Senator Tim Kaine: Walk Ride Paddle
This week, Michael is joined by former Governor and current Senator Tim Kaine to discuss his latest book, Walk Ride Paddle. Over the last few years, Senator Kaine hiked the Appalachian Trail, biked Skyline Drive, and canoed the James River. Along the way, he discusses the last few years of American politics, reflects on a lifetime of public service, and admires the natural beauty that exists across the state of Virginia.
Episode Transcript
Michael Pope
Hi, I'm Michael Pope. And this is Pod Virginia. A podcast that is enjoying the great outdoors. Today, we're gonna head out on a Virginia nature triathlon with a man who set out to walk, ride, and paddle across the Commonwealth. He has a new book out next week about his journey. He's one of the few people on the planet who can actually claim the title, His Excellency. But on the Appalachian Trail, they call him dog bowl. Senator Tim Kaine, thanks for joining us.
Tim Kaine
Michael, I can't wait to talk to you about my journey. Good to be with you.
Michael Pope
Great. The title of your new book is Walk, Ride, Paddle: A Life Outside, which was published by Harper Horizon. Ostensibly, the idea is simple: you hike the Appalachian Trail, cycle Skyline Drive, and paddle the James River, then journal about your experience. But that's only part of the story. Because along the way, you share your thoughts about your first statewide campaign for lieutenant governor. Your approach to the harmonica, your thoughts about Jesus, your worries about being a good father, and what it's like campaigning on the national stage with Hillary Clinton. Tim Kaine, why did you write this book?
Tim Kaine
It started as a project to celebrate turning 60 and 25 years in public life. I turned 60 in 2018, in the middle of a reelection campaign, so I couldn't really celebrate that year. But I said, when I'm done with this campaign, win or lose, I'm going to do something special to celebrate turning 60 and 25 years since my first city council race. The idea just popped into my head, Michael, and after that race was over, Why not create a nature quest that's Virginia-based? My sister and brother-in-law in New York and their kids had done something called the forty-sixers, which is there are forty-six peaks in the Adirondacks higher than 4000 feet. And New Yorkers make it a quest to do all of them. John and Taylor did it with their kids and dogs. There's a similar quest in Colorado to climb the fourteeners, all the peaks that are higher than 14,000 feet. I thought I'd create one of these quests for Virginia. What would it be? And then I thought, well, okay, walk, ride, paddle; walk on the 560 miles of the Appalachian Trail from Harpers Ferry to Tennesse; cycle from the Virginia North Carolina border on the Blue Ridge Parkway in Skyline Drive all the way to Front Royal; and then canoe, the whole James River. This is my love letter to Virginia, my home of 40 years, and to create this quest and do it. I kept a journal, thinking I might write about maybe somebody would be interested in it. But it turned into something more than just an account of each day's journey. Between when I started in May of 2019 and when I finished, I was a juror in two impeachment trials, an attack on the Capitol, COVID, long COVID, the murder of George Floyd, and a contested presidential election, the nature journey became a kind of window through which I was looking at this unusual chapter in American life. It was also what I wasn't just what I thought about, but conversations with people along the way. It's a weird mixture of a nature journey, political reflection, Virginia history, and conversations with companions and passers-by. So why did I write it? I want to challenge myself at a milestone birthday and a milestone in my public life and to get to know my Commonwealth even better.
Michael Pope
I opened with this joke about you being one of the few people on the planet who can claim the title His Excellency. Still, on the Appalachian Trail, they call you dog bowl. I was not aware of this tradition of having trail names. You hang out with people who call themselves Noomer Magic, Tracker, Underdog, Redbush, Juju, Cotton, Boxcar Willie, Lumberjack, and Pac-Man. Talk a little bit about these names and explain your nickname, Dog Bowl.
Tim Kaine
On the trail, it's a democratizing thing; you're wearing the same clothes day after day. You're not shaving; you don't smell very good. And you use a trail name rather than your actual name. The tradition on the trail is you have to be given the name; you can't choose the name. So, for the first few weeks, I was doing this on the trail, and I would introduce myself as TK. And again, every once in a while, somebody would recognize me; most often, they wouldn't, though, because I was in my hiking clothes and hadn't shaved for a while. I had a hack that I thought was great. I carried a collapsible dog bowl with me, so every time I got to a stream, I'd fill that up. It'd be a sink I'd use to wash my face or wash socks out or something like that. Somebody who hiked with me for a couple of days saw it and then, on the first day, thought it was a cool hack. Then, on the second day, I thought I was a little too proud of something that was somewhat obvious and just bestowed upon me the name Dog Bowl. So, from that point, everywhere I went, I just introduced myself as a dog bowl. My dog had passed away, Gina, our family dog, had died not long before the hike, and her dog bowl was still sitting on the floor next to the kitchen table as a little reminder to us. It's not the bowl I used on the trail. I brought my own dog bowl. Anyway, it seemed like a good nickname, so I stuck with it.
