The Man Who Walked Backward

by Ben Montgomery

  * * *

  Perhaps there was a certain irony to the fact that Della’s letter caught up with him in a place called Providence. She had to think about her own future. She was done with marriage. She had dutifully presented him with a chance to turn around, to go home and retake his seat at the head of their table and give up the ridiculous exhibition that had brought his loved ones zero benefit and noticeable harm. The test of love, commitment, loyalty, and obligation had come and gone, and Plennie had failed.

  Men do strange and terrible things sometimes.

  He backed into the office of James H. Kiernan, counselor-at-law, on Weybosset Street. With Mr. Kiernan’s guidance, Plennie waived his right to appear before a jury and agreed to pay court costs. There was no use in fighting anything, for his wife was always right.

  Plennie wrote “Dec. 21—1931,” on James Kiernan’s business card. “Signed divorce papers.” He stepped back into the sunshine, completely unaware that his fame had brought him into vaulted and unenviable regard among the American press corps. The papers, of course, carried the scandalous news.

  Reverse Walker Has Reverse In Wedded State

  If Plennie Wingo of Abilene, who has walked backward farther than any other known man, carries out his intentions of going around the world in reverse, he will have to about face when he gets home to regain his wife’s affections. Mrs. Wingo has filed suit for divorce in the 42nd district court. Mrs. Wingo and her sixteen-year-old daughter live in Abilene. She was married to Plennie in 1914, according to the petition filed in the name of Mrs. Idella Wingo.

  * * *

  The ladies at City Hall couldn’t get enough of Plennie. Someone brought him a plate of food from the potluck buffet. He was famished after twelve hours of backpedaling. He’d worn shorts for the thirty-mile hustle from Providence to the city upon the hill, and they made him seem younger, boyish. A reporter for the Boston Globe wrote that he wore “sawed-off knee-pants” and looked like “an escaped yodeler from the Tyrolean Alps.” The ladies and the reporter asked him what everyone else asked him: Why are you doing this?

  “Just because,” he said.

  They pried, trying to get him to articulate why, of all the various avenues of human achievement, he chose this one. He told them he liked the outdoors, and liked walking. He told them it was a great chance to see the country, albeit backward. He explained that he wanted to do something that would make people notice, make them stop and think.

  “It’s an ambition I’ve had for many years,” he said. “There’s no competition in it, either, and that’s something in this day and age.”

  He’d walked more than two thousand miles through sixteen states and the District of Columbia, and below the hems of his knee pants you could see that his calves had moved around to the fronts of his legs.

  All that remained between him and the next leg of his journey was passage to London, and the next morning, after a quick rest at Hotel Haymarket, courtesy of the City of Boston, he called on P. R. Drew, head of the heel and sole department of the Hood Rubber Company in Watertown, a few miles west. When he walked into the office he was happy to see one of his postcards on Drew’s desk. Drew was kind and good-natured, and he seemed genuinely interested in doing what he could to help. But he told Plennie it would have to wait until after the New Year. Meanwhile, Plennie got a passport and spent Christmas alone.

  When he next saw Drew, it didn’t look good. The company viewed the stunt as a liability and therefore would not be using Plennie L. Wingo for advertising. But there was an ounce of hope. “I am going to make you acquainted with our traffic director,” Drew said. “He might be able to assist you in getting a boat job.”

  The two men walked down the hall to the office of Mr. Webster, and Plennie explained himself, doing his best to sound desperate and grateful.

  “Tell you what,” Webster said. “You go back to your hotel and I’ll call you.”

  Plennie was grateful. Neither man needed to be so kind. He returned to Hotel Haymarket to wait. He shoved his hands in his trouser pockets and paced in the lobby, weighing his situation. If this didn’t work, he’d soon be out of money. That would leave him homeless, divorced and broke, and two thousand miles from home. His spirits were lower than they’d been in a long time.

  The desk clerk called out for Plennie. He had a phone call. Webster was on the other end.

  “Would it make any difference to you,” he asked, “if you went to Germany instead of England?”

