John Francis spent 17 years walking… in silence. His pilgrimage is testament to the fact that you don’t have to speak to be heard and that the tools to combat global warming are in all our hands.
We would see him almost every day, a large man pushing a stroller along the road near our house. We had just moved here – to the northern California coast, about an hour north of San Francisco. It was winter, with its drizzle and fog. Still the man walked, with a long easy gait that flowed through his entire body, as though he was carried forward by his own momentum as much as by muscular exertion. This was John Francis, I discovered, and he had walked quite a ways. The story has been told often in the US media of late. In the early 1970s he was living out here, amidst the rolling ranchlands and postcard beaches. Two oil tankers collided in the fog near the Golden Gate Bridge. Eight hundred and forty gallons of crude oil poured into San Francisco Bay and spread up the coast. People flocked to the beaches to help. Birds died in John’s hands as he tried to rescue them from the ooze.