By Elizabeth Wulfhorst
MIDDLETOWN – If just the thought of walking 5 miles makes you feel tired, brothers Aiden and Louis Ardine are going to leave you exhausted.
On May 1, the two will set out from Asbury Park on a walk that will cover nearly 3,200 miles, take five months and end on the other side of the country. And it will hopefully raise money for those in the restaurant industry hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Aiden had been a bartender and manager at Bond Street Bar in Asbury Park for four years when the pandemic hit. The stress of the situation made him decide to leave the business. “After COVID, I was pretty burnt out,” he said. “And Louis and I were both living at home at this point, to save money.”
A monthlong trip to Vermont to hike with friends planted the seed for the fundraiser which they’ve dubbed “Walking America.” Aiden said he was getting frustrated looking for jobs and told a friend as “an offhanded joke” that he just wanted to hike. She suggested he hike to visit her at her home in San Francisco.
“That just really, like, stuck in my brain,” he said.
In December, on a family road trip to Nevada to see their dying grandmother, Aiden said he posed the hike to Louis. “That’s when the idea really started to take shape,” he said.
They sought advice from others who’ve completed similar long-distance hikes, then mapped out a route and a plan. Then they came up with a mission, “so it was more than just us walking across the country,” Aiden said.
He is not a stranger to activism: Since 2017 he has been part of an artists’ collective called Unmuted Stories which focuses on social and political issues. A writer, Aiden co-wrote a play in 2019 called “The Wrong Place” about the Rohingya refugee crisis; it was presented at the Two River Theater in Red Bank, among other places. He plans to pen a book about the walk, something Louis insisted on. “On the car ride across the country, that was my condition” for agreeing to the plan, Louis said. Aiden had to write a book and “actively seek to get it published.”
Aiden said the brothers know how difficult this past year has been for everybody, especially those in the restaurant industry.
“For us and for our peers and, you know, bars and restaurants, we felt like you were kind of caught between a rock and a hard place, because a lot of people had to go back to work when we were able to, despite not necessarily feeling comfortable to go back to work.
“Everybody got COVID,” he said, and “half of us, maybe, got our unemployment benefits.”
“We wanted to do something for other people while also pursuing sort of, I guess, a weird, lifelong goal of our own,” Aiden explained.
The brothers, two of six siblings, are distance runners who grew up in the River Plaza section of Middletown, hiking and camping with their dad. Aiden, 28, attended M.A.S.T. (Marine Academy of Science and Technology, a magnet public high school on Sandy Hook) and then Rutgers University School of Arts and Sciences; Louis, 27, graduated from Middletown High School South and the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers. They have always made hiking a priority but readily admit they are not “terribly experienced,” said Louis. “But that’s kind of the fun of it.”
They have partnered with the Restaurant Workers’ Community Foundation (RWCF), a nonprofit that addresses quality-of-life issues that disproportionately affect restaurant workers. A big part of the “Walking America” adventure will be eating at restaurants, diners, cafes and other eateries along their route and sharing the stories of the people who have kept these establishments going throughout the past year. By doing so they hope to raise awareness and funds for those in the industry across the country.
Their anticipated route will take them through 11 states – New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Colorado, Utah, Nevada and California – with stops in both small towns and major cities like Philadelphia, Chicago and Denver. While they have contacts along the way through friends and family, Aiden and Louis said they will be relying on the kindness of strangers and plan to introduce themselves and share their story with whomever they meet along the way.
The brothers are paying for the trip costs themselves with money they have saved and a little help from friends and family. “One of our good friends offered to pay for our tent,” said Louis, “which was cool, because it allowed us to get a better tent.”
Any money they receive through donations to support “Walking America” will go directly to RWCF to be distributed.
They’ve gotten a lot of advice, tips and tricks online from the hiking community and by watching YouTube videos. They will try to keep their pack weight around 20 pounds “with a little extra room for food” as needed, Louis explained. He said they anticipate burning 6,000 to 8,000 calories a day.
“We expect to be hungry,” Louis said.
Food is not as much of a concern for the brothers as fresh water. By the time they hit Utah, Louis said, “We’re gonna have to figure out some way to build or find, like, a caddy or some way to just carry a lot more water than we expected to need.”
They will travel what Aiden calls “back country highways” – trying to stick to already mapped routes like the American Discovery Trail would have added 1,000 miles to the journey – and have kept the distance between towns below 50 miles. “I’ve got a credit card and we’ve been saving money,” Aiden said. “Worst case scenario, we can always get somewhere in a couple hours, even if we have to call an Uber or a cab.”
They plan to meet with people in the “culinary scenes” in the major cities they pass through, using personal connections and those they’ve made through RWCF. They have scheduled “zero days” or days to rest with no walking, which will instead be filled with conversations with RWCF grant recipients.
They’ve set aside a little money to have “a warm meal in a small town” whenever possible, Aiden said, “because in my experience, that’s where all the locals come together.”
“We personally just want to meet people and get a feel for how other people live in the United States, getting sort of away from our little New Jersey bubble,” he added.
“We’re going to be posting on social media a great deal about the restaurants that we visit,” Louis said, “even if it’s just like a mom and pop in some middle-of-nowhere town.”
He also said they plan to “knock on someone’s door, explain to them what we’re doing in the project and just, you know, kindly ask if we can simply just tent in their yard, if they might let us have some fresh water. Or maybe a shower, if they’re feeling really generous.”
“We’re kind of just going to hope for the best and a bit of it is testing our faith in people along the way,” Aiden said.
The brothers will document the trip on Instagram @ardinebroswalkamerica and on the Unmuted Stories website at unmutedstories.org/walking-america.
The article originally appeared in the April 15 – 21, 2021 print edition of The Two River Times.
