Sean C. Morgan
Of The New Era
He’s walking across America, but he’s not doing it like the many others who have passed through Sweet Home on a coast-to-coast adventure.
He spends time, sometimes a lot of time, in the places he travels. And when people gather, he shares stories about slogging through deep mountain snow, people shooting at him, his time with the Navajo and the Amish, riding hot-air balloons or his encounters with concerned or angry property owners.
Jesse WhiteCrow, 44, has been on his walk since 2005 and passed through the Sweet Home area around Dec. 20 with plans to spend Christmas in Corvallis with some friends.
WhiteCrow was a combat paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne Division, he said. He also taught college level fine arts in New England.
In summer 2005, he started out from his doorstep in Massachusetts after completing a test journey in 2002 from the coast of Maine to his doorstep.
As WhiteCcrow approached Sweet Home, Oregon Department of Transportation crews were the first from the area to meet him.
“The concern of the men plowing the mountain from Sisters to Tombstone Summit constantly kept me alive in their mirrors, outside the teeth of the slushy, gnashing of tire chains moving over mountain ice that once was tar. (I received) gifts of hot chicken and eggnog from David (Lamb of Sweet Home) as I crawled from my caves of snow and brown nylon (and) escaped yet again from ice fields of rain over new snow over a foot deep as I descended into a new world of water constantly falling, collecting, adding weight, burden, a saturation no fire could consume,” WhiteCrow said in his blog entry on Sweet Home. “We stood in half circles, these plow drivers and myself, on pull-offs, kicking stories with our wet boots until we were all adventurers in a better season of bloom, all walking, all hunting elk, moving through South East Asia or panning gold in Alaska.”
After a rough introduction to the people of Eastern Oregon, he found the Oregon he had pictured in his mind before coming here.
On the east side of the state, he woke up one morning to a property owner, “I know you’re not sitting under that tree in my ragweed,” he said. That’s all it is out there in the eastern part of the state, ragweed, mud and briers. The woman yelling at him didn’t give him too hard a time, telling him, “You make sure you leave it like you found it.”
One hiker told him, “Yeah, there’s hard people to the east of this state; but your heading toward people that will get you and dig what your doing. The people only get friendlier heading toward John Day, Prineville, and Sisters, all nice people. After Sisters … No worries.”
Brenda Tunnell and Angela Olson-Goodwin found him near milepost 35 on Dec. 20 and after promising to return him to the same location took him to the School District 55 Transportation Department for a Christmas lunch.
“We headed for the absolute insanity of a room full of platters of steaming hot turkey and ham, all of the fixings, cakes and pies, fudge and sweets and best of all, a literal pool of smiling faces all eager to talk, share, laugh and take me in like the saviors of nourishment that they were,” WhiteCrow described in his blog. “If a room can be love then I was in that room swimming from face to face, buoyant in the silly joy of signing copies of my picture, and the constant reminder that these steps walked, all of these steps and stories, these faces, these inquisitive bright faces, everything that I had survived and been so blessed with … matter.
“The Oregon that I saw in my mind’s eye has found me and comforts all that has worn thin and is wanting.
“With Cheryl and Roger I rest for the night, fogged over with more food in my belly that I usually eat in a week. I am stranger but known, warm and dry and held close with every word spoken.”
He had spent the night before at Cascadia Bible Church. Asking permission to sleep under a tree there, the pastor invited him out of the weather to sleep inside the church building.
“I came from a modern-day toxic cliché,” WhiteCrow explained. Out of a dysfunctional start in life, he came up with the idea of traveling in a hot-air balloon and meeting people who “actually want me there.” After many years, that morphed into his traveling on foot; although he did get a chance to do some of it in a hot-air balloon.
After walking out of an eight-foot wall of snow, just skin and bones, in New Mexico, he said. He met a group from a hot-air balloon club, and they flew him around for a couple of days.
“It’s a childhood dream,” he said. “Inadvertently, it made me what I am.”
So far, he has traveled 7,500 miles and used up 26 pairs of hiking boots.
On average, he gets through a state on a pair of boots, he said, and he has visited somewhere between 22 and 26 states. He carries about 150 pounds of gear in a cart and 75 pounds in his backpack.
While most traveling through Sweet Home on these coast-to-coast trips have tended to travel from point A to point B in a relatively straightforward way, WhiteCrow is more a wanderer, taking a circuitous route through the states, traveling north and south as often as he travels westward.
Sometimes he doesn’t pass through. He sticks around awhile. Last summer, he stayed a month in Wyoming while helping build a new roof for a pastor.
“The walk is the walk,” he said, and that defines what he does. He may stop and help with a cattle ride, or he might walk on through.
He decided to begin his journey when he had a little bit of time and some money saved up to make it happen, he said. With that, he began his journey, trusting that he’d come out on the other side. His bank account should have run out a long time before, but “I was meant to do this. We’re all meant for a purpose, and this is what I was meant to do.”
One night, walking through a Pennsylvania community, an older woman called out, “Hey you down there on the road, get in my house and have some of my award-winning cherry pie.”
The road isn’t always that easy. He rarely sleeps indoors. Most of the time, at dark, he camps a little ways off the road.
“I have been through a zillion things I shouldn’t have walked out of,” he said. He related one story where he was surrounded by apparent gang members. The tense situation turned out okay when “one says he saw my face on television. When they put your face on television and talk about you, you’re like the weatherman.”
Pretty soon, he was signing autographs. All but one, the apparent leader who remained aloof, had him sign autographs.
He was guest co-host on a Navajo radio station, he said. When he took sick in Colorado, the radio station put it on the air, and an entire family took food to him.
When people ask him what he’s doing, he tells them it’s a “book in progress,” he joked. To police officers it’s like a code, “Don’t bust me or I’ll write about you.”
He planned a short break in Corvallis.
“When I get to Corvallis, I’ll have a glass of rum and look at a map,” he said. Any time he reaches a milestone, like crossing the Continental Divide, he has a glass of rum.
The best part of the trip, he said, is “just never knowing what’s ahead” and meeting new people.
After Corvallis, he planned to make his way to the northwestern tip of Washington where he would be joined the last few miles by friends and supporters.
He’s not sure how he’s going to get home or leave Washington at this point, he said. “I can’t imagine flying after having so much freedom, someone saying get rid of the nail file.”
He writes prolifically when he can and records it in his blog. He has taken thousands of photos, and when the trip is finished, probably around February, he’ll go to work on the book.
He sold almost all of his possessions to take this trip, he said, but he kept a vintage 1948 Airstream and his pickup. He is thinking about traveling the route again, possibly with book signings, and meeting again the people he met while traveling on foot.
He’s learned much along the way, he said. Among them: “By being hungry, you appreciate what it’s like to have a good meal.
“I think the most important thing I found out, if you do what you’re going to do, it gives you incredible power.
“It rebuilds you. Everybody will believe you’re a person of your word. It’s a gift you can give yourself.”
For more information or to read WhiteCrow’s journal, visit http://www.WhiteCrowWalking.com and http://www.WhiteCrowWalking.blogspot.com.