Michael Pope
Your book kinda reminded me of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which is ostensibly about a motorcycle journey from Minnesota to California. Along the way, the author talks about everything from epistemology, the history of philosophy, to the semantics of science. It also reminded me of the quirky habit of journaling. That was the hallmark of former Florida Senator Bob Graham, who was also a governor and found himself in the Senate. He would journal things like how long it took to rewind, a VHS tape, that sort of thing. There are also hints of Henry David Thoreau and life in the woods, Senator Kaine. What were your influences on this book? And where do you see it fitting into the canon of American nonfiction?
Tim Kaine
I love that you thought about Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. That's a book I absolutely love. I hadn't thought about that for probably 20 years. That wasn't in my mind when writing this.
Michael Pope
There are lots of obvious parallels between that book and your book.
Tim Kaine
When you say it, it's like, yeah, I can see it. Because you're right, it's a journey, but it's much more than the journey. I'd say the biggest influence on my thinking about this was A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. That's one of my favorite books. It's an amazing story. Thoreau and his brother, I think, built the boat, and they filled it up with watermelons and food from their garden. They put the boat in Concord, and they canoed down the Concord River to the confluence with the Merrimack. Then, they took the boat upstream on the Merrimack into New Hampshire. It's only a week-long journey. Thoreau kept notes about the journey but didn't do anything with it for many years. But this is what Thoreau worked on when he was at Walden. We know Walden is Thoreau's most known work, but he didn't write Walden until after his sojourn there. What he did at Walden was take notes of this river journey, and he wrote it up. Each day is a journey, and he reflects on his brother. It's an analogy to his brother who's passed, the nature of friendship, and issues going on in the country at the time. I would say that book was the one thing I really thought about. The other thing, to some degree, is Teddy Roosevelt. Teddy Roosevelt wrote a lot of nature literature when he was in public office. He wrote about his time with the Rough Riders, and he wrote about his time in the Dakotas. He wrote about hunting trips and things that he would take. When Teddy Roosevelt found out he was going to be President, he was camping in the Adirondacks. McKinley had been shot. Teddy had gone to Buffalo to see the President. They thought the President was recovering and went camping in the mountains of the Adirondack Mountains. The Secret Service had to run up a trail and inform him that he was now President of the United States. He wrote a lot about nature while he was in public office. I was thinking a lot of my colleagues write books that, like, I'm introducing myself to the American public because I might be your President one day. These days, political books fit into a fairly narrow straitjacket. I'm a politician, but this isn't that kind of book. It is a nature book. I would say that Thoreau and the Teddy Roosevelt books were things that were on my mind as I wrote this book.
Michael Pope
Actually, you've raised a lot of interesting issues right there. Where do you put this book in the bookstore? Is it in the politics section? If you are the publisher, and you're looking to market it, what kind of book is this? Because if you're looking for a political book, it's not too political. If you're looking for a nature book, maybe it's too political. How did you strike that balance? Because there's the immediate, where you're talking about paddling. Then you're recalling your first campaign for Richmond City Council. Then you go back to the Appalachian Trail, and then you're talking about the insurrection?
Tim Kaine
Or a trip with my kids 20 years ago, in the same stretch, and you know how it compares to now. What is this book? I wrote the whole book with no agent or publisher; I wanted to write it my way. Obviously, if somebody's interested, I'm gonna have an editor who'll make it better. But I wanted to do it my way. I struck out with two agents before I found one who said, I liked this, but it doesn't fit into a niche, and you're gonna have a hard time getting this published. I found my way to Suzanne Gluck at WME Books, who's my agent. She said, well, I've never done a book with a politician before, but I like this. I want to work with you on it. I don't know exactly how it's categorized; it's a kind of memoir. I've been seeing it listed as a travel book, a Southern Atlantic travel book; It's been on lists like Insider's Guide to Disney World 2025. It's kind of a travel book, memoir, and political book all at once. But that's okay; it doesn't have to fit into a niche. A lot of great literature doesn't look at Zen in The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and it doesn't really fit into a niche.
Michael Pope
It's fiction; you can at least put it in the fiction section.
Tim Kaine
Yeah, you could, although a lot of it's nonfiction. It's a story. He wrote another book called Lila, which probably has a little more fiction in it but is still based on events in his life. Anyway, yeah, what is this thing? It's a journey, is what it is.
Michael Pope
Interestingly, you raise the topic of travel books as a genre. Because one of the things you lug around on the Appalachian Trail is the old guide. I loved it when you talked about the old guide. Explain that and how you use it as a window.
Tim Kaine
I know we're doing audio here. But you can see the old guy right there.
Michael Pope
Yes, right there.
