Murphy Walks Where The Sidewalk Ends

As 85-year-old Raisa pulled up a photograph of her daughter on her iPhone, U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy took a break from walking across Fair Haven Heights to ask her a question. 

“Is she safe?”

Murphy met Raisa along a mile-long stretch of the east side of New Haven on Thursday morning as he traversed the last leg of his seventh annual ​“Walk Across Connecticut.” 

Raisa sat on the bench of an Eastern Street pocket park behind her home at the Fair Haven Heights senior living community of Bella Vista.

When Murphy strolled by — more than 60 miles into his journey that started in Stafford and ended in East Haven — she had a brief chance to tell the prominent advocate for Ukrainian aid about her family’s life in a country entangled in war. 

Raisa’s daughter, who lives in Raisa’s former country of Belarus, is safe. But as Murphy said, ​“These are hard times in Belarus.”

“It’s terrible now,” Raisa agreed. She showed him her daughter’s photo.

“Do you think she’d want to come here from Belarus?” Murphy asked.

“She visits,” Raisa said. 

Murphy handed her his card with contact information for his office, noting that if Raisa ever needs help with a visa application, she should contact him.

Further up the hill, Murphy observed, ​“She probably will have some visa issues at some point.”

Raisa was the second Belarusian immigrant Murphy met this week on his annual walk from one end of the state to the other.

Though Murphy typically walks across the state in the summer, initial plans to do so in 2023 were canceled when he contracted Covid-19 and rescheduled his walk to autumn. He takes a different route each year, typically starting in the north and ending in the south.

This week, Murphy took a four-day, 67-mile walk: walking one day from Stafford to Manchester, the next from Manchester to Bethel, then from Bethel to North Haven, and finally on Thursday from North Haven to East Haven. 

Though he rides back to his Hartford home at the end of each day, he begins the next morning exactly where he left off the night before, following one continuous path from end to end of the state. 

The journey takes him from more rural, wooded areas to walkable city streets to busy yet car-centric neighborhoods.

His route included about a mile through New Haven’s Quinnipiac Meadows and Fair Haven Heights neighborhoods — primarily along Eastern Street, where pedestrians are rare and sidewalks are disjointed.

"The State Is Terrible For Pedestrians"

By the time he made it there, Murphy had honed a couple of strategies for ambling through car-centric neighborhoods by foot.

First: when there is a sidewalk, use it. Even if that means rushing across the street where there is no crosswalk to get from the end of a sidewalk on one side of the road to the start of a sidewalk on the other.

Second: when there is no sidewalk, walk against traffic — except when the road turns a corner, in which case it may be easier to see oncoming cars from the far side.

Having grown up in Hartford, Murphy is used to navigating across the state from the perspective of a car driver or passenger. The annual walk has given him a renewed perspective on the challenges of being carless in Connecticut.

“The state is terrible for pedestrians. I’m reminded of that every year,” he said. 

Having taken up a focus in the last year on the ​“epidemic of loneliness” affecting the United States, Murphy took special note this week of how Connecticut residents find opportunities for — or barriers to — community building.

He met a trio of friends who meet every morning in a North Haven diner to start their days. He heard laments about the closure of a public pool in Wallingford, which once served as a convening place for residents.

This year, he said, the Israel-Gaza and Ukraine-Russia wars have trickled into his conversations with constituents. 

Still, he said, most of the constituents he talks to are concerned about issues like surviving on low or fixed incomes, the community spaces in their neighborhoods, the quality of their kids’ education.

“What defines this walk is not what’s different from year to year, but what’s the same,” he said.