How It All Began

Val's gaze followed my fingers, then moved down to Florida. "Key West, huh?" he said, staring at the place on the map that marked the southern most point of the U.S. We were now in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

"And here's North Pole," I continued, pointing to a little dot just outside Fairbanks, Alaska. "'Key West to North Pole,' make a catchy book title, huh?"

He nodded.

"But I was thinking, why not go all the way to Prudhoe Bay, maybe even Point Barrow?"

Val looked up at me with a blank expression and blinked once, then back at the map. He flipped a page and looked closer at Alaska. "There's not much between Fairbanks and Prudhoe Bay, and it's," he paused, looked around, then at me, snatched the tooth pick from between my teeth and laid it against the mileage indicator on the map.

"Looks like about five hundred miles," I said. "I flew from Prudhoe to Barrow back in Eighty Eight and that was a little over two hundred miles."

"What did you say the total distance was?"

"Including Prudhoe Bay or Barrow?"

He scowled at me as if that where a stupid question to ask. What difference was a couple hundred miles?

"About seven thousand five hundred miles . . . give or take 100 miles."

Another blank expression. One blink.

He rubbed his scraggly whiskered chin. "It would be the adventure of a lifetime," he observed, half to himself. "A little different than walking 'the Trail.'" I nodded and smiled. Val had recently spent six months hiking the Appalachian Trail from Atlanta to Maine and the experience was still fresh in his mind.

For me the trip would be more like going to the Moon (a dream I once had as a boy), a long way, but not impossible. But since I was now thirty-four, and stood a far better chance of seeing the Moon turn to green cheese rather than actually walking on it, I would have to find my adventure some other way. So on October 1st, 1997, I was going to fill a small vial with saltwater in Key West, Florida, the "southern most point in the U.S.," and start walking in a north and west direction. And some time in September 1998, I planned to dump that vial of Caribbean Atlantic water into the Arctic Ocean at Prudhoe Bay. And who knows, if good circumstances prevailed, and I wasn't eaten by wolves, polar bears or “rabid lemmings” between Fairbanks and Prudhoe, I might press on west and a little north across another two hundred miles of tundra, along the edge of the Arctic Ocean to Point Barrow, the "northern most point in the U.S." I just had to figure out how to cross the small rivers I had seen when I had flown over before. Either that, or wait until they froze over in November.

"You want to go with me?" I said, repeating my offer of a few days earlier. Actually, Val was the only person I would even remotely consider asking to join me. (And this was strange, because I had only met him a few months before, but it seemed now like we were old buddies.) The act of walking seven thousand five hundred miles would be enough strain on me, without having to worry about someone else. Now I felt like I was dangling a sugar cube in front of a starved horse. He turned the page back to the U.S. I thought I saw his eyes glaze over for a second.

Then he blinked.

10 December 1996

In the meantime, there were a few logistics to work out. Like the actual course I planned to take.

As a "photojournalist/adventurer”, a title a Key Largo newspaper had once bestowed on me, I had planned, or been a part of several expeditions or remote location shoots before. One to the Arctic, others deep into Mexico or Belize or England. Then there was Sri Lanka, where I had directed a project with Sir Arthur C. Clarke.

Now the first waves of excitement wafted over me again as I began to make notes and examine the atlas in more detail. Of course, this was followed not long after by the overwhelming mass confusion that crashes around one's shoulders in the beginning stages of such a venture.

One morning I woke up feeling like I was hung over, but that didn't make sense because I hadn't partied in days. Then I remembered what I had been doing till very late the night before: studying my Rand-McNally, working tiny black numbers on my calculator, and planning to walk from Florida to Alaska.

This is absurd, I thought. What in the hell am I thinking? Then I decided not to think about it until I was in a better frame of mind. I didn't want to talk myself out of it before I had even begun.

The atlas was not exactly the choice of maps to plan an expedition, but it would have to do for starters. What I really needed to do was renew my AAA membership, and then go visit one of their offices and get the maps I needed. My goal was to stay as far away from large cities and interstates as possible. I wanted to see what was left of "olde" America, not metropolises and sprawling fields of four-lane pavement. And considering that I could only make 20 to 30 miles a day, it would be rather difficult to get through a large town or city in one day. Raising a tent in a back alley for the night wasn’t going to work, so some detailed planning was a must.

