Last Saturday at Lula Cafe in Logan Square, Tim Herwig slipped his feet out of his new Gore-Tex cross trainers and peeled off two layers of socks. He did this under the table, discreetly. “I know it’s really bad,” he said, glancing around sheepishly as he rested his bare feet atop his shoes. But he had walked nine miles that morning, and his feet needed some air.
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Herwig is a soft-spoken 45-year-old “semiretired performance artist” and the vice president of community affairs at TCF Bank. On the morning of August 14, he’ll leave his apartment in Edgewater, walk south for almost two miles along the lakefront path, west for eight miles on Irving Park Road, south for three miles on Harlem, and then west, right out of the city, on North Avenue. He’ll keep walking, for five weeks and about 550 more miles, through long stretches of Illinois and Wisconsin and Iowa, past his hometown of Albert Lea in southern Minnesota, and on to Minneapolis, where he lived for 19 years.
Herwig comes from a long line of midwesterners. Both his maternal and paternal ancestors settled in central Illinois in the mid-19th century. His parents were high school sweethearts. His father worked for a small midwestern chain store; in 1963 the company transferred him to Albert Lea. “My folks didn’t have a lot of money,” Herwig says. “It was a big, Catholic family. Six kids. So what we did for vacations is drive back to Pontiac, where they grew up. So from very early in my childhood I started making this transit between Minnesota and Illinois.”
Herwig had previously told his boss about his walking plan, and in January he asked for six weeks off. A Harley aficionado who understood the call of the road, his boss told him to go for it.
He plans to eat in restaurants when he can (and to charge his cell phone in them), and when there are none in sight, he’ll suffer summer sausage, oatmeal, and freeze-dried stroganoff.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Paul L. Merideth.
