On The Passing of Walkin' Jim Stoltz

I never met Walkin' Jim Stoltz. I only knew Jim. We got faintly reconnected in recent years through emails but the person I really knew best was but 14 or 15 years old. We were junior high buddies and I will always remember a large poster he gave me at the time that hung on my bedroom wall for years afterwards. It was a black and white poster of the bottom of two bare feet. It was obscure and random and cool, and we appreciated it for those reasons. I looked at it as a simple token of our friendship. Jim left the flatness of Slidell, Louisiana early on to return to his true roots in Royal Oak, Michigan before he could graduate with those of us in the St. Tammany Parish School System. Even then he lamented the lack of freedom to be who he wanted to be, in a system that said long hair was a path to failure . Jim wrote the forgettable "St. Tammany School System Blues" in protest over attempts to make students conform and comply to silly rules designed to stifle self expression. In the Sixties that was being debated constantly by existing power structures and budding hippies. Jim was the latter and when he finally did graduate in Royal Oak he sent me his official senior picture with shoulder length hair as proof that he had prevailed over society's mandated conformity.
I'm not really sure when the compulsion to unite with nature took a hold of Jim. He is quoted as saying it was the Boy Scouts that gave him his first taste of life around a campfire, but Jim visited me in February of 1973 , long hair and all, and it was clear that the mountains of Vermont had seduced him completely. By September of that same year he had quit his job, quit college, bought a new guitar, and, eventually, set off with a girlfriend to go camping in those same mountains. After three months of hiking and camping his girlfriend left him, but he stayed in those mountains without her. He transplanted himself permanently to live and work there, bought his very first car ( a '66 Buick Special) for two hundred dollars and while living with friends in Newport, Vermont he found work in an Ethan Allen lumber yard. Jim tried to find venues ( bars, coffee houses, lodges) to play his music, something he had begun in Royal Oak, but those were hard to find at first. By March of 1974 he had quit his job in the lumber yard ("it's not where I'm at") and planned his first long distance hike (March thru October) of the 2,000 mile Appalachian Trail. Before he left, he cut his hair ( a little) and grew a beard. Surprisingly he left his guitar behind and took only a flute recorder to amuse himself with music. By then he was signing his letters as "Mountain Jim."
His second endeavor began in May of 1975 and ended in November of 1976 walking the length of the U.S.-Canadian border through wilderness from Maine to Washington- a 5,000 mile walk. Jim corresponded with me that year sending me clippings of media coverage he had received along the way and with those letters accounts of the wonderful people he had met and who had befriended him. His stories about the wilderness and the things he saw were both funny and awe-inspiring. Swallowed up by frozen mountain streams, chased by bears...all great stories to be told around a campfire on a cold winter night. It was on this trip that he or someone on some newspaper dubbed him "Walkin' Jim."
It would be easy to make comparisons between Jim and Thoreau and make reference to Frost's "the road less traveled." According to Jim ,"the road less traveled isn't a road at all."
His life was a testament to his passion and that is what impressed me the most about Jim. Nature called him as a steward long before he even realized it, but it became his overwhelming passion once he took that first step into the wild...into the wilderness. And when he came down from the mountains, he was, in his words, "educated." Nature filled him up and eventually overflowed in him. It was this overflowing that created the music, poetry and stories of the wisdom that could be learned from nature itself. It taught him and gave him purpose and everything he did after that was filled with the desire to share it with the rest of the world.
I've never known another person quite like that...passionate and committed to the very end.
His passion was the high country... wind and snow, mountains, streams and limitless sky.
There are many YouTube videos featuring Jim and his music performing at schools and such and I listened to several of them this past week having learning that he was gone. For me it sums up a philosophy that Jim so obviously subscribed to. He sings about the importance of "taking that first step"...and then the next. It is a lesson about faith and confidence and also persistence and commitment.
I mentioned earlier the large poster on my bedroom wall that I got from Jim in Junior High, you know, the bottom of two bare feet, the picture that struck both Jim and me as being so random and cool. I must admit that knowing what I know now...forty years later, it does not seem so random, but it is so very very cool.