American Discovery Trail: Walking for Democratic Candidates

Jessica Bateman

Part of my walking this week was walking around a Jubilee neighborhood (one I walk through often) with the woman in the picture to introduce her to my neighbors. It was hot on Saturday, but the walking was easy (only 6,000 steps!), and my part was just to say something like, "Hi, my name is Dennis Stambaugh. I'm from Clark's Landing [my neighborhood here in Jubilee.] I'm out today introducing candidates, and this is Jessica Bateman, who is running for state senate in our district." By this point Jessica usually started talking, and from there I was mostly silent while she talked quickly and made her points.

The candidates have maps of houses where voters have participated in Democratic primaries in the past. We visited about 50 houses in three hours, and everyone we talked to was at least cordial; a few of them wanted to chat for several minutes. We walked with a campaign volunteer who knew what she was doing, and she told us which houses to visit, then took notes on how the interactions went.

It was easy. I would do that again.

 Also, I had a birthday yesterday. Seven years ago, I turned 60, and I wrote about getting older, and Mike read it and called and suggested that we should start walking at night, and that slowly morphed into my walks across America (after I retired) and a bunch of weekly blog posts (more than 150 since I started walking toward Miami in 2021.)

This week we are near English Lake, Indiana, about 65 miles from Illinois.

Our path takes us close to Bruce Lake. At least half of the pictures I found of Bruce Lake are of people holding big fish they caught, some five feet long or more. Dude, I don't care that you caught a fish. I like this sunset.

We made it past Tippecanoe River State Park. Tippecanoe is a local Indian name for the buffalo fish, which still lives in the river. If you like pictures of people holding big fish they caught, once you are done looking at pictures of Bruce Lake you can look for images of buffalo fish on the Internet. There are plenty of them.