Read the original story on the WAMU website here.
I meet Tim Kaine on Roosevelt Island. It’s a sunny, humid spring morning after a night of rain. Yellow lilies bloom along the boardwalk that runs through the swamp and there is plenty of bird song overhead. In the intervals between flight takeoffs and landings from the nearby National Airport, you can almost convince yourself that you’re not in the middle of a major metropolitan area.
Kaine says he spent the morning reviewing assignment letters from his staff and was delighted to see an outdoor meeting appear on his calendar. He says he’s been coming here for years, ever since his son was a student at George Washington University, across the Potomac. As we talk, he stops to point out birds and other things he sees.
“It’s a great time of year to be on Roosevelt Island,” he says. “There’s a cardinal right in front of us, to the left.”
I’ve seen Kaine at many press conferences and campaign events (“Hi, I’m Tim!” is often his preferred opener), but this morning is different, and not just because we’re heading down a muddy road. We met to talk about his new book Walk, Ride, Paddle, a reflection on his lifelong love of the outdoors and his three-decade career in politics.
The book is a daily record of Kaine’s experiences completing what he calls the Virginia Wilderness Triathlon. That is to say: hike the 559 miles of the Appalachian Trail through Virginia; bike the 321-mile length of the Blue Ridge Parkway; and paddle the James River from the Allegheny Mountains to where it empties into the Chesapeake Bay. He fit in much of his adventure during recess weeks and weekends, when politicians are generally expected to return to their states to meet with constituents.
“Instead of having an entourage and having everything scheduled, the question was simply who would I meet that day? You know, the shuttle driver or the hiker or the picnicking family I ran into, or someone who runs a hiker hostel,” she says. “It was a really nice way to interact with Virginia (and) Virginians in a different way.”
We might be tempted to assume that a politician who wrote a book about nature would actually write a book about politics disguised as a book about nature. But while Kaine looks back on his political career (Richmond City Council member, mayor, governor, U.S. senator, vice presidential candidate) and meditates on Virginia and America’s political future, there is also much more to the book. Along the way, he shares his thoughts on marriage, fatherhood, friendships, faith, and aging.
He compares the different stages of its life to the front derailleur on a road bike: something you only play with when the terrain changes dramatically.
“I feel like I’m in the third ring of my life,” he says. “I had a civil rights career. That was 17 years. I then went on to a 30-year public service career… I feel like I’m entering a spiritual and contemplative time in my life where, once again, I’m bringing civil rights and public service work with me, but not Maybe think about it another way.”
And, of course, for voters excited by the idea of a sitting senator trudging through his August recess on the Appalachian Trail, Walk, Ride, Paddle has the dirty details that people who enjoy the outdoors free delights in talking: mud, downpours, insects, bears and Virginia. heat and humidity. One of his hiking companions even named the trail Dogbowl, after the collapsible dog bowl he brought to wash up after a long day.
Kaine’s quest to complete his self-created Virginia Nature Triathlon emerged from several impulses. He wanted to commemorate his sixtieth birthday, celebrate a quarter century in politics, and recharge and recover from the Clinton-Kaine campaign’s presidential election loss in 2016, as well as his successful 2018 re-election bid.
It worked? Yes. “It was a tremendous experience in that sense,” she says.
Since Kaine completed all three stages of his journey in 2019, 2020, and 2021, his adventures have also become a way to process concurrent events. There were impeachment trials of former President Trump, in which Kaine served as a juror. The nation also saw widespread protests for racial justice in the wake of the murder of George Floyd in 2020, and the COVID-19 pandemic occurred at the same time. And there was the Jan. 6 insurrection, during which Kaine and other senators were hastily evacuated from the besieged Capitol building.
Kaine, a devout Catholic, sees those national upheavals in terms of the biblical story of Job, a rich man who loses everything when God tests his faith. He realized this while he was alone on the trail, on a rainy, foggy day, in Grayson Highlands State Park.
“As I walked through a long, muddier day than this (I walked very slowly), I thought, well, maybe that’s what this is,” he recalls. “Maybe that’s how I understand this, that we’re being tested.”
That sense of perspective, he says, was only possible because of unscheduled time for contemplation in the forest. In a passage that will resonate with his fellow backpackers, he describes the mental progression that comes with the physical effort of carrying a heavy backpack up a hill: You start by thinking about what was on your mind when you left the car, and then you change the subject. what he calls “little incantations” to get through the hardest parts. And finally (this is the real magic) the climb becomes so difficult that your mind completely empties.
“Somehow you stop directing your thoughts and then things can come to your mind,” he says. “It could be a fragment of a song or a really heightened awareness of the bird sounds we’re hearing right now, (or) your own breathing.”
It keeps a bit of that awareness present in our walk, following the animal species we see: a snake, a small turtle.
“What we haven’t seen that is quite common this time of year are small salamanders,” he points out as we exclaim about the turtle.
He is also alert to bird species. His wife Anne, a college professor who also serves on the Virginia Board of Education, caught the bird-watching virus during the pandemic. While canoeing down the James River, the two are delighted to see pairs of bald eagles, a formerly threatened species now recovering in Virginia.
“I’m your bird dog because I have very good long-distance vision. Then I can see something up in a tree and say, ‘I see something up there and it’s got a little bit of yellow,’” she explains. “She carries the binoculars…she is a very good identifier. She can identify herself with sight and also with hearing. So it’s a lot of fun to be with her because I learn a lot about birds when she walks around.”
Walk, Ride, Paddle is also a journey through parts of Virginia’s history, particularly its legacy of slavery. He carries the backpack on his shoulder at Harper’s Ferry, site of abolitionist John Brown’s raid, which helped start the Civil War. And in the end he leaves his ship at Fort Monroe, where the first enslaved Africans were brought to the United States and where black people began to self-emancipate during the Civil War.
Walk along Brown Mountain Creek, a place in Amherst County that was home to a freedmen’s settlement until the inhabitants were forced to leave to make way for a reservoir. He paddles past Manchester’s slave docks and old plantation homes on the James River and reflects on Virginia’s role in establishing the legal basis for slavery in the United States.
“Some of the things that the Virginia General Assembly did were, quote, ‘innovations’ that perverted English law to actually create slavery in America that didn’t exist in England,” he explains.
Today, Kaine sees a commonwealth that still has work to do, but that has come closer to fulfilling the promise implicit in the term “commonwealth” during his time in politics.
“There was a kind of museum element about Virginia. And we went from looking back to looking forward,” she says. “And it’s been wonderful to have played our small part in that.”
Politically, he sees Virginia as “a blue-leaning battleground,” a place where hardline ideologues rarely triumph and neither party can become complacent.
The current national moment feels as tense as the ones Kaine processes in the book: a looming rematch of the 2020 presidential election, his upcoming re-election bid, and growing calls for a ceasefire in Gaza, to which protesters rally. have shown up at his office to demand.
He is resorting to being outside to think about everything.
“Now that I’ve done this, I want to be outdoors a lot. I don’t think I’ve been in a gym even once since 2019. I just like, you know, I have rain gear,” she says.
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