The Road to Hell

Cliff Young, a 61-year old sheep farmer, won the first ever Sydney to Melbourne ultramarathon in 1983. He did it by running slowly but most effectively and by sleeping only for two hours during the first night when his competition slept for six hours. Eventually, he skipped sleeping altogether. He won the race by a landslide and also set a new record. His stamina was forged in the 1930s when he run for days finding and gathering sheep in the Australian wilderness. Effectively, he had prepared for this very race for his entire life. (Cliff Young had been competing in shorter races, so this was not a one-off thing for him.

Incidentally, Cliff Young’s average speed in the Sydney to Melbourne ultramarathon was four mph. Which is exactly the minimum speed the young men in The Long Walk have to keep at all times in order not to get a warning for slow speed. A warning expires in one hour. Receive a third warning and you are in a danger zone. Unless you fall in line quickly, you will be executed on the spot.

Stephen King’s (pen name Richard Bachman) novel was published 1979. Cliff Young’s slow but relentless four mph gait–called the Young Shuffle–had not yet happened. Maybe Stephen King had a lucky guess about the sweet and painful spot, or perhaps he had been jogging in the empty roads of Maine, doing first-hand research about the limits of human physiology. However, despite all the Cliff Joneses in the world, ultimately the pace will be unsustainable.

On a cold Spring morning near the Canadian border in Maine we meet a young man from the very same state named Raymond Garraty. He is eager to start the race like the other 99 contestants. His mother – thin and weary – is driving him to the starting place in an old Ford. She begs him to reconsider, even though it is too late. This maybe the last time she sees her child alive. For some reason, when I think of her, she looks like the mother in Dorothy Lange’s photograph, Migrant Mother. Poverty and desperation are hard companions.

Children have been sacrificed throughout the history and all over the world to please gods, to ensure good crops, all the usual reasons. So, it’s a trope. And The Long Walk precedes at least two famous novels where the adults have decided to punish children for the ills of the society. In Battle Royale by Koushun Takami (the movie is a favourite of Quentin Tarantino), the Japanese economy is in deep depression, with a two-digit unemployment rate–a catastrophe by Japanese standards–, so the adults are punishing junior high school students by making them fight to death. In The Hunger Games, the winner of the civil war asserts their domination by demanding tribute of two children from each province who will then participate in a deathmatch. In The Long Walk, though, the reason for having the contest is not made clear. People do gather to cheer up along the route. Are the young boys are gladiators marching to their death? Panem et circenses, but with less confetti than in Panem (sic).

So, the boys walk. And they banter, boast, aggravate, cry, mutter, plead and whimper. They have cramps and abrasions. Legs burn. They become hot. They cut themselves. They become tired. They make pacts. One by one at four miles per hour they lose their optimism and humanity. The fall silent. They perish.

The boys’ journey is interesting, but not as interesting as the small bits of information Stephen King drip feeds us about the past and the present. There are convenience stores run by the state (so un-American). People say wrong things and disappear–that happened to Ray’s father (ditto). There was a war. In 1953 somebody dubbed a rebel governor from New Hampshire almost took over a German nuclear base in Santiago. Santiago, Chile? What?

The ending was weak and ambiguous, never a good thing. I would have liked to read more about the state of dystopian and fascists minimum-wage America. Maybe The Running Man will satisfy me.

Two faded stars.