Walking the line: Sebastian Junger in search of ‘Freedom’ – The San Diego Union-Tribune

Pandemic life has put an emphasis on freedom.

Whether it was in the form of disgruntled anti-maskers complaining about their right 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 humanitys conceptualizations of independence, liberty and self-determination. 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, Whats the freest Ive 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 thats 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 theres a way to walk along this entire thing. Theres 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.

Theres no way to carry that much weight for that far and not wrestle with that inner voice saying, Come on, you dont need to do this. Just stop, Junger says. Its just part of doing something thats physically hard. You just figure out a way to negotiate with that voice or ignore it.

Freedom, by Sebastian Junger.

(Simon & Schuster)

Readers whove enjoyed classics such as Henry David Thoreaus Walden or Jack Kerouacs On the Road will certainly find something worthwhile within Jungers journey. And while Freedom has much more in common stylistically to modern classics such as Jon Krakauers Into the Wild or Bill Brysons A Walk in the Woods, those books often used the journeys 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 not only affect him, but all of humanity.

When youre 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 dont 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 cant run away from them, then you outfight them. And if you cant outfight them, then youll have to outthink them. And if you cant do that, youre not free. Game over, Junger explains.

Still, Junger weaves in broad and complicated topics into the narrative and does so in an accessible way. He doesnt 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 wasnt therapy, it wasnt 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 hed 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 Im 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.

When: 4 p.m. Thursday, May 27

Where: Ticketed virtual event through Warwicks

Tickets: $5-$33.50

Online: warwicks.com

Freedom by Sebastian Junger (Simon & Schuster; 2021; 160 pages)

Combs is a freelance writer.

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Walking the line: Sebastian Junger in search of 'Freedom' - The San Diego Union-Tribune