A Yale graduate put a hold on his bright future to embark on a yearlong journey to walk across the country — in complete silence.
Greg Hindy, 22, is two months shy of a year on the road with just a tent to sleep in and a camera to document his journey. On July 9, he will end his vow of silence by showing his followers know what he learned through photos and a video.
“I am abstaining from just about all forms of entertainment other than the thoughts inside my head,” he wrote last July on his website. “I hope to better understand the endurance-performance works of artists who came before me. I hope to better understand myself and my relationship to my country.”
Hindy’s desire to make this cross-country voyage started in a photography class at Yale, where he was assigned to capture a community in pictures. He became enamored with the project, spending weeks photographing the New Haven flea market and the public library.
Just before graduating with a degree in cognitive science last spring, Hindy informed his parents he was planning a Forrest Gump-like trip throughout the U.S. where he hoped to learn about himself and what he wants from life.
“Some parents think, ‘Oh my God, he needs to get a job,’ but I think in the long run, this will serve him well in understanding his priorities,” his father Carl Hindy, a clinical psychologist based in Nashua, New Hampshire, told the Post.
Carl, 56, said his only concern throughout the past 10 months has been his son’s safety.
There have been a few medical situations – Hindy became dehydrated in Utah after a mystery-meat chicken sandwich from a gas station – but nothing too serious.
While he hasn’t talked to his son since he left their Nashua home last July to start his cross-country trek, he gets emails from people who have met him along the way and checks Hindy’s bank account twice a day. Carl tracks Hindy’s movement on an interactive map on the website, showing his son’s zig-zagging journey throughout the country.
Sometimes, Hindy will sit with someone he met at a local gas station or McDonald’s and call his family. While he won’t actually speak, he’ll have the person he met read notes he wrote to tell his dad what he has been up to or if he needs an airdrop of new camera film from B&H in his next city.
“It would easier if he just went to grad school. This hasn’t been easy for us as his family,” Carl said. “But it’s so relevant to the things we struggle with in terms of our identity and mid-life crises. It’s like working through your mid-life crisis at 22.”
The valedictorian of his high school class, Hindy has always been a “serial master” of anything that interests him, his father told the Post.
When he was in junior high school, Hindy got into making model airplanes and would spend hours in the basement creating planes that he would fly in competitions against professional engineers…and he’d win, too.
“Whatever he does, he’s doing it 110 percent,” Carl said.
On July 9 – Hindy’s 23rd birthday – he will end his yearlong journey at the apartment of his college roommate in Los Angeles. Carl is convinced his son won’t be hopping on a plane to get back to New Hampshire right away though.
“I think they’ll be some decompression time and then I think he’ll think about, “What next?” Carl said.
Hindy’s father thinks it’s likely his son will do a mixed medley of travel – including walking, driving and possibly some trains – to make his way back to the East Coast.
“As a parent, I think that will give him a better reentry into the atmosphere rather than just picking up some bearded guy who hasn’t shaved or had a haircut for a year,” he said. “He did say to someone along the way that he may be home by November.”