POMFRET, Vt.
OM STONE of Pomfret began walking around the world in 1992. Now five years later, his feet have carried him more than 30,000 kilometers in 24 countries around the world. He’s worn our about 20 pairs of boots, averaging 40 kilometers a day. He’s up and out at dawn and walks until after sundown each day. Inclement weather is no deterrent. He walks, rain or shine.
What started as an adventure may have become an obsession. “I don’t think I could stop now even if I really wanted to,” he said, according to a recent report in the Bangkok Post. After 14 years in the U.S. Army, Stone resigned and sold his home in Pomfret. On April 1, 1992, he set out for New Hampshire and then beyond. Why he is walking around the world is a question he finds difficult to answer. “Because I can,” he told the Bangkok Post. “It’s something I really want to do. I’m not doing it for any cause or political reason. I just like history and I like stories.” He stays in touch with his cousin, Sally Britton, a CPA who lives in Norwich. Britton thinks that her cousin’s adventurous spirit may be in his blood. His older brother, Dana Stone, was a news photographer who was captured in Cambodia during the Vietnam War. “He has been missing ever since,” said Britton. “I remember when we were kids, Dana would tell us stories of his adventures and Tom would just sit there, wide-eyed, taking in every word.” Now Tom Stone has his own stories to tell. And memories. “I remember the people more than the places,” he told the Post. His fondest memories are of Siberia where he walked 10,000 kilometers from July 1993 to November 1994.
“I loved Siberia. It was just wide open. The Russians are very hospitable, very friendly. I slept in a lot of homes. If my host had not food, he would borrow food from a neighbor, after telling the neighbor that he had a guest,” said Stone. In all of his travels, Stone experienced no real trauma. He was hassled a few times. Two men pulled a knife on him in Russia. Teenage boys in China threw rocks at him. Drivers have run him off the road in several places. But he was always able to walk away from these incidents, continue his trek, and meet more interesting and friendly people down the road. In Thailand, he stayed two weeks with a pistol-packing restaurant owner. “She told me that gangsters killed her husband so she kept three guns,” said Stone. “When some people made remarks about the foreigner with her and laughed, she’d just let her bag fall open, revealing a gun, and they shut up real fast.” Stone like Thailand so much that he spent six months there when he could have walked through in two months. He was apprehensive about Korea because he had heard such horror stories about the place. But he found the people great. “Little boys would walk along with me holding my hand,” he said. In Japan, many people insisted on helping him. He was walking in north Honshu in a real bad snow storm. “It was very cold and the snow was blowing,” he said. A car stopped and the driver opened his door. “It was quickly clear that he wasn’t going away until I got in the car,” said Stone. “So I got in and he drove me to Aomori, about 40 Kilometers.” Stone caught a bus there to take him back to where he was picked up. Clearly, keeping the integrity of walking all the way is important to Stone. Right now, Stone is in Australia. An old friend of his, Alice Smith, a professor of speech pathology at Indiana University in Indiana, Pa., spent the month of July with him, traveling the Outback. Out of deference to his guest, Stone took a break from walking and purchased an old Ford station wagon for the trip. “It was an amazing journey through an amazing place,” said Smith. “We traveled south to north across the interior of the country, from station to station. What Aussies call stations are really bars populated with Crocodile Dundee types. But they were all friendly, probably because people are so few and far between.” Not so the animals. They are many and everywhere. Smith and Stone observed and interacted with eagles, kangaroos, emus, cockatiels, parrots, dingoes, and all kinds of lizards, including goannas that are nearly 2 feet long. “We even ran into a crocodile once when we went swimming,” said Smith. One amazing sight Smith reported was a 3,000-mile chicken-wire fence that runs across the outback and is designed to keep the dingoes north of a certain line. Tom Stone is now in the midst of a four-month walk across the Nullabor Desert, a moonscape with no water, according to Smith. After that, he intends to go to New Zealand. From New Zealand, he will go to Alaska and walk across the tundra down into Canada and then across the continent and home to Pomfret. Sally Britton expects that it will take Stone another two years to do all this. “After that, he’ll probably go off on some other adventure,” she said. Smith said that Stone was thinking about trading in his boots for a sailboat next time. All through his travels, Stone has maintained contact with youngsters at the Pomfret School. When he started, he wrote cards and letters to the kindergarten class. These children are now in the sixth grade and they are still exchanging letters with Stone. “We hear from him about every six weeks,” said Rob Hansen, the sixth-grade teacher. “The letters are read at assembly to the entire school and the kids love them for their warmth and humor,” he added. Stone’s travels are carefully followed by a length of yarn on a map of the world in the school library, according to Hansen. When the kids write to Stone, their letters go to a post office box in Norwich. Britton maintains the box for anyone who wants to contact Stone. The mail accumulates until Stone calls her and gives her an address for sending it. 
