In happier times…just a few days ago in fact! At the ONDA Christmas party with Phyllisand Mary, two amazing women.
I’m so tired. Maybe it’s the ghost of the impending anniversaries from December 2024 and learning the truth about my injuries, but what’s my excuse this year? I’m discombobulated. I’m depressed. I’m in pain, and I’m grieving for something. I think it’s for who I used to be.
Yesterday I sunk into the depths of a dispair that I didn’t know existed, but today I woke up determined to have a better day. That looks like standing up without bracing for the rushing pain of low blood pressure in my head and shoulders, and instead slowly moving through it, anticipating the other side of the dizzyness, not getting derailed by the dizziness. That looks like leaving the house to write at a coffee shop where I can type these sentences with the accountability of being a human in public.
I don’t yet have the words to explain why I dip into these deep chasms of weeping, but when I try to understand, when I type out the sentiment behind the feeling, I can at least distance myself from it enough to see it a bit more objectively. That perspective takes on more weight as I circle around and around the idea of writing a book about my cancer experience. “Write from the scar, not the wound,” author Cheri Kephart said in her workshop, and that makes sense for a book. My book will be written from the scar, but this blog is written from the wound. From the bloody front lines of a life torn apart and knitting itself back together. At times I think I’m healing and toughing up, but yesterday reveals that I’m still raw and bleeding. The wound is tender and sore.
Bits from this blog may end up in the book, but I imagine the book will look back on this experience from a larger scale (hello fractal, my old friend). It will be putting all the pieces back together as a work of art, with thought and craft and structure… but now I’m still discovering what the pieces are, and what shapes they take. Writing here is sometimes messy, unshaped, uneven, and scattered, but it’s helping me find the pieces far faster than if I were stewing in this malaise and pain without getting it out into the open and letting it breathe. Writing from the wound is completely appropriate to this phase where I’m trying to make sense of what it means to almost die, to get a second chance at life, to confront my limitations in this new body, all within the context of losing my Dad just a few months ago.
Saw this on Substack and thought it appropriate, is depressed almost the same as stressed? In dessert speak, that is.
In a way, remission has been harder than treatment. At least during the treatment phase, I had a reason for being tired all the time, I had an excuse for staying in bed and not answering my emails. But after? Maybe it’s the scanxiety (the anxiety of the cancer coming back…all to be revealed in my next scans in early January, and every three months after…for the rest of my life) or it could be PTSD from my close brush with death a year ago. Or maybe there is no reason, and it’s just one big pile of shit that threatens to suffocate me each day.
Some days I don’t feel better, and wonder, is this the new normal? Now I’m starting to understand why people give up, why they don’t want to be alive with cancer anymore. But just thinking that thought scares me into thinking that thought will invite it back. If our minds are that powerful, can thinking about it coming back open the door? (proceeds to tear hair out)
Writing here has been such a lifeline; that’s a reason not to tear my hair out. Fun fact: my hair was thinning during the chemo process, but now it’s growing back, and in certain mirrors I catch a glimpse of myself with 2 inch hairs standing up from my part line; it does make me giggle (actually, you can see it in the photo above!). Through writing, I’ve been in conversation with myself and with you, and these connections have been everything. I’m sending out holiday cards this year, and it’s truly overwhelming. I look at the list of people who donated to my go fund me, who sent cards and care packages, who dropped off meals and stopped by for a visit, and there is not enough stationery or stamps to write enough cards. Hundreds of you came through for me this year, and even if you don’t get a card in the mail, please know how important you were and are to me. I’m so rich in friendship, true connection, and love that I know none of this has to be faced alone, even when I feel alone.
So let’s end this blog post on a high note. Thank you for listening. Even if it feels like I am screaming into the void, I know you are listening and care. That helps so much.
It’s very easy to take myself too seriously. Especially when starting something new like writing a book. After the Central Oregon Writers Guild conference last month, I was totally humbled and walked away from the weekend with my brain full of words and concepts, straining to remember what I could from college literature classes 30 years ago. It took four days and a walk in a tangerine sunrise before an inkling of confidence came back. After all, I’ve been writing constantly for those 30 years; I wasn’t starting from scratch, was I?