Tim Kaine
I'm showing them the three old guides on a bookshelf. Somebody with the Potomac Appalachian Trail Club, which is one of the clubs of about 30 clubs that maintain stretches of the 2,200-mile Appalachian Trail. Somebody who heard about my trip gave me the Potomac Appalachian Trail Club's guide to the Virginia portion. It was published in 1959, so I was born in 1958. So it's kind of like a 60th birthday thing. This is what they were saying about the trial when I was born. I lugged that with me for the first two-thirds of the Appalachian Trail hike until we got to a place where the trail had been significantly rerouted. It was no longer the version that had been done back in the 50s. But it was fascinating to read the old guide. Both their advice for camping, like don't wear shorts; they said don't wear shorts, are you kidding me? I'm hiking in August. What do you mean don't wear shorts? There were archaic racial references at the time to segregated facilities or the refusal to acknowledge the campground along the Shenandoah National Park, which was for African Americans; the trail runs right through it. It's an amazing campground with a lot of amenities now and then. But it doesn't even really get a mention. While you'll cross a road crossing that says, Mrs. Nellie Linden has a house half a mile away and will be glad to entertain a camper. They would tell you about the person down the road who had helped you but didn't mention trails right next to a campground for African Americans. It showed that they assumed who would be using the guide and who would be using the trail, and it's still very much a piece of its time. In that guide, my old guide who came along with me, some things about it were exactly the same when I did it in 2019, 60 years later, and some things about it were completely different.
Michael Pope
The old guide was totally fascinating. Speaking of genres of books, this is not a Washington memoir in the traditional way that people think about it. One of the staples of the Washington memoir that is not in your book is the index. When people are browsing bookstores to select a purchase, here in Washington, they will often turn to the index to see if their name is in it.
Tim Kaine
Are they in it? Yeah.
Michael Pope
Your book includes many name drops, but there's no index. I want to ask you about one name that appears from page 31 to page 53: Jim Comey.
Tim Kaine
Yes.
Michael Pope
Who you call in your book a virtuous but self-absorbed FBI Director. As mayor, you actually worked with then-US Attorney James Comey.
Tim Kaine
Hence the virtuous
Michael Pope
Talk about that experience and the important role he's played in your life, as documented in your book.
Tim Kaine
When I was a city councilman and Mayor, Jim Comey was a US Attorney for the Eastern District or head of the criminal section of the US Attorney's office. But regardless, he played a major role, an important role, and a great role in helping Richmond deal with its gun violence epidemic and bring down its homicide rate. I think very highly of him as a prosecutor and a person with a moral compass. At one point in the book, I talked about the experience of being on the national ticket and having FBI Director Comey, 10 days before the election, say well, I need to reopen the case about Hillary's emails.
Michael Pope
Can I pause you there?
Tim Kaine
Yeah.
Michael Pope
You mentioned you are in Tallahassee, and you remember the exact spot you were. Our listeners probably don't care about this, but I lived in Tallahassee for many years. What was that spot?
Tim Kaine
I was campaigning in Tallahassee for Hillary Clinton and the ticket in 2016 in October. I was standing on the right outside the courthouse where early voting was going on. People were coming to vote early. I was going over to do an event at the unit right across the street from the state capitol.
Michael Pope
Yes, right across the street.
Tim Kaine
I'm just saying hi to voters, and I'm getting ready to go to the university to do a talk with a student group. All of a sudden, when you're on a national ticket, you have a press entourage. Usually kind of bored by it because they've heard you give the same speech five times. But all of a sudden, they clumped around me, and it's like, oh, something's up. They told me that Director Comey had reopened the investigation into Hillary Clinton's emails. This was two Fridays before the elections, about 10 days before. We just watched the polling, particularly in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan; we watched the polling dwindle and dwindle because the email story was the head story for the next 10 days. On Sunday night for the election, I'm in Green Bay, Wisconsin. I'm doing an event at the University of Wisconsin in Green Bay. My press clumps around me again, and they say Director Comey has said they've done the investigation. And there's no problem. There was nothing new. But I had this sinking feeling. Yeah, but a lot of damage has been done. He made a miscalculation. Two rules had been established for good reason by the Department of Justice and the FBI, which is you don't talk about a pending investigation. You also don't inject controversy right before an election. There was a pending investigation into Donald Trump, but Director Comey did not talk about that. He did not inject controversy right before the election with respect to Donald Trump. He did talk about the Hillary Clinton email story and injected that controversy. So there was a set of two rules; he followed the rules with respect to one candidate, not the other. Look, there are a million factors that lead to the outcome of a race. However, we could definitely see the effect that this had on polling as it was the lead story for essentially the last 10 days of the campaign.
Michael Pope
Your book is divided into three sections, walk, ride, and paddle. The opening of the paddle section is a gripping account of the insurrection. It's funny that you talk about one of the lessons you've learned out in nature, which is that perhaps it's a good idea to leave your iPhone behind.
Tim Kaine
Yeah.
