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  • Crosswalk Countdown
  • Rahne Alexander (bio)

I missed my mother’s funeral. I had my reasons: I couldn’t afford a ticket and I didn’t want to deal with the judgmental homophobia of her church. More importantly, I didn’t want to be trapped there without a way to get out when I needed to. I’m not really a driver, see—I’m a walker.

Not having a car has made things more complicated. I’ve had to learn to plan well ahead for the most insignificant of errands. I learned to never to go parties where I wasn’t sure of how I was going to get home, and I had no idea how I was going to be able to go into hostile territory to attend the funeral and keep my own sanity. So I stayed home instead.

When I emerged as a queer trans woman in the late 1980s from a semi-rural town in California’s Central Valley into a Los Angeles college, I reckoned it would be a long while before I’d ever have a home again. I intended to stay gone, to figure out where in the world I might fit. I didn’t have a car, and no way of getting one. I had to escape on foot. The problem with this, of course, is that you can only go so far, and you can only carry so much with you.

Walking the world as a trans woman has taught me many lessons. Being a woman in public continues to be exhausting. You are public property and everybody has something to say to you about you. This is one of the reasons I didn’t want to go to her funeral. I didn’t want to upstage her in her final moments just because people are nosy and weird about trans women.

Being able to leave when you need to is a privilege that is invisible to so many, made more difficult when you walk everywhere, or rely on public transit, or rely on wheelchairs and other mobility devices. We take mobility for granted, and the automobile is barely 100 years old.

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In spite of the fact that there are vast and terrifying oceans, it is apparently possible to walk around the world.

The current entry on Wikipedia says that a total of 15 people claim to have walked around the world, but only seven are recognized as having done so by the World Runner’s Association (WRA). The World Walker’s Association has yet to be established, apparently. The WRA worked up [End Page 120] the nerve to make rules for walking around the world, which they call “ultrarunning” for some reason.

The rules?

First of all, you have to start and end the trek in the same place. Then you have to cross all lines of longitude. That means every time zone. You also have to pass through antipodal points, or the place on the opposite side of the world from where you started. The antipode of my house in Baltimore is in the Indian Ocean, some alarming number of miles southwest of Perth, Australia, so I should probably not start my journey from my house.

But wait: there’s more. You also have to cross at least four longitudinally consecutive continents coast to coast, and you can’t rest in any one spot for more than six months. And then there are additional rules if you’re going for a speed record.

Of the 15 globetrotters listed to date, only three are women. Only one of them, Marie Leautey, is officially recognized by the WRA, and she only just completed her pedestrian circumstances in September 2022 after a little more than two years on the road. When I first started researching this piece, no woman was officially recognized as a global pedestrian because the other two women apparently didn’t obey the rules.

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I missed my mother’s funeral, but I sent a eulogy for my sister to read. Part of the eulogy included a reminiscence of one my favorite memories of my mother. We had just moved to a new town. She was an accomplished...

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