Then I thought about my story: the months and years of living the dirtbag hiker lifestyle, discovering my love of strangers in strange lands, and how illness changed my relationship to all of it, and hope returned. I’ve lived through so many hilarious and scary moments that I could easily write an entire book about almost dying – like the time I could have slipped down a frozen ice shoot of snow on the Continental Divide Trail when approaching Gray’s Peak in Colorado. If I can walk across that icy death trap with bald trail runners, then I can write a book, right?
What helps is knowing that I didn’t start this book process just to place a shiny cover on my bookshelf, but to live the life of a writer, and to be a student again. I love the learning, I love the challenge of trying to condense 48 years of living hard into something bite-sized. I mean, how often do we let ourselves start at something new, knowing the journey will be filled with uncertainty and stumbles? Hmmmm, kind of a thru-hike? But what is different this time is that I never questioned my ability to finish a thru-hike. Not even on that first 2,000-mile one in 2002. I knew I would do it. Why is writing a book any different? I’m in a daily wrestling match with myself…but what a luxury to have this conversation with living me, when in an alternative universe I didn’t make it? This is all a bonus. This is all the icing on top.
I was in one of those self-doubting funks when a friend sent me this interview with author Ursula LeGuin, and watching it immediately turned my attitude around.
It lit my brain on fire in a couple of different ways and really got me excited about trying my hand at fiction. There are so many takeaways from this interview, but at one point, she mentioned that you don’t want to talk to a writer at the end of the day if they haven’t been writing. Even the best of us struggle. In a workshop I attended this week with author Cheri Kephart, she rattled off a few other quotes like this one from Hemingway: “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed,” and then I found this one from George Orwell: “Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.” But then I stumbled upon this Emerson quote that helped: “The only way to write is to write.” True dat. This blog is helping to serve that purpose. It’s giving me something other than the obvious task at hand to have fun with. I keep a running list of things I’d like to explore, or that struck me, and have come to enjoy the cadence of writing a blog post a week, sometimes about writing, sometimes not. I think it’s the writing that is key here. Just doing it.
I’ll leave you with this song that always helps lighten the mood when I’m bogged down by gerunds or trying to wrap my head around how to use the past perfect tense.
Here is my favorite part of the song, 100% Endurance from Yard Act:
“It’s all so pointless, ah, but it’s not though is it? It’s really real and when you feel it, you can really feel it Grab somebody that you love Grab anyone who needs to hear it And shake ’em by the shoulders, scream in their face
Death is coming for us all, but not today Today you’re living it, hey, you’re really feeling it Give it everything you’ve got knowing that you can’t take it with you And all you ever needed to exist has always been within you Gimme some of that good stuff that human spirit Cut it with a hundred percent endurance.”
Moving forward is the theme of the year, my next years, my foreseeable future. It always has been, but sometimes you need a big event, like almost dying – but not, to wake you up to the day-to-day reality of what it means to be healthy and alive. The moving forward theme is very convenient for a thru-hiker, especially me, as I’ve had a very deliberate and physical shift from hiker me to writer me since coming home from the Camino.
I’ve turned the office where I built and ran my long-distance trail consulting business into my writing studio. I moved all my hiking and business books out, and my writing books in. I obtained a new cozy rocking chair to read in, and finally transitioned my trusty cancer cart that would move around the house with me into a bookshelf that now houses all of my medications, the books you all have sent me (there are still so many I have left to read!), and notecards.
Why do this? Because I’ve decided that I am writing a book next. That is my forward, and I’m very excited about it. Yes, I do want to create more Camino-style hiking opportunities in the States. Yes, I plan to continue to explore and adventure without a backpack until the day when I can start putting weight on these shoulders of mine, but I decided that I will be making decisions for the short-term me for now. I will transition back to the business of hiking phase once I’m certain that I’ll be around in 5 years to work on a 5-year plan.