Michael Pope
And not carry it with you everywhere.
Tim Kaine
Yeah.
Michael Pope
Which is a laudable goal. But on that particular day, you do not have your iPhone with you. Explain what that experience was like? I would imagine, from your perspective, that this is probably a traumatic experience you're going through. How do you capture that in your writing here?
Tim Kaine
The paddle section starts with reflections on what's going on in the year. Now I'm going to do my paddling trip. The paddling trip was in 2021, so I began the start of the year on January 6th. I always have my iPhone with me; I'm too dependent on it, as we all are, especially those of us in politics. But I went into the Senate office very early, I just remember thinking, Okay, I'm gonna go over. Ted Cruz is challenging the Arizona election results.
Michael Pope
Actually, for the record, you got a whole paragraph of nice things about Ted Cruz, probably the only book in the bookstore that has a whole paragraph of nice things about Cruz.
Tim Kaine
Cruz and I came to the Senate at the same time. He and I filed a bill together last week. This was not a good day for him, in my view. Anyway, we have to trip over to the floor to debate Ted Cruz's objection. And I remember getting up in my office. Because of the threats, I told my staff to stay home. My Chief of Staff, Mike Henry, disobeyed me and came in anyway. But it was just Mike and I in the office. I started to go over to the floor, and I realized I had my cell phone. But this is important; I don't want to be on camera scrolling through my cell phone when I should be listening and paying attention. So I left my cell phone on the desk.
Michael Pope
From the gallery, all the press people are trying to see, okay, what's on his phone. Can I read it?
Tim Kaine
Yeah, exactly, they do that or, or even just noting, hey, you shouldn't be looking at your phone. This is a big deal. But what it meant is that I wasn't getting the warnings all my colleagues were getting from their staff who were texting them, hey, there's an attack on the Capitol. This is getting ugly. I'm sitting there with a smile on my face, blindly listening to the testimony, knowing that we're going to confirm Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as President and vice president shortly. What happens then is Mitt Romney gets up and bolts out of the room, then immediately turns around and comes back in. Mike Pence is rushed out of the chair, so Chuck Grassley, as the president pro-tem, begins to preside. I assume Pence was getting one last phone call from Donald Trump trying to arm-twist him. But the Sergeant at arms takes the stand and says we have to go into recess; the capital is under attack. That begins a long 10, maybe 12 hours where we are, first barricaded in the chamber for about 45 minutes to an hour. Before they can clear a path for us to go over to one of the Senate office buildings to go into a committee room. This is the peak of COVID-19, with 100 senators and 50 Senate staff jammed into this room. Everybody wearing masks except Senator Rand Paul. We're all jammed in there together. They roll in TV monitors, and for the first time, I can see what the attack looks like. I'm immediately like, I gotta call my parents and tell them I'm okay. I borrowed Martin Heinrich's phone to start making calls. So yeah, I don't leave home without it. I guess that is the motto.
Michael Pope
But you did learn the lesson out in nature that you don't have to be tied to your phone all the time, perhaps not on that day.
Tim Kaine
Yeah, I definitely did. I have been less yoked to my phone, although I'm not going to proclaim to be really good at being unyoked from my phone.
Michael Pope
When you're hanging out with people with trail names. And I have to say I was a little jealous; I'm not hanging out with Senator Kaine. They're hanging out there with a dog bowl. You're drinking whiskey, you're hanging out by the campfire, you're playing a card game called Quibbler. There was a fun thought experiment you were playing. The game is, what are the most idiotic rock'n'roll lyrics of all time? Senator Kaine, you didn't answer that question. What are the most idiotic?
Tim Kaine
I'm gonna give you two. One is by somebody who's been knighted, Sir Paul McCartney. The song Live and Let Die contains this lyric, "in this ever changing world, in which we live in," using the word three times that phrase. Like in the world, but in this ever-changing world in which we live? I mean, they should retract his knighthood just for that. The second one, which is even stupider, comes from the British Isles. I think they're from Northern Ireland. Thin Lizzy
, Jailbreak.
Michael Pope
One of my favorite songs.
Tim Kaine
Yeah, it's a good song. It's got a good riff. But, "tonight there's gonna be a jailbreakm somewhere in this town". Like, maybe near the jail. Like some dumb crook, I didn't mean to give it away; I said somewhere in this town.
Michael Pope
In the defense of Thin Lizzy, there could be a small jail at the police station and a larger jail near the courthouse.
Tim Kaine
It's possible, or maybe Jailbreak has had more...
Michael Pope
He's Irish, so maybe Irish culture is different.
Tim Kaine
Gail break, I guess. Right.
Michael Pope
Another interesting detail along the way is that when you're hiking, you lose 26 pounds, which is an amazing feat. Also, you're drinking a milkshake every five pages. How did you do that?