  21.

  Vengeance

  If you take a man who has never seen the open water, who has spent all thirty-six of his years surrounded by the assurance of firm earth, and put him on a ship upon the vast and rolling sea, surrounded by ocean for days, you should not be surprised by the man’s discomfort. It might take a few days, perhaps more, for him to get oriented and present himself upright. This is why the crew of the Seattle Spirit, which set sail from Boston for Hamburg, Germany, on January 12, 1932, got to know Plennie Wingo’s back better than his face, much like the rest of the world, on account of the fact that he spent the first few days of his ocean voyage facedown on his bunk, holding the loose sheets balled up in his hands, as if that might help.

  He had boarded with such pizazz, walking backward down the gangplank even, as his crusty shipmates watched from the deck, some curious, some sneering. “Hello, everybody,” he said when aboard. “Here I am!”

  His entrance had earned him no great benevolence among the seafaring men beside whom he’d soon be sleeping. He was granted passage as a favor, and was told he would not have much work to do, and the seamen seemed to know as much. Plennie’s chaperone introduced him to the crew, working his way down the line until at last they came to the steward, who was in charge of the housekeeping department. The man appeared to be equal parts German and Italian and had the hulking build of a professional wrestler.

  “I’m glad to meet you,” Plennie said, extending his hand.

  “I’ll bet you are,” the steward replied. Then he glanced at his crew. “He may be walking backwards now,” he said, “but I’ll have him turned around by the time we reach Hamburg.”

  Their meeting began a relationship people would come to describe as emotionally abusive.

  “We serve dinner at five,” the steward said. “You can start work in the morning.”

  The next morning Plennie was put to the task of squeegeeing fourteen cabins. He was nearly finished with the first when he felt a powerful phlegm rise in his throat, a sickness he tried to hold down by swallowing. This worked for a few moments, but eventually he acquiesced to the impulse to vomit, and the putrid discharge erased considerably his squeegee productivity. He crawled on hands and knees to his bunk, whereupon the mattress began to shift from under his weight as though it were attempting to overpower him. A great battle thus ensued. Plennie managed to reverse onto his stomach and latch on to his resilient adversary. He maintained the posture, void of concern for life, until the steward’s assistant breached the crew cabin.

  “I’ve been poisoned,” Plennie managed to moan.

  The steward’s assistant was indifferent. “You’re seasick,” he said. “Give it a few days.”

  Plennie lay there alone for hours in the looming disquiet, unwilling to unleash his disobedient bedroll, until a crewman came in. Plennie couldn’t remember his name from the introductions, but the mate seemed friendly enough. They talked for a while and Plennie mentioned that he was surprised to have been given a chore, having been told on shore that there was little work to be done. The man hadn’t been gone long when the steward burst in, put his meaty hands on little Plennie, and flipped him upright, like a child, jerking him to his feet.

  “So you don’t figure to have much to do, eh?” he bellowed, spitting profanity. “You’re going to work now, and work every day until you get off this ship.”

  * * *

  “I want to give you some advice,” the man in the next bunk whispered a few days later. Plennie couldn’t see him in
the darkness, but his name was John Hall, and if Plennie had a friend on the Seattle Spirit it was him. “You talk too much,” John Hall said. “And to the wrong people. That fellow you told about not expecting much to do is the steward’s right-hand stool pigeon.” The entire ship was a giant grapevine, and the steward was the root. Whatever anybody said made its way back to him.

  Plennie was sick for four days. Anything he ate came back with involuntary force. He was growing weaker and weaker, but the steward watched him closely, demanding he work eight hours each day, not including time spent on his knees in the head.

  John Hall was working his third trip across the ocean, and he kept his nose clean because he didn’t talk to anybody. He told Plennie that his son, on the opposite bunk, was the same way; he was no trouble because John Hall had trained him to keep his mouth shut. Plennie thanked Hall for the lesson and resolved to stay quiet.