I have always wanted to write a book. When I was a kid, I wanted to be an author. Others want to be astronauts or doctors, and I wanted to be a writer. I talked about it and thought about it endlessly. I specifically remember designing the cover (in crayon of course) for one of my early books, named “A Story Within a Story,” but did I actually write it? I don’t recall, but I do remember thinking I could write anything if I really wanted to.
I think I wanted to be an author so bad because I love books. Love them. Growing up, I read books like there was no tomorrow. Now that I know what no tomorrow really feels like, the metaphor holds up. Reading was and always has been a desperate thing. I would gulp down words as if they might disappear from the page. I wanted to read them all right now. Even today. The feeling I have of walking into a library or Barnes and Noble has always been one of longing and regret. There is no way I can read everything.
I think my desire to consume words has always really been about the desire for adventure (adventure with a side of escapism). Hmmm, escapism….Zogore in Burkina Faso comes to mind. After college, I got what I asked for. The adventure of living in West Africa for my two-year Peace Corps service was completely overwhelming at times, and I read through my bewilderment and frequent existential crises. I dealt with the reality of being the first foreigner, not even the first Peace Corps volunteer, to live in that dusty and dry sub-Saharan village by escaping into my books. Hundreds of books. Note: I learned to adjust to the rhythm of it after the first year…there is something to the idea that deep time in a place softens you up to accept its imprint on your person.
Since I started reading, I’ve been ingesting all of these stories and sagas, and those words have been sifting and percolating. And it turns out, I had been writing the whole time…just not books. From English class haikus in grade school to my dissertation in grad school: The Eco Interplay Ethic, I wrote a lot. But it took on another dimension when I started hiking.
When I started hiking, I knew I wanted to keep a daily journal, so my nightly scribbles on the Appalachian Trail in 2002 became part of my daily routine. I have no idea where that journal ended up, but I transformed my written journals into digital ones on my next few thru-hikes, including the West Highland Way, Pacific Crest Trail, Colorado Trail, Arizona Trail and more. Then over the last decade, as cell phones hit the trail, I’ve been typing with my thumbs on the 12 different long-distance hikes I’ve done since then…that’s about 12,000 miles of mornings. Early mornings became my witching hour. Early mornings are when my thoughts are most crisp, and even after sipping on the first dregs of my hot coffee in my sleeping bag, the night clings on just enough to bring some of its poetry back into the world.
Writing a book is a much bigger task than writing every day for 5 months on a trail (a la PCT or CDT). How do I start? I guess by writing every day for five months, and then five months more, and another five on top of that. Maybe I’ve started with this blog post.
Over the last month or so I started by reading about writing. (Can I give myself a self-directed MFA?) I want to study the craft. The structure. To learn how to weave different elements together in something as gigantic as a book. Like John McPhee says in On the Writing Process, start at an exciting part and circle back around (Note: revisit his structure in the story about the canoe and a bear). Add a little humor like Stephen King does in On Writing. Do the daily writing prompts like Suleika Jaouad does in The Book of Alchemy, and follow the 12-week program like Julia Cameron suggests in The Artist’s Way.
Of course there is no one way. I could just start writing.
But up next I’m going to take a workshop with Cheryl Strayed this weekend who wrote Wild (you know, the PCT book that wasn’t really about hiking the PCT). She rented a tiny house at the base of Hart Mountain National Antelope Refuge (along the Oregon Desert Trail!) to write her book. I figure it would be silly to NOT take her workshop.
Then I’m going to the Central Oregon Writer’s Guide Conference in Bend. And after that? Maybe take a masterclass, maybe look into some residencies, maybe start on a quest to find a room with a view where I can go to for a week or two at a time, take in the landscape, go on walks, and write this thing. (If you have any ideas of cheap places I could rent, spots I could park the camper, or people who need house sitters, let me know!)
What is one of the most important elements of becoming the writer I’ve always wanted to become? Time. I have the time. I need to keep reminding myself of this because I’ve been feeling pressure to start thinking about work (Note: this is my own pressure, it’s not coming from any of you). Writing is work, right? If I’m not going to die immediately, I should be working, right? I’m fighting with myself there. Why does existence have to be productive? The gift my friends and family and the disability social safety net have given me this year is the permission and cushion of time to heal. To get better. Working doesn’t necessarily have to be part of that equation, but it also gives me a reason to be…especially when the reason is writing to process this new life I find myself living.
