NEW YORK, NY.- Neil King Jr., a journalist whose book, “American Ramble,” told of his 330-mile trek from his home in Washington, D.C. to New York City while in remission from cancer, an account that lyrically evoked the people, history and back roads of the mid-Atlantic region, died Sept. 17 in Washington. He was 65.

His death, in a hospital, was from complications of esophageal cancer, his wife, Shailagh Murray, said.

King’s travelogue-cum-memoir, whose subtitle is “A Walk of Memory and Renewal,” was based on a 26-day hike he began in late March 2021, when the country was emerging from the COVID-19 lockdown. (He modestly called it a “humdrum feat by any measure.”) It crystallized for many readers how the pandemic had heightened a sense of life’s urgency and fragility.

“I had set out with a wonder first stirred by a sickness,” King wrote. “A jolt of fear had opened a seam of freedom, and I had slipped through.”

Outside Baltimore, he met a sidewalk philosopher taking out his trash who told him that his pilgrimage, just over two months after the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, would set off good vibrations and bring others to a place of sanity.

“Right now, everybody’s out of sync, in the wrong frequency,” the man said.

King, who had covered wars in the Balkans and Iraq as a longtime reporter for The Wall Street Journal, was not so unworldly as to think that America’s polarization could be easily healed.

He found historic echoes of disunity while visiting York, Pennsylvania, where residents in 1863 rode out to welcome Confederate troops, while just 25 miles away he passed through Lancaster, Pennsylvania, which had been the home of Thaddeus Stevens, the fierce abolitionist who pushed Abraham Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation.

Reviewing “American Ramble” in The Guardian, Lloyd Green wrote: “King puts his head and heart on the page. His life story helps drive the narrative, a mixture of the personal, political and pastoral.”

Before his trek, King spent 23 years as a reporter and editor for the Journal based in Prague, Brussels and, from 1999 to 2016, Washington. His titles included chief diplomatic correspondent, national political reporter and global economics editor.

His reporting on the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, was part of the coverage that earned the Journal the Pulitzer Prize for breaking news reporting in 2002.

Neil Caldwell King Jr. was born July 27, 1959, in Boulder, Colorado, the third of five children of Neil C. King, a lawyer, and Gretchen (Goit) King, an interior decorator and art collector.

He graduated from Columbia University in 1985 after studying philosophy and, in 1989, received a master’s in journalism from Northwestern University, where he met his future wife. The couple worked briefly for The Tampa Tribune, then, more or less on a lark, moved to Prague after the Velvet Revolution there. They were soon hired by the Journal as European correspondents. They married in 1993.

Murray went on to work as a reporter for The Washington Post, then as a senior adviser to Vice President Joe Biden and to President Barack Obama before becoming head of public affairs for Columbia University.

Besides his wife, King is survived by their daughters, Lillian and Frances; his mother; his sister, Shannon Bracht; and his brothers Jeff and Ross. Another brother, Kevin, died of brain cancer in late 2021, and his struggle with the disease was often on King’s mind during his journey, he wrote in “American Ramble.”

King was diagnosed with esophageal cancer in 2017. He experienced several years of good health after treatment, but the disease returned a year ago.

Long before he became a professional writer, his life was characterized by wanderlust. Inspired by literary travel authors Bruce Chatwin and Patrick Leigh Fermor, he dropped out of college and spent three years traipsing around the world in his early 20s. He worked on a sailboat in Australia and meditated for a month in a Buddhist monastery in Sri Lanka. (He failed as a monk, he wrote, because he was too distracted by the scenery.)

On his hike to New York, he carried an 18-pound rucksack and a collapsible fishing rod and stuck mostly to rural routes, overnighting in Airbnbs. “We forget, from our depleted vantage, what an Eden we found upon arrival on this continent,” he wrote.

“He was just an unbelievable traveler,” Murray said. “Even though he was 6-foot-6 and had this huge, booming voice — the most conspicuous person — he was just incredibly loose.”

The same approachability that greased his reporting in foreign countries turned casual encounters on his D.C.-to-New York walk into something deeper. A stop to watch Mennonite teenagers play softball in Farmersville, Pennsylvania, ended with the students singing hymns for him.

“The simple purity of it, mixed with the lyrics of death and longing for a better place, twisted a part of me,” he wrote. “I won’t lie. I cried when they sang those songs.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.