Sarah Brown
It took Jake Sansing 10 days to make it to Sweet Home on foot after he began his “Jake Walks America” journey from Newport on Saturday, April 9.
Sansing, who hails from a small town in Tennessee, is determined to raise money to open a free campground in Oregon for veterans with post traumatic stress disorder by walking across the United States. That may sound like quite an accomplishment, but he’s already done it five times since 2013.
Part of his mission includes selling copies of his 339-page book, “Walking America: A 10,000 Mile Journey of Self-Healing,” for $25. Therein readers can learn about how, after being discharged from the Army, he developed from a business owner who consumed a 12-pack of beer every day to a wanderer who found healing from his own PTSD.
The now-34-year-old was stationed at Fort Lewis, Wash., and served two tours in Afghanistan between 2007 and 2011. Afterward, he lived in Tennessee for a year until, he said, fate stepped in. Somewhere between a bad breakup with his girlfriend and a tornado, he lost his business and his car.
So he started walking.
Granted, he was going from town to town to find employment, but what he found instead was the curative work of being afoot. Between towns he walked along train tracks that took him away from the population and into the woods.
“It was super peaceful out there and I was camping every night,” Sansing said. “I was slowly starting to feel better.”
Being away from crowds and loud noises, and finding “good people” along the way, helped reduce his anxiety and helped curb his need to drink. Sansing said he didn’t know he had PTSD because his intoxication masked that fact. But without the opportunity to drink, he found fate had put him on a better path.
“It was kind of like it was forced upon me,” he said, “like fate was (saying), ‘You’re doing it wrong. We’re going to set you on this path that you’re supposed to be on.'”
So Sansing just kept walking, picking up odd jobs here and there. He sometimes used his journey to raise money for the Wounded Warrior Project, Shot@Life and St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, but as motivation began to wane, he decided to continue for a more personalized purpose: to build a campground for veterans with PTSD that offered such outdoor activities as ax-throwing, archery, woodworking, fishing and a slingshot course.
“That’s the kind of stuff that helped me, so I feel like I’m not the only person it would help,” he said.
And that’s the kind of stuff April Peake, of Sweet Home, likes to read about.
“I find it fascinating to hear about peoples’ personal growth, especially people who’ve had it hard and how they learned how to make their lives better by not feeling sorry for themselves and turning to drugs and alcohol,” Peake said. “He picked himself up by the bootstraps, and I think that wanting to help others through his pain is amazing.”
Scott McKee, who has a history of working with veterans living in homelessness or facing the possibility of homelessness, took the opportunity to meet up with Sansing.
“Hearing about a veteran who had lived homeless and wrote a book about their experiences traveling the U.S. is intriguing to me,” he said.
Logging about three to five miles an hour, Sansing expects it will take him one to two years to complete his roughly 4,700-mile mission, traveling to Idaho and down through Utah, Colorado and New Mexico to Texas, then along the south and up to Maine.
In his downtime, he catches up on his social media and video posts, signs copies of his book and rearranges his gear in a covered wagon cart, which packs everything he needs to survive, including cooking supplies, fishing and hunting tools, bear spray, clothes, sleeping gear, a solar charger and a slingshot.
By now he knows exactly what he needs to survive. Sansing has gone through “quite a few” tornadoes, blizzards and dust storms. He’s had a couple of heat strokes, been charged by a grizzly bear, dealt with “quite a few” black bears and mountain lions, and found himself on the wrong end of a gun. Not to mention he’s also been in a couple of fights because he looked like a derelict.
But with his new cart and sign, Sansing feels people look at him differently now. He certainly gets more attention, and people regularly stop to give him food and supplies that, honestly, he usually doesn’t need or have space for, he said.
Though he realizes that attention comes with the territory, Sansing finds he prefers the more anonymous method.
“It was really in the raw form, you know?,” he said. “It was nice. I like it, actually. I kind of miss that.”
Due to inclement weather and a potential illness, Sansing spent four days in Sweet Home and resumed his journey on April 22. By the sounds of it, he will take a little bit of the city with him. In a video he posted to his Facebook page, Sansing said he’s fallen in love with the area.
“I just want to say that Sweet Home is f—–g awesome,” he said. “The whole community has been super supportive of me and my mission. Everyone is just like one; the whole community here is just one.”
He expects his journey will take him into some “not-so-good” areas, but when he arrives, he said, thoughts of Sweet Home will keep him motivated.
“If I wasn’t on a mission right now to go all the way across America, I would just wanna stop right now and just stay here,” he said.
To purchase his book or make a donation for the campground, visit JakeWalksAmerica.com. Follow him on his social media platforms at Facebook.com/jakewalksamerica, Instagram.com/jakewalksamerica, and Patreon.com/jake_walks_america.