Neil King Jr., a journalist whose bookye7, “American Ramble,” told of his 330-mile trek from his home in Washington, D.C. to New York City while in remission from cancer, an account that lyrically evoked the people, history and back roads of the Mid-Atlantic region, died on Sept. 17 in Washington. He was 65.
His death, in a hospital, was from complications of esophageal cancer, his wife, Shailagh Murray, said.
Mr. King’s travelogue-cum-memoir, whose subtitle is “A Walk of Memory and Renewal,” was based on a 26-day hike he took in the spring of 2021, when the country was emerging from the Covid lockdown. (He modestly called it a “humdrum feat by any measure.”) It crystallized for many readers how the pandemic had heightened a sense of life’s urgency and fragility.
“I had set out with a wonder first stirred by a sickness,” Mr. King wrote. “A jolt of fear had opened a seam of freedom, and I had slipped through.”
Outside Baltimore, he met a sidewalk philosopher taking out his trash who told him that his pilgrimage, just two months after the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, would set off good vibrations and bring others to a place of sanity.
“Right now, everybody’s out of sync, in the wrong frequency,” the man said.
Mr. King, who had covered wars in the Balkans and Iraq as a longtime reporter for The Wall Street Journal, was not so unworldly as to think that America’s polarization could be easily healed.
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