By Carol Vaughn — Isaiah Glen Shields, 28, of Provo, Utah, has been walking across America since May 13, 2021.
Last week he arrived on the Eastern Shore, where residents have been excited to meet him and to hear his story.
He hit the 7,000-mile mark of his journey Sunday, July 24, on a back road in Accomack County.
“It’s just a sense of adventure, I suppose. I really like to get out there and see what the world has to hold,” Shields said Saturday, when a reporter caught up with him as he walked down Market Street in Onancock.
“I just wanted to further my own understanding of the world. I figured, what better way to do that than to see it firsthand,” he said.
Shields this week took a detour to Chincoteague, where he attended the Pony Swim Wednesday and even got to meet Gov. Glenn Youngkin. He wrote poignant entries this week on his social media about the hospitality shown him in Chincoteague and on the Shore in general.
Last Friday, Shields stayed overnight with Eddie, Donna, and Brooklyn Eder, near Onley.
Eastern Shore Post editor Connie Morrison interviewed him at the Eders’ home.
Eddie Eder had seen posts on social media that week, saying Shields was walking north on the Shore.
“I told my wife yesterday, ‘When he gets up this way, we ought to offer the camper to him,’” said Eder.
The camper has electricity and running water.
Eder sent Shields a message Friday morning, offering him the camper for the night.
When they were out driving on Route 13 that afternoon, they spotted Shields walking near the former Central High School, in Painter.
By nightfall, Shields had made it to their home.
“I just figured, give him a nice, safe place to stay at night, and cool, out of the weather,” Eder said.
Shields described how he arrived at the decision to walk across America.
“It was real arbitrary. I remember sitting at my desk … I worked in corporate finance and I was sitting at my desk, on a Windows machine … If you jiggle your mouse, the launch screen will be, like, some new picture of the world every day. I think this one was in Spain or something — it was of a valley.
“And it was, like, ‘Do you want to learn more?’ And I was, like, yeah, I do. So I spent the first hour of work reading about it. I probably should have been at work, but the thought came to me, there’s just way too much out there to see, to learn about, to be inspired by, whatever you want to call it, and I just keep coming back to this desk, with these four white walls, sitting down at a computer — it seemed like at the end of my life, I wasn’t going to be really proud of that.
“So, I was like, man, what if I just went on a walk. You know, traveling used to be something you did where the destination was so far away that the traveling in and of itself was a huge part of going somewhere, rather than just getting there.
“So I wanted to not just go places — because if I wanted to get to Maine, I could have gotten there within three hours if I had taken a plane.
“Instead, it has taken me 14 months to get here. So clearly it wasn’t about getting to Maine.”
Shields said he “wanted to meet everybody along the way that I could. I wanted to see as many places as I could. I wanted the struggle.” Shields compared his walk to the plot line of a book, saying characters in a book typically follow an arc, showing growth from start to finish.
“They always have some flaw at the beginning; they’re kind of unwise, but at the end, after they have gone through terribly difficult ordeals, and they’ve had to reach deep, they’ve turned into someone who they probably wouldn’t have recognized.”
Shields said he is still “right at the beginning” of his own arc.
“I think this trip will just be sort of a launching point for the rest of my life,” he said.
Despite, or perhaps because of, bad weather and other hardships along the way, “it’s never boring,” he said.
“I really just enjoy observing things all the time,” he said.
Shields has been walking on the Eastern Shore during a heatwave, when most people are hiding inside in air-conditioned spaces.
The only thing that has stopped him from walking so far has been snow, including a big snowstorm in Wyoming in late November, he said.
He was between towns when the storm, which was not forecast, hit, meaning he had to wait it out on the side of the road.
Finally, he was able to set up his tent, “in the dark, with my fingers just frozen solid.”
His reward, though, was a gorgeous sunset after the storm passed.
“Those are the prices you have to pay to see the places you shouldn’t be,” he said.
Another snowstorm drove him to stay in a cheap motel in Shamrock, Texas, for several days.
Shields said he will travel in a car if someone wants to show him something off his route, but he requires the person to drop him off back where he was.
He also had to get a lift across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, where pedestrians are not allowed.
“I’ve only had to be picked up and dropped off three times,” including the CBBT crossing and to cross bridges in Washington and Louisiana.
Shields is using savings from two years working in corporate finance, after he graduated from Brigham Young University, to fund the trip.
Additionally, people along the way “are quite generous,” he said, adding, “I didn’t really expect it to happen but more often than you think somebody will just pull over on the side of the road in their car … and go, ‘Here’s five bucks; I hope this helps you’ … so that does help quite a bit.”
He was persuaded to add links to his social media, at linktr.ee/YoDoYou, to accept online donations, after many people, inspired by his documentation of his walk, encouraged him to do so.
“I’ve never asked for money,” he said, but if people want to help him continue his walk, “then I’ll let them help.”
Shields’ impression of the Eastern Shore is that the region comes “as close as you can get to being unprecedented in levels of kindness and helpfulness.”
Last Friday alone, two to three dozen people pulled up to him as he walked, saying they had been following his journey online and had been driving up and down the road trying to find him.
“I’ve never had that level of people being really excited and interested…. Everybody has just been really friendly,” he said.
The walk is taking longer than the year Shields estimated when he started out.
Asked whether he is eager to finish his journey, Shields said, “It depends on the day. There was a stretch there in North Carolina where I got rained on six or seven times a day, every day for a week. That’s just really demoralizing. … So there are days where it’s the seventh time you see the rainclouds coming, and you’re just like, ‘I have a house I could be living in right now.’ And then there are days like today, where you just meet so many people and they are so friendly, you’re like, ‘I should be doing this every day for the rest of my life. You can’t beat this.’”
Shields typically walks 20 to 30 miles a day — in June, on the solstice, he walked 53 miles in South Carolina.
His finish point is Lubec, Maine, a town of 1,237, which is the easternmost municipality in the contiguous United States.
The Shore, particularly in summer, often sees passing through the region people who are walking, running, bicycling, or, in one recent case, skateboarding across America.
There is a longstanding tradition of such wanderers in this country. Some make the journey to bring publicity to a cause; some see it as a spiritual calling; and some make the journey for other reasons of their own.
Walking across the contiguous United States can be done in as little as 2,400 miles, but Shields chose the longest walk possible — starting from his home in Provo, Utah, and walking to the westernmost point in the U.S., Cape Alava, Washington, then turning around and heading eastward to the easternmost point.
He is on his eleventh pair of shoes and on his second cart, which holds his belongings, including a solar panel to charge his devices. His first cart broke just five days into his trip.
He has not gotten sick once on his journey.
Still, it’s not about getting to the finish line for Shields, who said, “I love the process, arguably, even more than I like the result. I love seeing all these old buildings, watching the sunset, passing by all these fields and old houses and wondering about their history. I just really like being in motion. That’s where my body feels comfortable.”
To view the photo gallery, click on any photo below.
Since this article was written, Shields has had several more adventures during his time on Virginia’s Eastern Shore.
Follow Shields’ journey on Facebook, at https://www.facebook.com/isaiah.shields.5/; on Instagram, at https://www.instagram.com/igshields27/; and on YouTube, at You Do You, at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCChMnx_MRcwvRn9a6KSg9iQ
Connie Morrison contributed significantly to this article.