Tim Kaine
Well, I tried to drink a milkshake every five pages. There were a number of instances of going to a place where I expected to find a milkshake machine, and it was broken or busted, or COVID had closed the place down. Yeah, you lost a lot of weight on the hike. Particularly when I did the heart of it, which was in August. We had an unusually long recess in August, and I did a 13-day section and then a weekend off and maybe a nine-day section and lost 26 pounds in that stretch. It was because heat records were being busted. It was over 90 every day, and the water was dried up. That was really a challenge, and the absence of water was the most significant of the challenges of the hike. Also, you're working so hard that you think you'd be super hungry. But in some ways, it's so hot, and sometimes the thought of eating makes me nauseous. So yeah, I lost 26 pounds in that August stretch. Now, it came back pretty quickly once I got back to the sedentary United States Senate. But it was the heat and the water that really made you struggle. As I talked about in the hiking section, there are a lot of things to be afraid of. The most fearsome thing is the smallest thing, which is ticks.
Michael Pope
I thought you were gonna say spiders.
Tim Kaine
I hate spiders, and Wolf Spiders are fearsome, and they would make me afraid.
Michael Pope
You mentioned one of your senate colleagues eventually succumbing to something she caught on a hike in Virginia.
Tim Kaine
Kay Hagan, a friend of mine from North Carolina. She lost a Senate reelection in 2014, and she is a big outdoors person. She went on a trip to Africa and then came back and, shortly after that, had encephalitis attack her brain. People thought because she'd been in Africa, it must have been something there, and it turned out that wasn't the case. What had happened was she had gone on a hike in Southern Virginia and had an unusual tick, giving her what's called the Powassan virus. That put her into a very bad health situation, nearly comatose. She recovered somewhat but died a couple of years later from a tick. You've got Lyme disease from ticks, you've got Rocky Mountain Spotted fever. There's a tick that is getting more and more common in Virginia and elsewhere; I can't remember the name of it. But it gives you an allergy to red meat if you get bitten by this tick. For a very long time, when you eat red meat, you have problems. The smallest thing turns out to be the most dangerous. I was fortunate I didn't have a bad tick encounter on this hike.
Michael Pope
One of the things that happen when you write a book like this is that, over the years, your thoughts about things change and change over that period. One of the interesting dynamics here is an evolving opinion over things like Confederate Avenue in Richmond and our relationship with these statues that are everywhere. Talk about how your thoughts changed during this period.
Tim Kaine
They definitely changed. I started this hike in 2019. I've lived for many years in Richmond and for 30 years in a house on Confederate Avenue. It's Confederate Avenue because it's the street where the Confederacy had their intermediate line of Defense protecting the city of Richmond. It wasn't named after a person. When I moved onto the street, I guess it was 1992, I didn't think much about it. I was on the Richmond city council and mayor, and we knew we needed to do some things to reckon with our history. I viewed it as an additional problem. The key wasn't changing things or taking things down. It was adding names and adding statues. When we built a new court building, we named it after a civil rights hero. When we built new bridges, we named them after people of color or people who weren't Confederates. But I kind of got convinced by some staffers of mine in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd. That's when the effort really picked up to tackle the issue of the monuments in Richmond. One of my staffers said something to me; he goes, Look, you don't want to whitewash history, I get that. You look at the monuments on Monument Avenue as part of our painful past that we shouldn't whitewash; we should just be honest about it. He said, for me, my worry is it's not just part of the past. If we maintain them, we cut the lawn around them, we keep them beautiful, we have light displays on them, and we market them to tourists. To me, it's not a symbol of a painful past; it's that in the present, we still venerate people who would hold others in slavery, and that makes me worried about what the future is. So, one of my staffers helped me see it differently. My wife and I then got involved in the effort in our neighborhood, Confederate Avenue, which is about four blocks long. To change the name of the street was interesting, Michael. Here's a lesson: It was pretty easy at that point to get a consensus. You're right. We should change the name of the street. But the hardest thing was you got to have a new name. It was very hard to come up with a new name. I think there might have been 65 houses on our street, and people submitted names. There were like 32-name possibilities. I didn't do it, but my neighbors did set up a process to whittle 32-name possibilities down to what became Laburnum Park Blvd. It was fascinating: town meetings, democracy, and action efforts. The neighbors who did that really deserve a lot of thanks because it wasn't easy. But we found a path forward to making a change. And I came to see that merely addition isn't enough. Sometimes, it needs to be about subtraction. Because you can't change history. You can't undo it. You can't rewrite it. You can't whitewash it. Sometimes, you can choose who to honor, and a statue isn't about telling history; a statue is about honoring someone. People who we honored 100 years ago, as we look at it now, they're not worthy of being honored.
Michael Pope
One of the things you admit to in the book is being an introvert. I think a lot of people would be surprised to learn that someone who has a life in politics could actually be an introvert. I also think there's an interesting relationship between you and the other senator from Virginia, who is probably a classic extrovert, right?
