By Life-Wire News Service: Staff
(Brought to you by Honda of Staten Island)
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- For Matt Green, life is a long and winding road. He takes his adventures step by step, borough to borough, street to street.
He first started walking in 2009 when he quit his job as a civil engineer.
“I designed roads and was sitting at a desk all the time. It was a pretty good job in a lot of ways, but I was just never very happy doing it,” he explained to the Lifestyles Media Department when he visited this summer.
He decided to walk across country. He had with him what looked like a wheelbarrow and a funny hat. Along the way, he met a lot of people, including a man with an even funnier hat.
Some of the people he met chatted, some gave him food and some even invited him to stay at their home. It’s possible the people who helped him thought he was homeless.
“I was in areas where nobody was. So by being the person who stuck out and looked weird, you might think that would be bad for me, but it actually turned out to be good for me,” he said.
One day in Wisconsin, he was walking along talking to his mother on the phone when a father and son pulled over to ask what he was doing. He hung up on his mother and explained to the pair about walking cross country. When they drove away, he resumed talking with his mom. A few minutes later, the same car approached, this time with the son driving. Matt said goodbye to his mom again as the car pulled up.
“Man, I think you’re so cool, I just wanted to give you some money to go get a sandwich” said the son and handed him five dollars. As they drove off, Matt resumed talking with his mom. The car approached again. This time the father gave him a meal of cooked sausage, a Gatorade and a beer.
That is one of his favorite stories and just one example of the goodness of people.
“Those are the kind of things that just happen when you give people a chance to show how good they are,” he said.
Some folks let him camp in their yard. Others invited him to stay in their house. He also compared notes with Amish people on the use non-motorized transportation.
He noticed animals large and small from dung beetles to a dog in North Dakota that followed him for miles, flushing other animals like deer and fox out of the brush along the way.
That first walk began in Rockaway Beach, Queens, and finished in Rockaway Beach, Oregon. Google was his guide with his only firm destination to visit his brother in Chicago.
When he came back from his cross country walk, his “perspective on life” had changed, he said. Rather than go back to work, he began a new project -- walking every block in New York City’s five boroughs.
He goes someplace new nearly every day and continues to meet people who stop him because they are curious about what he is doing.
As he was walking through Brooklyn near Franklin and DeKalb avenues, he spoke to a young woman about the portrait on a gate of Biggie Smalls. She was 31-year-old Trina Williams and she serenaded him Beyonce’s “1+1.”
If you are wondering how he does this project without a job, you are not alone.
So here’s the deal. He lives on about $15 a day, couch surfs for lodging, cat sits and accepts donations on his blog.
Even though he lives in Brooklyn, walking the city has been a revelation.
“There’s so much life in New York City; it’s an ecosystem all on its own, just like a forest is.”
On Staten Island, he noted the wildlife -- deer, turkeys, eagles, seals. The amount of beaches in New York City surprised him. He visited Gateway at Great Kills during a deep freeze and captured stunning images.
Finding figs trees growing all over, Matt also forages on the streets of NYC. Grapes, blackberries and raspberries were also there for the taking.
“I always say that my favorite block or neighborhood is the next one that I walk… I’m not always thinking about what I saw in the past, I’m thinking about ‘Where am I now? What’s right ahead of me?’ So it kind of makes me love all of them equally.”
Matt’s blog imjustwalkin.com/ is a great place to take a deeper dive into all he has seen.
Fortunately, a friend joined him a few years back to video him in some of the neighborhoods, and the next thing they knew they were working on a documentary. It’s called “The World Before Your Feet” and available on many platforms to watch online.
Written collaboratively by Salvatore DiBenedetto, Anthony DiFato, Abdallah Nabhan, Joseph Padalino and Greg Perosi for Life-Wire News Service with Kathryn Carse.
Learn more about the Advance/SILive.com’s partnership with Lifestyles for the Disabled, sponsored by Honda of Staten Island.