The Final Walk

Rob and John take their final walk together.

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Hi, I'm Rob. Tale number forty two, the final walk. I take a lot of walks. Almost every day. Most of them are at the same park, which is near where I live in Florida. And it's a really big park, so if you wanted to, you could take a 15 mile walk. My route is about four and a half miles. I usually walk alone, and if there's a goal it's to see wildlife. There are a lot of animals at this park. One day I was finishing up my walk, and it was in a spot where through the trees each evening you can watch the sunset. And there is this guy standing there, an older man, I would later learn he was eighty-one years old. And he was standing there taking a photo of the sunset with his phone. As I walked by, I said hi. He said, Do you think you could help me? And I said, Sure, I can try. He said, Look at this sunset. Is this not the most beautiful sunset you've ever seen? And I said, Yes, it's it's a really pretty sunset. And he said, I like to come look at the sunset here instead of going to the beach because for some reason it's more beautiful to see the sunset through these pine trees. And I said, Yeah, it's a really nice spot to see a sunset. And it's interesting that more people don't come out here to watch the sunset. They all go to the beach. And the beach was just a few miles away from us. And then he said, I've been trying to get a picture of the sunset to send to my great grandson for over a year, and now I've gotten this new phone that's supposed to take much better pictures. And what I want to know from you is how do I take a photo with this phone that captures the sunset as beautiful as it is right now when we're looking at it? Because every time I take a picture and then I look at the picture, it just doesn't capture it. And I said, I can try and take a photo for you, but I think that sometimes you just have to be standing there looking at the sunset if you really want to get that full experience. So I took a few photos for him, and then I showed him how he could kind of mess with the settings to try and bring out the reds that we were seeing that were not really translating to the photo on the phone. And then he finally introduced himself and said, My name's John, and I said, Hi, my name's Rob. And he asked me if I walked there often, and I said, Yeah, I walk here all the time. He said, Well, I've never seen you, and I said, I've never seen you either, but I am walking at a slightly different time than when I normally walk. And he said, When do you normally walk? And I said, I like the last ten minutes of my walk to be in the total darkness, because that's when I can hear frogs call, which is something I really like to pay attention to. And he said, I've been walking out here for over twenty years. I've been walking here since before it was even a park. At first it was just land that had been donated to this city. I found that really interesting. And then he said, What time do you think you'll get here tomorrow? And I said, Probably about four o'clock. And he said, Okay, I'll see you then. And that's how John and I started taking walks together. I walked with him once or twice a week. It was never planned, but on some days when I showed up to take a walk, he would be there waiting for me. And I really enjoyed walking with him. He would tell me all about the human history of the park, who had owned it, how certain trails had come to be, and I would point out the animals that I saw and we would talk about those. We were both having a similar experience, I think. I didn't know about the park in the way John knew about it at all, and John didn't know about the park in the way I knew about it at all. So we were both learning a lot about a place we liked to learn about. For example, there was an old fence out there. I had walked past it thousands of times. John told me that fence was from a homestead that had been there about fifty years ago, and the fence was the only thing left. It gave me a totally new perspective of the park as a place where people had lived. It was not always vacant land with no structures on it. And then John asked me about these holes he had noticed that had been dug out, and there were little piles of sand near them. He thought they were coyotes or maybe armadillos. I was able to tell him that those were made by gopher tortoises, and that they're a special animal, and this is one of the few places in our area, especially where they still live. And that's how our walks together usually were. They were always on weekdays. I like to do longer walks on the weekends, and he didn't know if he was really up for that distance. One day he said, Hey, I want to come out with you this weekend and do a longer walk, and I was like, Okay. And I told him I'd be out there Sunday, and I planned on getting out there around two o'clock, and he said, Okay, I'll be there. And if I'm not there, just go without me. That means I'm not coming. So Sunday rolled around, I showed up, and he wasn't there. I didn't have his phone number and he didn't have mine. The only way we communicated with each other was either in