Tim Kaine
Yes.
Michael Pope
So can we talk about that? You explain this in your book and what it says about you.
Tim Kaine
If anybody's taken a Myers Briggs Personality Test, the way that the Test looks at introversion is: Where you get your energy from. Do you get your energy from interacting with others? Or do you get your energy from solitude and quiet time?
Michael Pope
You have a lot of solitude and this book.
Tim Kaine
I wanted solitude; I got more than I bargained for. I've always been a very introverted person if you measure it that way. I don't have trouble interacting with people, and I derive a lot of joy from interacting with people. But I need to have alone time to recharge. I think Mark Warner and my wife are classic extroverts. I'm very much an introvert. I need time to myself to process and get energy for the next challenge. But as you point out, the hike is only one-third. Two-thirds of it was just me. So it's 42 days over many months, 28 days, I'm just by myself hiking. There were a number of days where I wasn't just hiking by myself, but because it was so hot and there was so little water, I would go days without even seeing anyone else. That was a challenge. I thought of myself as an introvert; I was looking forward to that solitude. But, sometimes, it's like, enough of this already. I'd round a corner hoping I'd see someone, and I would see two deer skittering away, and well, if that's the only company I get, at least it's better than being by myself.
Michael Pope
So you don't think of people in public life as being introverted, but you're one of them. Another thing you don't really find a lot of in elected officials is that they play any kind of musical instrument. You carry around a blues harp in the key of D. Talk about that; every now and again, you'll whip out your harmonica, and you start playing.
Tim Kaine
It was the only entertainment. I kept the phone off except for emergency emails or the map to figure out how far it was to the spring or to the next shelter. I didn't bring any books. The only entertainment I had was the harp. I've played, and I taught myself to play the harmonica when I was 13. I was jealous of friends who had music lessons and could play instruments; that's not what we did in my family. But I thought, maybe I can teach myself something, and I thought, why don't I try the harmonica? I'm an enthusiastic amateur. But I love playing. I play with bands in DC, and I play with jazz bands and bluegrass groups in Richmond.
Michael Pope
You wrote a song as part of this.
Tim Kaine
I wrote a song as part of this.
Michael Pope
Your name is actually on the copyright.
Tim Kaine
It is on the copyright. The song is called Self-Unemployed; it was recorded in Nashville by a super group, not a group that comes together much but Daryl Angor on the fiddle and Sierra Hull on the mandolin, Trey Hensley did the vocals, Alison Brown on banjo, and played the harp on this on the tune. But I would just play; I'd get to the shelter and want to entertain myself. Sometimes, I get a chance to play with other people who are carrying instruments, or you get to a town where there would be music, and I'd get to play the harmonica; it's such a perfect instrument, right? I mean, it's not like I play the tuba.
Michael Pope
You can play the wrong note. All the notes are the correct notes.
Tim Kaine
And it's ok to suck. In fact, that's how you make half the notes. It's the one instrument where sucking at it is just fine. It's the lightest instrument there is. So if you're going to take something on a camping trip, play the harmonica.
Michael Pope
We talked earlier about how you did not have your iPhone during the insurrection. There's a lot where you are kind of in a news blackout. Which has to be really interesting for the United States Senator. At one point, you get out of your news blackout, and the President wants to sell Greenland. What is that about? At the end of the book, you actually have an interesting thought about this, which is when you got stuck in your car during that snowstorm, the social media reaction to that was so intense. People reacted to that in a way they would never react to as if you had a legislative accomplishment. Yeah, I mean, your time out in nature gives you a better understanding of what it means to be tied to our cell phones all the time.
Tim Kaine
Yeah.
Michael Pope
Explain that.
