| Walking
His Talk
Published Nov. 2002 issue of Hope Magazine
LISTENING
to John Francis recount his fifty-six years, you might not
guess that he was silent for seventeen of them. Looking at
his dreadlocks and gold earring, you wouldn’t imagine
that he once had a desk job with the U.S. Coast Guard. Idling
next to Francis on the Golden Gate Bridge in his wife’s
Saturn, you’d certainly never know he eschewed cars,
trains, and planes for twenty-two years. Watching the stay-at-home
dad playing with his young son, you wouldn’t think he
was a pilgrim who had walked 20,000 miles of the Americas.
Make that 20,000 miles and counting.
Francis has a dream, and he calls it Planetwalk: one man walking
and sailing around the world to promote peace and environmental
stewardship. That dream, however, has changed over the years.
Francis broke a seventeen-year vow of silence to tell others
about his journey. After two decades on foot, he hopped on
a plane, believing he could do more good if he could get his
message to more people.
Hypocritical? Some might think so. Paradoxical? Perhaps. Unusual?
Definitely. Yet these are all facets of Francis’s continuing
journey, which began in the simple, ordinary actions of walking
and silence. “First it has to be a journey of self-discovery—and
by self, I mean the larger self, not just the person John,”
Francis says. “The self includes all of us, as we are
the life of the planet.”
In his travels, Francis has inspired
thousands of people to slow
down, listen, and think about the choices they make in their
own lives. Along the way, he also has helped revise federal
environmental regulations. As stories of Francis spread, the
United Nations named him a Goodwill Ambassador. But his journey
doesn’t end here, in the cozy home he shares in Point
Reyes Station, California, with his wife and son. In fact,
they’re joining him for the next leg of his journey:
a 1,200-mile walk across Cuba.
IT TOOK TWO tragedies to propel Francis’s
dream into reality. The first happened on foggy morning in
1971, when two tankers crashed beneath the Golden Gate Bridge,
spilling hundreds of thousands of gallons of crude oil into
San Francisco Bay. Francis sat by the shore watching a young
woman’s futile attempts to rescue an oil-soaked seagull.
His head swam: he knew the oil his car used made him an accomplice
to the spill.
He wanted to stop driving then and
there, but felt his life and identity, not to mention his
job managing an avant garde band, depended on his car. Francis
felt haunted by standards he was raised with back in Philadelphia
in the mid-1950s—how much money he made, what kind of
career he had, how fast his car could go.
Shortly after the spill, one of Francis’s
close friends drowned in the bay when a storm capsized his
boat. Francis decided to walk to a concert twenty miles from
his home in Inverness to give himself time to contemplate
his friend’s life. On the long walk home, life’s
fragile, finite reality struck Francis hard. “It was
the end of the sixties; we all had dreams. I came to California
from Philadelphia thinking I’d get a piece of land and
have a farm,” he says. “But after my friend died,
I realized if there was something worth doing, I’d better
do it now, because there was no guarantee there would be a
tomorrow and a million dollars at my door. That’s when
it hit me that I needed to keep walking.” He gave up
cars—and buses, trains, and planes altogether.
To his surprise, Francis found himself
constantly arguing with
people who thought he was crazy or trying to guilt-trip them
for riding in cars. On his twenty-seventh birthday, he decided
to give himself a one-day ceasefire by not talking. During
his day of silence, Francis realized how little he’d
been listening to people, and how he’d used words to
spin a web of facades. “I would make up lies to make
myself look better—like I had been asked to star in
a movie, or I was going to medical school,” he says.
“I was very unhappy just being who I was, being black
in America. I grew up at a time when school counselors told
me I should think about being a garbage man, when African
Americans were always portrayed as buffoons in the media.
Even if your family is supportive, you’re not going
to grow up liking yourself.”
The day of silence turned into a week,
the week into a month,
the month into a lifestyle. Giving up cars and then the spoken
word, Francis no longer had to worry about driving the right
car or saying the right thing. He gained a rush of freedom,
a quieted mind, a reminder of the kid he really was. Francis
walked to Oregon, where he did odd jobs, built wooden boats,
completed his B.A., and finally named his dream. He would
walk and sail around the world as a self-employed goodwill
ambassador. Francis started a nonprofit called Planetwalk,
and gave himself eighteen years to complete his mission.
ON NEW YEAR’S DAY, 1983, Francis left
Abbott’s Lagoon, his favorite hiking spot on the Point
Reyes Peninsula, equipped with a backpack, banjo, and watercolors.
