The finish line was 580 days away

SALISBURY — It was the 1970s and Charlie Bell was a Princeton engineering graduate with a promising career working for IBM in sales in New York City and doing well by all accounts. He donned a suit each day, a good one, reached for his briefcase, and took the commuter train in to work. 

Then, one day on a train platform, he began to question the pattern. His answer took him a year-and-a-half later on a 10,000 mile solo adventure that brought him in touch with himself and America. He collected a lifetime’s worth of stories of generosity, the weather, hospitality, incarceration, natural disasters, running shoes, Saltine crackers, dodging bullets and personal growth. 

He shared some of these tales with a rapt audience at Noble Horizons on Saturday, Oct. 26. 

The run began and ended in Mercersburg, Pa., Bell’s home at the time. The route was southward, looping into Florida, and then west. Bell said that his plan was to cover the southern states during the winter, go north along the length of California and head east through the northern states in the summer, reaching New England in time for foliage season.

The schedule derailed for a variety of reasons — the major one being that he kept succumbing to hosts’ entreaties to stay just one more day. The delay meant that he looped through Maine at the end of one of the coldest Januarys on record. But he dipped his feet briefly into the waters lapping the rocky shores before moving on southward toward home.

Bell said he has lived in Salisbury for 44 of his 66 years. He retired in June from a career teaching at The Hotchkiss School. His mother, whom he described as “eccentric and contrarian by nature,” lived at Noble Horizons for a time. Bell has recently relocated to Columbia County in New York.

Bell said the two-year detour in his life was “100 times more powerful, more inspiring” than he’d expected it would be.

Practical logistics included a 25-pound backpack. Seven pairs of shoes were needed for the run. Replacement pairs were mailed ahead by family as needed, to reduce the weight he was carrying. 

He took one set of street clothes. A motel stay was scheduled for one night each month. Lodging was found by meeting people at random, sometimes resulting in those people knowing of places farther along the route, so that sometimes there would be a short series of lodgings arranged in advance.

He met many people.

“I fell in love; I got dumped,” Bell recalled.

His diet along the way surprised his audience when he said that 60% was Saltine crackers, ground inside the wrapper and eaten as crumbs, then washed down with water.

With 4,000 miles to go, Bell said knee trouble had set in, so he walked the final stretch.

Over the next two years, Bell said he will work on the chronicle of his journey. So far it is 820 pages. He will also sort through the thousands of photos he took. He is constructing a website, hoping to devise an interactive format so that viewers can click on a part of the route and read stories from that area.

Summing up the learning experience, Bell said that he was struck by how good average Americans are and how much variety there is out there. 

“One’s view of the world is arbitrary,” he added.