By Charles F. Bostwick
Staff Writer


ROSAMOND — Eight months and 3,500 miles ago, Joe Hurley started walking in Connecticut, looking for the America you can't see from an interstate highway.

A semi-retired newspaperman, the 59-year-old set out to see if Americans are the same as when he was a boy 50 years earlier Ozzie and Harriet or Will and Grace?

"I haven't found what I thought I'd find. I found many other things," Hurley said Wednesday, walking through the desert north of Rosamond beside Sierra Highway, in flannel shirt and widebrimmed hat, a small pack over one shoulder.

Hurley found that Americans are different in different places at least in friendliness toward a cross-country stranger.

Walking across New England, Hurley had one motorist stop to ask if he needed a ride. The offer became common starting in Pennsylvania, and on through the Midwest and in the West.

But when he got to Bishop, just inside the California line, he found people didn't have much time for him.

"Some guy in a hat and shirt like this and who asks how much the coffee is before he buys it is not the person they want to deal with," Hurley said.

The difference he sees is between townfolk and the inhabitants of cities or suburbs.

"I think that's a basic difference. … I think the difference is time, how much time they have. In the suburbs and cities people are always in a hurry," Hurley said.

Hurley is walking more than 20 miles a day along U.S. Route 6, at one time the longest highway in the United States and the same route that Beat Generation novelist Jack Kerouac had his fictional Sal Paradise pick but abandon in the classic "On the Road."

Hurley started March 26 in Provincetown, Mass. He expects to reach the Pacific Ocean at Long Beach on Dec. 1, after more than 3,600 miles.

Route 6 used to go from Cape Cod to Long Beach, but for the last 40 years its western end has been a few miles outside Bishop.

Where Route 6 ends, a Caltrans road sign says: "Provincetown, MA 3,205 miles." Hurley thinks the actual distance is farther.

Sierra Highway was U.S. Route 6 from Bishop through the Antelope Valley and Newhall until 1964, when California changed its highway system.

After taking off Thansksgiving which he plans to spend watching TV or doing a crossword puzzle with his feet up in a Lancaster motel Hurley continues through Palmdale on Friday, going southward through Burbank on Tuesday.

Hurley takes off Thursdays and Mondays to write newspaper columns. A reporter since 1974, covering everything from crime to politics to sports, Hurley retired in 2003 from The News-Times, a 40,000-circulation daily paper in Danbury, Conn., but still writes a weekly column.

Photographer Travis Lindhorst, 29, accompanies him. They spend nights in motels, with Lindhorst driving him back and forth in mornings and evenings so he starts up walking each day where he left off the evening before.

Hurley writes by e-mail about people he meets and the things he sees: a Native American centenarian in Nevada, a French and Algerian couple who run a restaurant in Independence, Calif.; dwindling Great Plains farm towns, and Plains motorists' habit of waving to passing drivers.

Hurley has worn out six pairs of shoes and a car. His aging Geo Metro's brakes failed on a Death Valley sidetrip, so he left it with a mechanic in Beatty, Nev., to fix and give to a local elderly woman.

A niece in Santa Monica loaned him her camper to keep up the trek.

Hurley hopes to turn his adventure into a book.

"We've got dozens of stories," Hurley said, "and some are pretty good stories. There's definitely a book there."