A type-written note introduced Francis and his mission to
the schoolchildren, waitresses, professors, priests, activists,
and truck drivers that he met on his way north and east. He
says most people were eager to help him, ironically, often
offering him rides. Some nights he slept outdoors, others
in the spare bedroom of one of his countless benefactors.
With a lot of help from his friends, Francis produced a quarterly
newsletter about his walk-in-progress, plus news of other
peace-keeping and environmental efforts. In pictures and words,
he chronicled the kindnesses on which his journey depended
and the observations of a man now more attuned to the pace
and patter of squirrels than the speed and rumble of cars.
Schools often invited Francis to be a guest “lecturer,”
where he pantomimed stories from the road, showed slides of
his watercolors, plucked his banjo, and passed the hat. The
discovery that walking great distances was possible inspired
kids to envision things that previously seemed impossible,
he says. While his walk was a spiritual discipline more than
a protest, at times it became an act of civil disobedience,
as when his route crossed a freeway or bridge off-limits to
pedestrians.
Other encounters not only tested his
mettle but also
demonstrated the power of his silence. Two years into his
walk, a man put a .44 Magnum to Francis’s head and told
him that his kind wasn’t welcome. Francis just smiled
and walked his fingers through the air to indicate he was
walking. The puzzled man told him to get lost. Francis kept
walking. “I went and sat by the water and listened to
a loon call, and thought about what happened. The situation
made me understand that death is always with us, but not something
to be feared. I decided I wasn’t going to stop because
just someone scared me.”
WHILE IN MANY WAYS living on the fringe of
society, Francis has
often plunged into the heart of institutions, challenging
their
assumptions in his own quiet, eccentric way. “Avoiding
institutions can be counterproductive. They are the entities
that can maintain the change that we want to see, but they
can only change slowly, and from within,” he says. In
1985, he reached the University of Montana-Missoula, where
he earned a master’s degree in environmental studies—and
became the school’s most controversial teaching assistant.
When students and parents learned that the administration
had hired a speechless TA, the phones rang off the hook. But
within a week, Francis had a waiting list for his class, where
he would act out parts of the lecture to spark discussion.
For his final thesis, Francis described
and illustrated his
pilgrimage, successfully defending it with sign language and
pantomime. “It wasn’t easy for a lot of people
to accept his methods, but there wasn’t anybody more
dedicated to communicating with students,” says classmate
Gary Roy, who has stayed close friends with Francis. “It
was a high maintenance friendship, having to communicate slowly
with pads of paper and pantomimes, but I stuck with it because
I respected him so much. You can learn things through the
news and course work, but it’s not going to affect your
life unless you have real-life role models like John.”
The wayfarer walked on to Madison,
Wisconsin, to enroll in a
Ph.D. program in land resources. Barbara Borns, then graduate
student coordinator for the University of Wisconsin’s
Institute of Environmental Studies, recalls the faculty’s
apprehension. “As John walked towards Madison, the staff
was pretty nervous, wondering how we were going to communicate
with him,” she says. “Once he arrived, it took
about two minutes for us to relax and see he was okay. Some
people still think he’s a ‘kook’ or a phony,
but the majority respect John and his commitment immensely,”
says Borns. “We all have a role in taking care of the
earth. John lives that message; he doesn’t just write
papers or give speeches about it.”
As far as he had come, Francis still felt unsure of himself.
After
he had completed his coursework and was “ABD, all but
dissertationed,” he almost gave up. “I could see
that was a pattern for me—I would try something and
then say I couldn’t do it,” he says. But he persevered,
and wrote his dissertation on the economic and environmental
costs of oil spills. The research reaffirmed his decision
take personal responsibility for the oil spill he had witnessed
fifteen years before. Francis
discovered that land-based sources, most notably automobile
owners, cause more marine oil pollution than any other (a
fact that hasn’t changed, according to a 2002 National
Academy of Sciences report.)
On
Earth Day 1990, Francis spoke his first words in seventeen
years. “Thank you for being here,” he said to a
gathering of extended family in Washington, D.C., not even
recognizing his own voice. “If there wasn’t anybody
here, there wouldn’t be any communication. Silence has
taught me the value of listening.”
ON
THE HEELS of the Exxon Valdez disaster, the U.S.
Coast Guard hired the new Ph.D. in 1991 to help revamp federal
oil spill regulations, giving Francis the chance to affect
the outcome of spills like the one that had catalyzed his
journey twenty years before. Because of his expertise, the
Coast Guard agreed to wait the two months it would take him
to bike from Vermont to Washington, and later allowed Francis
and a colleague to bike to a tanker inspection in Philadelphia.