A few days later, Val stopped by after he got off work at Grand West Outfitters.

Naturally, the conversation turned to “the trip”, as it had become known.

"What route were you planning to take?" he asked.

"I thought we'd stay south as much as possible. My first ex-wife always complained about the freezing rain she used to get in northern Alabama, and I have experienced my share of it there, too." I traced a path from Florida's panhandle, through Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, then up just north of Dallas and east of Amarillo and straight up to Colorado Springs. I was hoping to have a few sponsors in the Springs, and thought I'd like to drop by and see them on my way through. And I wanted to get into mountain scenery as soon as possible.

"Why not up through here like this?" he said, making slightly straighter line toward our Canadian entry point of British Columbia.

I gritted my teeth and tried to suppress my dislike for the "flatness" of the states his finger crossed. As a kid, my family had spent six years touring the country’s schools as a professional acrobatic team. We had spent a considerable amount of time in the “dust bowl” states. I answered, "Because Oklahoma and Kansas are nothing by flat, flat, flat -- imagine walking through them for hundreds of miles -- you'll go nuts!"

"I don't know about that,” he countered quickly. “How can you say that when you've never done it before? I'd rather do it and then if it's bad, once we get across, we can say, 'God, that was terrible, we'll never do that again!'"

"Val, I already spent enough time out there as a kid,” I argued. “I have no desire to do it again. Besides, I haven't figured our mileage yet and I don't know what time we would be passing through that area. And I don't want to spend winter on the plains. That would be insane."

* * *

In 1994 I was inducted into the Explorers Club as a Fellow National for photojournalistic and documentary production contributions I had made while working on Spanish galleons in the Florida Keys. As I sat at that year's banquet held at the Waldorf Astoria, I watched some of the world's greatest explorers return Club flags after their expeditions. And I saw myself up there doing the same thing, someday.

The next day I was at Club headquarters in Manhattan doing some research for a project I was directing with Arthur C. Clarke in Sri Lanka. As I headed through the foyer to the map room I passed the Club's giant world map. Tiny black numbers dotted its surface indicating where the Club flag had traveled. From the Arctic to Antarctica, from the depths of the Marianis Trench, to Everest, to the Moon, the Explorers Club flag had flown. In fact, there were few remote places on the Earth where the flag had not flown, and those places didn't hold any significance for expedition purposes. Like a long sigh, a sad realization settled on me: The days of great exploration were over.

And I had missed them.

As a boy I had wanted to walk on the Moon. I even told that to the United States once when I was 13 years old, just after I had set the Guinness world record for push-ups. I was on To Tell The Truth and Jamie Farr asked the "imposters" what they wanted to do when they grew up. As my family was a professional acrobatic team touring the country at that time, they both answered, "Be an acrobat." He looked at me and suggested, "And Number Three, I suppose you want to be an acrobat, too?" I shook my head and announced that I wanted to be an astronaut. The audience laughed and Jamie quipped, "That's what I get for assuming!"

When I was about ten, while my family and I performed along the muddy waters of the Mississippi, I secretly made plans to run away and build a raft and live on an island and catch fish for my supper. Yes, I had just read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Sometime later, we were stopped doing laundry at a strip mall when I spied a circus set up in an adjacent field. Slipping out of our motor home unnoticed (or so I thought), I tromped off across the parking lot, climbed over the fence, and began knocking on the doors of the road weary travel trailers. I was soon directed to the Circus Master; he was a gruff old clown who looked anything but funny. I was a pretty good acrobat in those days so I gave a brief demonstration, then boldly asked for a job. Looking down his nose, he regarded me for a moment, then asked, "You got an act?" I told him no, but I could make one up to fit his needs. He grunted and began to turn away, "Go home, Boy. Your momma will be missing you." Then he climbed back into the trailer and slammed his rickety door on my adventure.

To be continued . . .

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