By Tom Dodge
Dallas, TX – Hal Stan lives at Greenport, Long Island. Greenport is located on the extreme side of the United States, about as far east as you can go. In fact, "extreme" is about the best word to describe Hal if you're using the popular definition of that word. To the regular mall-shopping, soft drink-swilling, SUV-driving, football game-watching suburbanite, he would be considered extreme. He would be considered extreme because he avoids the television culture. He studies Zen, grows his own vegetables in the community garden, helps out at the co-op, recycles everything (even his hair - he makes pin-cushions with it), and walks.
Ordinarily he walks about four hours each day. His older brother, Lennie, who swims four hours a day, says that Hal is just like their father, who walked 2500 miles after escaping from a Siberian prison in the 1920s. He walked across Siberia to Hong Kong, where he caught a steamer to New York. There he married their mother, eventually ending up in Florida, where Lennie now lives. The brothers visit each other every year to get the best climate of both states.
In any case, Hal is somewhere in the Wisconsin area now, on his way back across the country to Greenport. His original plan was to hike from Arizona, up the Rocky Mountain Trail, to Alaska. In northern Montana he concluded that he wouldn't be able to make it before the cold weather set in, so he turned back east. He says the severe cold is unpleasant to him now. He's 72.
Isn't it strange how the perception of this piece changed radically with that statement? Seventy-two is normally the age when people are expected to be either in the nursing home or at least seriously considering selling the motor home. The television tells old people to do this, just as it tells young people to buy music, scooters, skateboards, cell phones, and the like. The television does this because it is a corporate tool; and life in a monetary-driven society must be regular so that demographics may be made, projections established based on the demographics, elections planned, money invested, products packaged and sold, movies planned and filmed - all guaranteed to appeal to the correctly-identified audience. If 72-year-old people are hiking somewhere in the wilderness rather than watching television and buying motor homes, prescription drugs, and boat shoes, this would totally skew the projections, foul the system, clog the machinery. Corporations don't like taking chances.
Before I met Hal, I knew Lennie, who lived in Sunnyvale, east of Dallas. Lennie was young then, in his forties, and exercised like a madman. Before teaching his classes at Garland High, he had ridden his bike 20 miles, swum hundreds of laps, punched the heavy bag, and jogged. When I raved about his condition, he always said, "You oughtta meet my brother." I thought this was a joke. But when I finally met him in 1986, he had just returned from walking the 1200-mile-long Appalachian Trail and riding his bicycle from Seattle 3000 miles to Greenport.
"I get it now," I told Lennie.
All of which is to say that in a lot of ways Hal is my hero. Not just because of the physical act of doing these things, but because he does them solely for private reasons. He does them alone and he does them without fanfare or publicity. I could do what he does, and so could thousands of people my age and older. Some do. But too many others buy into the myths created by the television. And buy and buy and buy.
Tom Dodge is a writer from Midlothian, Texas.