So what we did for vacations is drive back to Pontiac, where they grew up. “My folks didn’t have a lot of money,” Herwig says. His father worked for a small midwestern chain store in 1963 the company transferred him to Albert Lea. His parents were high school sweethearts. Both his maternal and paternal ancestors settled in central Illinois in the mid-19th century. Herwig comes from a long line of midwesterners. ![]() He had been in Chicago for only two years, and he felt comforted by the thought of walking home, of retreating into a familiar landscape, a landscape he loved. His wife had recently left him, and he wanted both to vanish and to prove he was alive. He’ll keep walking, for five weeks and about 550 more miles, through long stretches of Illinois and Wisconsin and Iowa, past his hometown of Albert Lea in southern Minnesota, and on to Minneapolis, where he lived for 19 years. On the morning of August 14, he’ll leave his apartment in Edgewater, walk south for almost two miles along the lakefront path, west for eight miles on Irving Park Road, south for three miles on Harlem, and then west, right out of the city, on North Avenue. Herwig is a soft-spoken 45-year-old “semiretired performance artist” and the vice president of community affairs at TCF Bank. ![]() He knows this because he’s spent an inordinate amount of time walking in recent months–four to five miles every other day and between ten and twenty miles on the weekends. He has realized, for instance, that the heel of his right foot is wider than that of his left and the toes aren’t quite as long. Herwig has been keenly aware of his feet lately. But he had walked nine miles that morning, and his feet needed some air. “I know it’s really bad,” he said, glancing around sheepishly as he rested his bare feet atop his shoes. And there they discover the terrible damage done by a sin-sick soul.Last Saturday at Lula Cafe in Logan Square, Tim Herwig slipped his feet out of his new Gore-Tex cross trainers and peeled off two layers of socks. To an area so desolate, so damned, the first mariners called it the land God gave to Cain. ![]() The journey takes them further and further from Three Pines, to the very mouth of the great St. A man so desperate to recapture his fame as an artist, he would sell that soul. And deeper and deeper into the soul of Peter Morrow. Together with his former second-in-command, Jean-Guy Beauvoir, and Myrna Landers, they journey deeper and deeper into Québec. “There’s power enough in Heaven,” he finishes the quote as he contemplates the quiet village, “to cure a sin-sick soul.” And then he gets up. Having finally found sanctuary, Gamache feels a near revulsion at the thought of leaving Three Pines. Failed to show up as promised on the first anniversary of their separation. Peter, her artist husband, has failed to come home. While Gamache doesn’t talk about his wounds and his balm, Clara tells him about hers. “There is a balm in Gilead,” his neighbor Clara Morrow reads from the dust jacket, “to make the wounded whole.” On warm summer mornings he sits on a bench holding a small book, The Balm in Gilead, in his large hands. Happily retired in the village of Three Pines, Armand Gamache, former Chief Inspector of Homicide with the Sûreté du Québec, has found a peace he’d only imagined possible. A #1 New York Times Bestseller, Louise Penny’s The Long Way Home is an intriguing Chief Inspector Gamache Novel.
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