  * * *

  He tried to eat again on January 16 but couldn’t keep food down. He found success, finally, on January 17, and his stomach retained his first solid meal in five days. By then he had squeegeed seven of fourteen cabins. His friend John Hall whispered that he’d never seen a sick crewman run as ragged. Plennie was keeping his mouth shut and showing the steward, who was nearly twice his size, all the courtesy he could feign, but he couldn’t work fast enough. The big man grew more disagreeable by the day. He seemed to enjoy insulting Plennie, threatening to lock him in the hold on bread and water, even suggesting he wouldn’t give Plennie a release once they arrived in Germany. Plennie was dubious about the prospect and slipped out of the cabin one night to track down the captain.

  “I have to tell you, son,” the captain said, “we have rules at sea and we can’t interfere in another man’s territory. Unless he tried to murder you, I couldn’t lift a finger.”

  “Could he prevent me from landing in Germany?” Plennie asked.

  “He sure could if he wanted to,” the captain said. “For any reason.”

  A propeller broke on the sixth day at sea, delaying arrival by three days. Plennie had finished his squeegee work on the cabins by the time it was repaired.

  “I guess they will pass,” the steward said begrudgingly.

  Plennie was hoping to relax a little the next few days, but the steward put him back to work cleaning grease from the ceiling and walls of the dining room. When that was finished, he was made to clean the galley.

  Plennie celebrated his thirty-seventh birthday in silence on January 24, a Sunday, and within a few hours he saw the white cliffs of Dover—as close as he’d ever come to England—and the big ship entered the English Channel. Just six months earlier, an Austrian named Karl Naumestnik had become the first human to walk across the dangerous twenty-mile stretch from Cape Gris Nez to Dover, wearing on his feet eight-foot-long bamboo water skis buoyed by inflatable bladders. What would they think up next?

  The five-thousand-ton ship pushed up the River Elbe toward Hamburg as Plennie hustled to finish cleaning the galley, fantasizing the entire time about ways to get even with the steward. Plennie was a Texan, by God, and there was no justice in his current arrangement. When the city came into view, Plennie wondered if he’d be allowed off the boat given the steward’s disposition. Then he was summoned.

  “I have to go to Italy while the ship is in port,” the steward told him. “I’ll be back before sailing time on January twenty-ninth. The second mate has your passport and will release you after my orders are carried out, and not before.” If Plennie wasn’t finished by sailing time he could finish on his way back to America.

  Plennie was boiling mad, but what option did he have? He went back to work, daydreaming about evening the score. He changed the linens in all fourteen cabins and put the dirties in the laundry. He defrosted the two walk-in freezers and cleaned them. He had begun to straighten and clean the large storage room near the mess when his plan revealed itself as he was moving several cases of lye. Some of the powder had spilled out of a broken can. With a mean notion in his head, Plennie wrapped the lye in a cellophane bag and tucked it into his pocket. The big bastard would never know what hit him.

  He collected his clothes and notebook and swapped out his suitcase for a spare knapsack. He double-checked his cleaning, then, as twilight approached, reported to the second mate, who handed him his passport. Just before he disembarked, he slipped into the steward’s room when no one was looking, took care of his business, then, full of anxiety and flushed from the effort, headed for the gangplank. The second mate was there to see him off.

  “Are you feeling all right?” the mate asked.

  “I feel fine,” Plennie said. “I guess the idea of entering a foreign country makes me nervous.”

  He bade the man farewell, put his glasses on, faced the Seattle Spirit, and started backward down the gangplank. Europe was behind him, finally, and he hoped hard that the big ogre didn’t appear in his mirrors. What he had done felt something like setting fire to the long fuse on a stick of dynamite, then walking away, hoping to be out of the blast zone by the time the thing blows.

