved.

Because of his steps through our landscape, he naturally became a part of it and of us.

And I, for one, felt he wasn't merely passing through. In the case of this innkeeper and others whose lives he touched with his slow-paced enterprise, the sound of his shuffling footsteps endures.

At the onset of the 2012 travel season, when many visitors will stop and honor us with their presence, curiosity and stories, it's worth remembering that we have each other much to offer as strangers.