“We wanted a balanced team, and John brought solid technical
expertise and a good environmental perspective,” says
Norm Lemley, director of the OPA 90 (Oil Pollution Act) staff.
But after a year, Francis felt more
like he was collecting a
paycheck than making any real contribution to environmental
clean-ups. The United Nations Environmental Program had just
appointed him as an international Goodwill Ambassador, so
he returned to the road. Walking and sailing his way around
the Caribbean and South America, Francis created environmental
curricula for local schools, taught kids about marine ecology
via sailboat rides, and produced a video on litter for Antigua’s
government.
Passing Venezuela’s infamous
El Dorado prison, Francis
realized his decision to eschew cars had created a prison
itself. While his commitment to silence had been a living
one, revisited year after year, Francis had allowed no flexibility
in his decision to stop driving. “When I first decided
not to ride in cars, it was a very appropriate choice, but
much had changed—I had written pollution regulations
that actually allowed me to do something about oil spills,”
he says. “But I hadn’t allowed myself to change
along with the change I was creating.”
Over the next four years, he walked the length of South America
and, with the help of cars and planes, spoke throughout the
United States, focusing in both places on young people. Francis
speaks every year at the World Affairs Seminar at the University
of Wisconsin in Whitewater, which draws more than 1,000 high
school juniors from around the globe. In South America, he
visited schools affiliated with the GLOBE program, in which
students help scientists worldwide by making environmental
observations and entering them in an online database.
Francis finally concluded his bi-continental journey in Tierra
del Fuego in 1999, and circled back to Point Reyes, where
he had begun his Planetwalk nearly twenty years before.
Francis shares his home base in Point Reyes Station with his
wife, Martha, and their year-old son Samuel. Life with the
Planetwalker hasn’t always been easy, but it has been
rewarding, says Martha Francis, who met John in D.C. during
his Coast Guard days. She was then a senator’s press
secretary, working on “the big policy issues, but feeling
disillusioned. Watching how John did things at the grassroots
level, one step at a time, I realized I could save one child
at a time.” She quit her job and got her degree in social
work. When her husband has been in remote places for extended
periods, she says, “I just had to have faith that everything
was okay. John has taught me to see the world as though everyone
is connected, so even when he’s not around, I feel like
there are people around me that contain parts of him.”
THE ENTIRE FRANCIS family is gearing up for
John’s 1,200-mile walk across Cuba next June. Martha
and Samuel will accompany him for part of the walk, as will
a filmmaker and a satellite technician. Linking up with SchoolTone
Alliance, a global organization combining education and technology,
the Planetwalk team will zap live footage of the family walk
to schools in Oakland, California, and throughout Cuba.
Francis will begin his walk at the
close of an international
conference next June in Havana, where Cuban and American scientists
will address sustainable development issues and shared environmental
problems. Working with the San Francisco-based nonprofit Global
Exchange, Francis is organizing a student delegation to attend
the event and join him on a three-day post-conference walk.
He also will visit farms to begin studying the island’s
organic agriculture. While Cuba has been widely touted as
an agricultural model for the region, Francis hopes to gauge
how well the nation’s farms are actually feeding its
people.
Planetwalk is financed by a network
of supporters, including
most of the Point Reyes community. It’s typical for
a third of the town’s 350 residents to show up for a
Planetwalk fundraiser. Perhaps that’s because Francis
never preaches—he isn’t looking to convert the
motorized world to a pedestrian one, though he’d love
to see communities evolve away from the automobile. It is
precisely because he isn’t trying to convince anyone
of anything that John Francis moves people. The owners of
a restaurant he once visited instituted a silent working day
each month. After attending Francis’ send-off in 1983,
a man was inspired to walk across the U.S. carrying a UNICEF
peace torch. Another man chose not to renew his driver’s
license, figuring “if John can walk it, then I can try.”
Francis recently revisited silence,
along with a few residents of
Point Reyes, for ten days. As in the past, he didn’t
intend to isolate himself, like the Trappist monks he once
thought of joining, but rather to share the vibrant, silent
space with the community, regardless of whether or not they
spoke. “Hardly anyone ever listens anymore, and I think
that’s his real message,” says Peter Barnes, author
of Who Owns the Sky, and founder of the Mesa Refuge,
a writers’ retreat in Point Reyes. “John shows
us how it is possible to resist the lures of modern life,
unplug from the noise, and live a satisfying existence.”
Want
to Learn More?
John
Francis
P.O.
Box 626
Point Reyes Station, CA 94937
(415) 663-0838
www.planetwalk.org
planetwalk@earthlink.net
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