Work also brings up the question of: “how do I make decisions now?” As I mentioned earlier in the blog, until I can be more confident of being around at the end of a 5-year plan, I’m not going to work on a 5-year plan. I’m going to work right now. I’m going to work on the immediate future. It’s tough, though, when I got the scan showing me I didn’t have any active cancer this summer, I suddenly could see a longer life… so does that mean I start saving for retirement again? Can I even entertain the possibility of retiring? All the while, I still need to make it to 5 years…and the odds aren’t quite in my favor, but then again, I’ve always excelled at exceeding the odds and have had good luck trusting the world.
I don’t know the answer friends. I guess I’ll keep going forward and find out.
Since the commenting has been so buggy lately on this website and an upgrade would be very expensive, I’ve decided to share these posts on my new Substack where commenting will be much easier. So head over there if you want to leave me a message.Note: My substack is free, I am not accepting payments at this time, so feel free to choose “no pledge”.
Hanging out in Burkina Faso. I spent hours and hours and hours with these guys playing cards.
I have the feeling that I’m very quickly going to slide into the next phase of this cancer journey…the phase where I start feeling better, start leaving the house more, start interacting with the outside world, and slow down on the updates. I’m already missing you and these blog posts.
What will this blog turn into then?
As you all know I love writing; maybe I’ll continue to devote time to words, maybe I’ll lose interest in the middle-of-the-night journaling thing (especially as I start sleeping more), or maybe I’ll dive into trying to put all of this into a book project (oooo, I said it out loud!).
No real secret here, but I’ve wanted to write a book since I started reading books…writing and reading have always been two of the most important things in my life, and I revere authors. I do! I’m so lucky to have many friends who have written books, and that makes the prospect achievable and a bit less daunting.
Here are some books that friends of mine have written:
Wow, I know some talented people! Making this list is also reassuring; I have a lot of resources and knowledge to turn to should I need it. These peeps have gone through traditional publishing houses and self-published. It runs the gamut. I’m not sure which way I would go…but I’m open to your suggestions and stories if you have them. Please check out the list above; I hope some of you find a new book or two to read. And here’s a plug for independent booksellers: buy from Bookshop.org if you buy online, or your local indy bookseller in person.
I think a book project will be worth it even if I write something that three people read (I’m looking at you Mom and Dad!), so maybe I’ll start putting something together that could be considered a book. (BTW, what are some good books about the writing process that you know of? I like John McPhee’s Draft #4: On the Writing Process, and Stephen King’s On Writing.)
If I’m diving into writing and reading in this post, I may as well talk about the time I read more books than ever…that’s the two years I spent sweating in my village of Zogore, Burkina Faso where my coping mechanism was reading. I read well over 200 books during that time and spent many, many hours hiding from the sun (and myself) by reading in my mud hut.
How did I even end up going into the Peace Corps in the first place? I can solidly place that portion of my life into the “I want to make a difference in the world” phase. (Hmmm, have I ever left that phase? Debatable.)
I can tell you what prompted me to turn in my application…
During my junior year of college, it was time to get an internship and put into practice all of the classwork I had been immersed in, which included a smattering of graphic design, communications, and writing courses. I wanted something creative, so I found one of the most creative positions I could in one of the least-creative industries: tractors. Peoria, Illinois was home to the Caterpillar tractors world headquarters at the time, and I found an illustrious position writing for the parts and service support newsletter.
I don’t want to knock Caterpillar. Many of my friends have worked or currently work for Caterpillar (including my brother Jeff), and there are many, many ties between the company and Bradley University. It was a natural fit to find an internship there (and I remember it paid really well!), but as I reported to my cubical in Morton, Illinois, in a sea of cubicles the same size, I quickly became disillusioned. I had a creative gig, oh yes! And the team of people I worked for were some fun creatives as well, but the output left something to be desired. I interviewed people, took photos, wrote articles and I had the great privilege of updating and designing the CCTVs around the Morton facility with the current day’s lunch menu. I alone could choose font colors and fun backgrounds. Fun!