person at the park or we had each other's email addresses. Sometimes he would send me emails. So I checked my email, he hadn't sent me anything, I waited a little while, and then I left without him. My walk that day was going to be about eight miles. It was sort of a complicated route if you were not familiar with the park. Lots of turns onto smaller, more obscure trails. And I was about six miles into the eight mile walk when, way off in the distance, I could see someone walking towards me, and it was John. I was so baffled because he had no idea what route I was taking. He walked up to me and I was like, How did you find me? How did you know where I was going? And he's like, I got here late, I just started in the opposite direction, and when I got to a fork in the trail, I asked myself, is this a trail that Rob would go down today? And if it felt that way, that's the way I went. It was a remarkable act of intuition. Then I noticed that John's right ankle was bloody. He said he had walked off the trail a few feet to pee and had gotten tangled up in some thorns and fallen down. He said it hurt, but it wasn't bleeding anymore, and he was fine. I said okay, and we started to walk back towards the parking lot, which was about two miles away. It was immediately obvious to me that John was struggling. As we walked, he slowly started to lean forward, to the point that he was walking with his back almost parallel to the ground. And I asked him if everything was okay, and he said his stomach hurt, like the muscles in his stomach, not like he was sick, and that the only relief he could get was by leaning forward really far. But when he would do that, he would lose his balance and he kept almost falling down. It was also making him very tired. I asked if he wanted to stop and rest, and he just sat down in the middle of the trail. And then he said, You can leave me. This happens sometimes, I'll be fine. So I just sat down with him. He said he had been having this problem with his stomach and he might have to get surgery. He hoped after that it would be easier to walk again. After about five minutes we stood up and started walking again. And then the same thing happened all over again, and we sat down. He started talking about how it was really awful to become old, and how he still felt kind of like a child. He remembered what it was like to be a child, and he still felt like that person. It was scary that his body was failing him. It wasn't fair, and he wanted to resist. But he was eighty one years old, and he knew that's not really how it worked. It took us a long time to get back to the parking lot. We would walk for a little while and then rest and then walk and then rest. It was dark, but luckily I had a couple flashlights in my backpack. John didn't look good, his voice sounded weaker. We got to his car and it just didn't feel right, so I asked him if he would let me give him a ride home. He said yes. We started to drive. He asked me if I could do him another favor, and I said sure. And he said, Could you please stop at the Dollar General? I want to buy some socks, because if my wife sees this bloody sock, she'll never let me go on a walk by myself again. We stopped, I walked in, got some socks for him, brought him back out, helped him take his bloody sock off, and then he cleaned his leg with a paper towel, got his socks and shoes back on, threw away the evidence, the bloody sock, and then we headed to his house. As we were approaching, he said, This is my last week I'll be in town. I'm heading to Minnesota next week. I'm gonna get the surgery and stay with my son while I recover. Hopefully we'll see each other next year. And then he said, This might have been my final walk. And I said, I don't think that's true. I will see you next year. I dropped him off at his house. I emailed him to check and see how he was doing, but he never replied to me. And so I was just hopeful that I would see him again the next year. Next year rolled around and I didn't see him in January, but I thought he might wait till it was warmer to come back down, which was usually early March. Then it was early March and he still wasn't there. For the whole spring and summer I never saw him. And then that winter I was walking at the park and I saw somebody that I didn't really know that well, but I guess he had seen me walking with John, and he came up to me and asked if I had heard that John had died, and I said no, I hadn't. And he said he had gotten the surgery, it seemed like it had gone well, but he never really recovered. He was stuck in his house in his bed for several months after the surgery, and then he died. It was his final walk. He was right. I'm happy I got to know John a little bit. I'm sorry that he was stuck inside for the last several months of his life. And I'm honored that his final walk was with me. The cover art is by Marcella Johnson. She also came up with the title of the podcast. Our theme music is by Mitchell Harditch. Thanks to Ben, Gordon, Marcella, and Melanie, who are always there to bounce ideas around. You can find us on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and at RobtellsTales.com. And thanks to you for listening.