Wednesday April 21, 1999: Ponca City, OK
In late October, 1997, I walked through Idaho Springs, Colorado, and three days later reached Rollinsville, Colorado. I had spent the last five months of my life walking about eighteen hundred miles, all the way from Florence, Oregon. As you can imagine, October is not a good time to be at an elevation of 9,000 feet in Colorado when your house is made of light-weight nylon. It was time to stop for the winter.
I had planned on spending the winter in Boulder, Colorado. That is where everything I owned was in storage, where a job was waiting for me, and where my girlfriend at the time lived and was taking care of my car while I was walking. Living in Boulder all seemed very fine and logical until the relationship with my girlfriend began to crumble, and life off the road became very uninteresting, unfulfilling, and extremely difficult for me. Of course, the end of a relationship with someone I love is going to be painful, but it was combined with the abrupt transition from being out on the road to a stationary life. It was more than I could bear.
There are those of us who have travel surging through our veins, and when it is taken away, life can become more than uncomfortable. At this very moment, as I write this, I can feel it. I want to be walking. I think that to fully understand it, you have to experience it. Steinbeck understood it. Charles Kuralt's first wife left him because of it. Meriwether Lewis understood it so well that when he and Clark finished their expedition back in 1806, he drank heavily before taking his life.
When people ask me if the walk is difficult, I usually tell them that the hardest part about walking across America is stopping. The adventure of the road, unpredictable days spent without a schedule, not knowing what is around the next corner, who you will meet, what will happen tomorrow --they all abruptly come to a halt. The pack comes off and strangers no longer stop for a conversation, invite me into their home, or ask me what I am doing--they could care less what I am doing. When I stop walking, I tend to fall into a deep sleep. I slip into a coma of modern day life full of a million things I have to do, things I'd like to do, and never enough time to do anything.
On the road, I am no longer distracted by those million things to do. I live my days outside, walking, thinking, praying, writing, and reading. It is there that I become Awake and truly Alive. I long to be back out there whenever I stop for a considerable amount of time. It is out there that I can spend my days walking, conversations with God come naturally, and my relationship with God is as close as it always should be. It is out there that I feel at peace, and I feel a joy that often makes me laugh and cry out, "Thank you, God, for my legs and the opportunity to walk," when I'm out in the middle of nowhere.
People often ask me, "So what are you going to do when you stop walking then?" and for that I have no answer, only speculation. I can't really imagine doing anything other than what I am doing right now. I imagine that it will all fall into place like everything else, if I let it. To have a definite destination, time of arrival, and "plan after that" would seek to destroy the whole personality of the trip itself. It is a journey that regards experiencing everything in between point A and B far more important than just reaching point B "and then what?"
But getting back to Boulder and the winter of '97, I decided that a geographical cure would be the best solution, so I packed my car to the ceiling and moved to Prescott, Arizona. There, I lived and worked through the spring of '98. On June 17, 1998, I boarded a Greyhound bus and headed back to Idaho Springs, Colorado to continue the walk. There wasn't bus service to Rollinsville, and anyway, if I started back in Rollinsville, I would only be backtracking twenty-five miles back to Idaho Springs. This is where the travel logs that I have on computer begin. Read them at your leisure or at work while you are getting paid to read them, whatever you feel comfortable with.