Tim Kaine
Yeah, I think we all need a little bit of nature therapy. Where you're attuned to bird sounds and rushing water or the sound of leaves falling through other leaves in the fall. We are so focused on screens. It's not unusual to walk into a Senate committee, and every person except the witness who is speaking is looking at a screen. And I'm guilty of that. So, using time and nature to unplug was extremely helpful from a mental health standpoint. Remember, I'm doing this during COVID, the impeachment trials, and I have a long COVID that I'm dealing with. It's a very tumultuous time. I say in the book that I could never have done this until this point in my life when I was 65. I never could have done it before. I couldn't have done it when I had kids at home. I couldn't have done it at many points along the way. But I never needed it as much as I needed it right now. Because what was going on in society was so challenging. What was going on in my work was so challenging. So, I really learned the value of time in nature. There's a senate gym on one floor beneath my office in the Senate. I don't think I've been in it once since I came back from that hiking trip in 2019; I do all my exercise outdoors. Now, if the weather's bad, okay, then I don't know. Somebody said there's no such thing as bad weather, only the wrong clothes. You just wear different clothes, if it's snowing or raining. That way, you get not only exercise but also the mental health boost of being outdoors and paying attention to the wider world. The trip also really helped me on my 27-hour journey on Interstate 95. I had to learn how to go for hours with no water or food. So, on that trip, I'm trying to get up here for a voting rights meeting. It's in January of 2022, and there's gonna be a snowstorm. I grew up in the Midwest, and I know how to drive in snow; I get on I-95 in Richmond, and the sign says, snow, proceed with caution; it doesn't say turn around, stop danger. And I know how to proceed with caution, but it turns into a 27-hour trip. I have no food or water in the car, I'm stuck there in the middle of the night, and the temperature is 18 degrees on I-95. A family gave me an orange; I ended up finding a Dr Pepper when I found a place to get some gas. I learned that I was a cranky commuter for the first four or five hours. I gotta get to DC for this meeting. Then, I realized in the commute that this was a survival test. I had a third of a tank of gas, and it was 18 degrees. We've been stuck for hours; I have no idea when we're going to get unstuck; how do I survive? My mind switched from commuting to surviving. I switch from cranky to okay, but this is a problem I've got to solve. Then, all the nature time and the survival skills from the trip kind of snapped into place. And I figured out how to do it.
Michael Pope
One drawback of not having an index is that you can't mention all the places that you stayed, some of which sound really fun. I actually didn't know till I read your book that the movie Dirty Dancing was filmed at Mountain Lake Lodge. Also, you talk about tent site 820. So give some shout-outs to your favorites. You stay at Appalachian Trail hostels and motels. Give our listeners a sense of where they should stay, and get some names out there.
Tim Kaine
You're right; the names are in the book, but I didn't do an index. I guess I'm probably too lazy to do it.
Michael Pope
It's a pain.
Tim Kaine
Yeah. It is a pain to do an index. So cool places on the trail. I'll go to each segment; Mountain Home Cabin in Front Royal is a great place and a great B&B. That's right on the trail as it crosses Route 522. Tent A20 in loft mountain campground on the Blue Ridge Skyline Drive. That's amazing; it's a great campground all around. But that particular tent site is renowned. I guess I could have kept it quiet and kept it a secret. But I not only listed the number but also included a picture of it in the book. It's view is second to none. The Mountain Lake Hotel is a little bit west of Roanoke near Newport, Virginia. Great place to stay; the Appalachian Trail runs through the property, maybe a mile or so from the hotel itself. That's a great one. Woods Hole Hostel is a quirky log cabin hostel about 400 yards off the trail south of Pearisburg, Virginia. That's a great place to stay and one of the shelters. Sometimes I'd stay, you know, at a B&B. Often, I would stay in this bivy, a tiny little half tent that only weighs a pound; I'd stay there a lot. But I'd stay in shelters along the trail. My favorite was the Chestnut Knob Shelter which is a shelter that is a converted fire wardens cabin at the southern end of Burke's Garden, which is a truly remarkable Valley in Tazewell County in southwest Virginia; that was one I loved on the bike trip. We stayed on the classic places along the Blue Ridge Parkway and Skyline Drive Peaks of Otter Big Meadows. We stayed at Hotel Floyd and heard a bunch of music, so those are some great ones. On the canoe trip, there was a lot of camping at the great state parks. James River State Park and Powhatan State Park, where I camped. I stayed at a remarkable B&B in Charles City County, where I had an incredible interaction with the owner; Nanny was her name. The B&B is a North Bend plantation. We had a really interesting discussion about her family history and the history of that particular land that had been settled and on which a number of enslaved people worked back in the first part of the 1800s. Her story about the land and about what happened was one of the most captivating chance encounters I had with anyone on the trip.
Michael Pope
So you're hanging out with friends and their children. And at one point, you're impart like the gray beards are imparting wisdom. This is one of my favorite parts of the book. This is not about hiking; this is about life.
Tim Kaine
We were with a guy who was about to graduate from college, the son of one of my friends, Charles and Adam, and he was about to graduate. So Charles and I decided, here's what we should do: we should impart wisdom to you, things we wish we had known when we were 22 years old.
Michael Pope
It's on page 60. It's the beginning of chapter 15. Never bring a problem. We always have a proposed solution, too. Don't ever burn a bridge unless absolutely necessary. Think long-term. Take care with written communication, especially emails. Pick a place to make a difference. Geography matters. The team you work with will be just as if, if not more important than the work itself. You actually imparted a whole lot of stuff. And that's only part of the parapet. Talk a little bit about the life lessons imparted to the children of your friends.
