• Steve Vaught
• A tent for one
• Lightweight gear
• Meteor Crater in Arizona
• Oklahoma City National Memorial
• Jim Hickey
• Granny D
• Delaying life after college
• Concrete Dinosaurs in Cabazon, CA
• The Country's Oldest Dr. Pepper Bottling Plant

Walk America

To truly understand Steve Vaught, you'd have to walk a mile in his shoes.

Actually, make that more like 3,000 miles.

In April 2005, with little more than a one-person tent and some lightweight essentials, Vaught left his home and family in San Diego, CA and set out to walk across the entire country. Why? Well, for one thing he wanted to lose some weight.

"I was 39 and weighed over 400 pounds," says Vaught. "I knew I couldn't live like that much longer. I knew I had to do something drastic to change my relationship with eating."
He also figured that walking would allow time for introspection -he wanted to examine the route he'd taken in his life and figure out how he'd change things going forward.

Finding interesting people and extraordinary places were not initially among his goals, but after his first month he decided to slow his pace in order to have more time to meet locals and take in the sites he was seeing, whether it be the meteor crater in Arizona, the Oklahoma City National Memorial, or just a cow walking around in the middle of nowhere.

By late 2005, he'd walked nearly 2,000 miles, had lost close to 90 pounds, and had made friends in corners of the country few people will ever see.

Amazingly, dozens of people go on expeditions like Vaught's every year. Some do it to raise money for charity while others, like 96-year-old "Granny D", have done it to bring attention to an issue that's important to them (hers was campaign finance reform).

Others have vaguer reasons. Ryan Firestone and Gidon Felsen, decided to walk across the USA after graduating from Brown in 1999 because, well… just because.

"We wanted to do something physically challenging," says Felsen, "and we also wanted to meet people and see parts of the country we'd never seen before." They camped out, stayed with strangers, and saw quirky things and places they never knew existed-from the massive concrete dinosaurs in Cabazon, CA, to the country's oldest Dr. Pepper bottling plant.

But mostly, they did something that few people can say they've done: They saw America in a truly unique way… and they have the blisters to prove it.

 

Posted on January 23, 2006