  * * *

  He hustled, forward this time, down the backstreets of Hamburg, occasionally looking over his shoulder, until he found a rooming house where to his surprise the proprietor spoke perfect English. Some of the crew of the Seattle Spirit got rooms at the hotel overlooking the port, but he wanted to remain anonymous until he was certain the ship, and the steward, were at sea. Still, he found sleep difficult and interrupted by attacks of anxiety. He tossed and turned until morning, picturing the fruits of what was most certainly a criminal act, even by the lax standards of maritime law. When the sun rose, he walked to the harbor like a spy, peeking around buildings, until he was sure the ship had departed. He paced to the dock, then continued his backward walk away from the Elbe into the brick canyons of the portside city. Soon the curious were rushing to the curb, then rushing away and bringing back friends and family. Before long the streets were packed with Germans puzzling over the man wearing the sign with English wording. Soon a reporter was at Plennie’s side, asking questions in English, telling him he had read about a backward-walking Texan but had not believed it. After a short while they arrived at the American Embassy, where Plennie shook hands with the American consul from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and showed him the clippings from his hometown newspaper. He left with two cartons of American cigarettes and the consul’s good-luck wishes.

  Plennie made one final stop before carrying on with his second leg in an unknown land.

  “What do you wish?” asked the doorman at the police station, which covered an entire city block. Plennie explained slowly that he would like to talk to someone who might make it okay for him to stay in Germany for a spell. He was shown inside, to a giant room, and from what he could tell there was not a single interior wall or partition on the entire first floor. He walked forward past a jumble of crooked desks to a long table in the center of the room where the bearded men seemed most official. Several studied his sign.

  “Are you American?” one of them asked. “The one who is going around the world backward?”

  “I am,” Plennie said.

  “You must be crazy,” the man said.

  “Perhaps,” Plennie conceded. He handed over his passport and the men perused it, speaking to one another in German.

  “Are you planning to walk backwards in Germany?” the man asked.

  Plennie confirmed. That was the plan.

  The men talked some more.

  “We do not believe it is safe,” the one finally said.

  Plennie whipped out his glasses, his ace in the hole. He pressed them into the German’s hands. The men all looked them over. Two tried them on and attempted to walk backward. They weren’t convinced.

  Plennie put his glasses on.

  “See that door in the front?” he asked, referring to the door far behind him, through which he’d come. He paced backward toward it, zigzagging around the desks and down crooked aisles without bumping anything.
He reached behind him finally and grabbed the knob. The cops seated around the room began to applaud, then more joined in, and the bearded men in the middle of the room nodded. But what about finances?

  Here he had less confidence.

  “Sufficient,” he said. “I won’t be a bother to anyone.”

  * * *

  He gave instructions at the post office to forward any mail for Plennie L. Wingo to Berlin. A kind man down the street agreed to paint a new sign on the back of the scrap he’d worn across America. He tied his shoes tight and slung onto his back the knapsack containing his extra clothes, two hundred postcards, two cartons of American cigarettes, and his journal, which contained a new clipping from the Hamburg newspaper Altonaer Nachrichten, headlined WELTREISE RÜCKWÄRTS! He left Hamburg on February 1, 1932, wearing a newly painted sign, saying:

  RÜCKWÄRTS

  Rund um die

  WELT

  22.

  Powder Keg

  He’d been warned. The reporter for the Hamburg newspaper had told Plennie to be careful in Berlin. Something was different there. Something had changed.

  All of Germany was facing a national crisis: millions were unemployed, and banks were failing left and right after Austria’s big Creditanstalt bank declared bankruptcy in May 1931. But Germany’s largest city, with a population of more than four million, felt like a powder keg waiting for a match. Broken, out-of-work men filled the squares. Their factories were closed, smokestacks eerily still. Their government dole swelled. Their leaders were impotent. Even with President Hoover’s moratorium on repayment of debts, the country’s economy was failing. “Gray desperation” was what a publicity man named Joseph Goebbels called it. “The people are divided, torn in two,” he wrote just before Christmas in Berlin’s Der Angriff. “People have every reason to despair of the future. Were there no National Socialist movement as the last hope of those of good will, millions of people in Germany would long since have plunged into the abyss of chaos and anarchy. We have raised the banner of a new faith.”