Tim Kaine
My kids were with me on some of the journey. My friends and kids who had often gone camping with us were there. And we did some imparting of wisdom. But also, I gotta say, it worked in reverse. One of the stretches on the river, I'm going along. It's not with Adam; it's his brother, Jason, who is a public high school teacher. My wife is in the boat with me. Adam is in the boat with his dad, and my wife, who is a big educator on the State Board of Education, asks Adam, well, what's it like to be a high school teacher? He's a late 20-something. But can you tell us about your high school students? He had taught in an inner-city Middle School in San Diego. Now, he's at a public high school in Hanover, New Hampshire, near Dartmouth. Both public schools are at the opposite end in terms of wealth, demographics, and social class of the students. We had a fascinating discussion with him, where he was talking about his work as a teacher but also really sharing the stresses and challenges in kids' lives these days, the things that were completely similar about his San Diego and Dartmouth kids, and the things that were completely different for them.
Michael Pope
What's interesting is that you talk about learning from the younger generation because I don't want to say critical. Still, at one point in the book, you talk about how some young people have a nature deficit disorder.
Tim Kaine
Yeah.
Michael Pope
This is actually related to your discussion of people being tied to their screens. What's the solution to that? Or what strategies can undermine that?
Tim Kaine
Yeah, there's the nature deficit disorder, I can't remember the writer who coined that phrase, but it kind of captures a reality where people are transfixed by screens and spending less time outdoors. If you dig into some of the evidence on it. Maybe the evidence doesn't completely support the proposition, particularly since COVID. I think COVID pushed a lot of people outdoors, and they found they liked being outdoors. And outdoor outfitters and bike shops have done generally pretty good business sense COVID. But I think we really have to be intentional about this. We have to be intentional about it for a couple of reasons. People who spend time outdoors find it much better for their health and their mental health. But also, our outdoors needs stewards and protectors. Suppose you don't get into the habit of spending time outdoors. In that case, you're probably not going to be a steward or protector of the outdoors. The best stewards and protectors are people who get into it in the book: my parents, a Boy Scout Troop 395, and then a middle school shop teacher, Joe Mackenzie. Those are the people who, early in life, got me out into nature and into camping and canoeing. And thank God they did. They opened up a part of my life that might not have been open otherwise. It's given me such tremendous satisfaction. Not every young person has that in their life. And so, we are creating more opportunities where we can get young people out for their own sake. Still, also so we'll have the stewards of our outdoor resources forever. That's really important.
Michael Pope
I could go on and on and on. But I need to close this podcast. So, I want to ask you about the end of your book; you talk about how humbling this whole thing has been. You found that's the epiphany, and it's humbling. You actually go into the etymology of the Latin root word, which comes from being grounded. So, talk about what you learned by doing all of this.
Tim Kaine
What did I learn? At the end of the epilogue, I'm trying to sum up what life in the country has been like during the time I've done this. What's my Rorschach; the word humbling comes to mind. And the root word of humbling is grounded. To be in politics, humbling and humility are not the words we use. We tend to be self-important and puffed up. We want to talk about American exceptionalism, America's indispensable nation. That's kind of the way we do things in politics. And yet, if you think from a spiritual standpoint, and I use the phrase from the New Testament, He who'll humble himself shall be exalted, e exalts himself shall be humbled. If the character of humility is important for an individual, Is it unimportant for society? No, I think it should be important for society. So, what does it mean for a society to be humble? And I grapple with that a little bit. And then I asked the question, okay, that's the word I think about for the country during the last few years with COVID; the attacks on the Capitol, the impeachment trial, racial justice protests, humbling is the word that came to mind. Then I said, what do I say about myself in this journey? The Rorschach word that came to mind was grounding. Which is the root word for humbling. Having been in politics for 30 years, you know, getting a grounding experience, it's not all about what Belem introduced. It's not all about the roundtable or the interview with the local media. It's not even all about communication with people. Virginia is gorgeous. It's my adopted state, I moved here 40 years ago, the natural bounty of Virginia, everybody's got their favorite place. And that's a unifier in a divided time, wanting to protect these beautiful places so that our kids and grandkids can derive the same joy from them that we do. That's a unifier. Through the grounding experience, I gained some knowledge about our country. I had some epiphanies about why certain things going on. I have a long analysis of the Book of Job as I'm trying to think about what explains this moment in life and one of the challenges our country is going through. I think about the Book of Job, which offers incredible wisdom for a book that's 2500 years old. It shows an astute understanding of human psychology. Again, it's a story about a person, an allegory about a person. Still, you can expand its wisdom to thinking about societies as well. You need time to let these thoughts bubble up in your head. If you're running around doing your schedule every day, sometimes the thoughts don't bubble up, or they don't crystallize. One of the things about the journey is that thoughts were kind of encoded or rattling around in my head, which could connect together and give me a greater understanding of the value of humility. About how to understand the challenges that America and the world are going through right now.
Michael Pope
The book's title is Walk, Ride, Paddle: A Life Outside. Tim Kaine is a US senator, but if you see him on the trail, you can call him Dog Bowl. Thanks for coming to Pod Virginia.
Tim Kaine
Thanks, Michael, glad to do it.
