Holden Minor Ringer is a man walking across the United States, but he does not particularly want to be called “the walking man.” He does not want to talk about how many pairs of shoes he’s gone through in the last year. And he definitely does not want to hear your shitty Forrest Gump jokes.
“I don’t want to be pigeonholed into one thing,” says the man who is more than 340 days into a walk across the country. But Ringer is a nice guy, and he knows that we are only human and cannot resist asking questions and making jokes, so if you do indulge, he’ll answer with a smile
On February 20, day 333 of his 3,000-mile walk from Washington State to Washington, D.C., the 26-year-old walked into the Bull City, heading east on Chapel Hill Street and pushing a stroller full of travel essentials. Having grown up in Dallas and graduated from Emory University in Georgia, being back in the South is a bit of a homecoming.
“It’s the worst region in the entire country to walk through,” Ringer tells me, perhaps affectionately as we walk around Durham’s downtown.
Ringer’s journey across the country is partly to promote pedestrian safety and partly because he thought it would be a cool thing to do. Along the way, he’s met local advocates and strangers alike.
He’s a strange person with a strange hobby, but he would rather talk about his reason for walking, rattling off the relevant statistics (“44,000 people die in car crashes every single year”).
The idea for Ringer’s trek, which has taken him on a curving path—from Washington State down to Atlanta, then rounding northeast through Durham—came to him when he was about to graduate college in 2021 and feeling the stress of final exams.
“As a form of procrastination I started Googling ‘walking across America,’” Ringer says. “And the seeds were just planted.”
In 2023, he started the walk.
Ringer mostly walks alone, accompanied only by his stroller, Smiley—a storage unit for sustenance (water, lots of canned pears), shelter (a tent), and other essentials (books). Smiley is also a companion, in keeping with the Tom Hanks theme, maybe in the mold of Cast Away’s Wilson. But the stroller is also a reminder to keep finding a reason to smile, even in hard stretches—like struggling across the High Plains out west.
“You’re staring at thousands of miles of sagebrush,” Ringer says, “Meanwhile, I was getting over a breakup at the same time, and it’s like, you’re seeing your ex in all the sagebrush.”
“If you take one takeaway from meeting me, it’s: America is not a walkable place,” Ringer continues, adding, “And there’s lots of generous people in America.”
“Walkability,” as it turns out, is not just about sidewalks.
“It’s like, where do I go to the bathroom? Where do I sit down at a bus stop? How close is a grocery store to my house?” Ringer says.
Ringer spends a lot of time walking on highway shoulders. And lots of the people he sees there aren’t exactly doing it for fun. “Oftentimes, it’s poor folks that may not have any other option,” he says. “Departments of transportation across the country see these people as invisible.”
Ringer has also walked past a lot of roadside memorials, often large crosses marking the spot where someone was killed by a careless driver. These deaths, he says, are preventable.
“I can see [a driver] on their phone, you know, from hundreds of meters away. And it’s like, I can tell that they’re on their phone before I ever see the phone,” Ringer says. “That’s the scariest thing that I deal with.”
Ringer points out that in the South, much of the infrastructure was built during the postwar era of the automobile. That’s the case in Durham, where downtown revitalization plans led to the creation of pairs of two-lane one-way streets, like Duke and Gregson, and Roxboro and Mangum. That design leads to increased driving speeds and thus higher danger for pedestrians.
While in the city, Ringer met with Bike Durham advocates currently campaigning for changes to Roxboro and Mangum Streets. The speed limit on that parallel pair of north-south streets is 35 miles per hour, though a resident-run Twitter account, @RecklessRoxboro, regularly posts photos of cars going faster than 60 miles per hour in the residential stretch. While in Durham, Ringer visited Roxboro and took some videos for Bike Durham to demonstrate how unsafe it is.
Over the journey, Ringer has also dealt with the oddity of becoming a minor internet sensation. Headlines like “Emory University alum’s epic journey” and “WOW: Man Attempting to Walk Across Country” appear like footprints behind him.
He also keeps a blog and posts on Reddit, platforms that help him plan ahead and make inroads for his next stop. In his five nights in Durham, for instance, he scored a free night at the Durham Hotel (“probably the nicest hotel that anyone has ever gifted me”) and then four nights with some kind-hearted Bike Durham advocates. When he can’t find someone to host him through Reddit or asking around, he’ll pitch his tent in a yard or a church.
As Ringer walked around Durham, he shared stories about parking minimums in Greensboro; a preacher in Gaffney, South Carolina; and accidentally herding goats near Winston-Salem. In return, Durham residents shared tales of the pedestrian nightmare of the Loop, the rise of One City Center, and the Ellerbe Creek Trail dinosaur.
On Day 338, Ringer walked north on Roxboro Street headed toward Oxford, taking those Bull City stories with him. His walk officially ends in D.C., but he plans to walk up to New York and see the Atlantic. By May, he’ll make it to New Haven, Connecticut, where his grandparents are memorialized.
On Day 339, having moved on toward Virginia, he posted: “Leaving Durham yesterday I felt some real sadness. From the very first interaction I had with folks in town I felt the sense of warmth and community so prevalent that remained throughout my stay in Bull City.
“So thank you Durham, you are special and I hope to return one day.”
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