Many of my classmates were gearing up for jobs in advertising agencies, PR firms, or ones like the Caterpillar gig, and I couldn’t be more turned off (sorry, not sorry). At Caterpillar, I worked in a cubical the same size as a guy who had been there 40 years, and I just couldn’t see myself there, so when the Peace Corps popped into my awareness, I jumped at it.
The application process was long. There were essays to write and letters of recommendation to get. There were medical tests to schedule and interviews to sit for. Honestly, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I wanted to have a grand adventure, and I had no real idea what being a Peace Corps volunteer would mean other than it was the exact opposite of the Caterpillar internship. Joining the Peace Corps would be a giant leap into the unknown, and if there is something I gleaned from reading thousands of books over my lifetime, it was that I had an eagerness for the unknown.
It was during spring break of senior year that I got the news of my Peace Corps assignment; I was going to the francophone country of Burkina Faso. I eagerly grabbed the first world atlas I could find, and there was no Burkina Faso. Hmmm. I had no idea what continent it was on…and couldn’t find it on a globe either. Where was I going???
It turns out Burkina Faso used to be Upper Volta until its name change in the 1980s, and the references I was using pre-dated the name change. (This was before the internet was everywhere…we had to wonder a lot before we had computers in our pockets!)
Zogore was about 15 kilometers west of Ouahigouya.
Ok, for the sake of time and effort (and a bit of laziness on my part at 2:02am) here is a chat GPT overview on the history on Upper Volta/Burkina Faso:
“Upper Volta, a landlocked country in West Africa, underwent a significant transformation to become Burkina Faso in 1984. This change was spearheaded by Captain Thomas Sankara, a charismatic and revolutionary leader who came to power in 1983 through a coup. Sankara sought to break the country’s ties to its colonial past and foster a sense of national identity and pride. The name “Burkina Faso,” meaning “Land of Incorruptible People” in the Mossi and Dioula languages, symbolized this vision of integrity and unity. Sankara implemented sweeping reforms, including land redistribution, promotion of women’s rights, and campaigns to eradicate corruption and improve health and education. Though his presidency was short-lived, Sankara’s renaming of the country remains a lasting legacy of his effort to redefine its future.”
Upper Volta had been colonized by the French, and Sankara successfully kicked out all the colonizers until his best friend, Blaise Compaoré, killed him and rekindled the foreign influences once again. “The coup was fueled by internal dissent and external pressures from powerful nations and regional actors who were uneasy with Sankara’s radical reforms and pan-Africanist stance. Compaoré’s takeover marked a sharp departure from Sankara’s revolutionary ideals. He justified the coup by accusing Sankara of endangering Burkina Faso’s international relationships. Under Compaoré, the country reverted to policies more favorable to Western interests, prioritizing economic liberalization over the socialist-inspired policies Sankara had championed. Compaoré ruled Burkina Faso for 27 years, during which his administration faced accusations of corruption, repression, and growing inequality, leaving Sankara’s vision of a self-reliant and equitable society unrealized.”
Peace Corps and all the other international development NGOs that typically blanket African nations didn’t start coming back until the 90’s. Our group of 1999 volunteers was only year 4 into the return to the country, and it was an interesting time to be in Africa. Overall, the Burkinabe welcomed us, they weren’t as jaded and corrupted by foreign influence as some of the neighboring countries, and the people still carried the pride of Sankara with them. They were an independent nation for a minute, they were going to be the future of Africa, they were a sign that things could be different.
But it was poor and struggling too.
“In 1999, Burkina Faso was ranked as the third poorest country in the world, with the majority of its population living on less than a dollar a day. The country’s economy was heavily reliant on subsistence agriculture, which employed around 80% of its workforce but remained vulnerable to erratic rainfall and desertification. Cotton was the primary cash crop, but fluctuating global market prices and a lack of industrialization limited its profitability. Burkina Faso’s economy also faced significant challenges, including a lack of natural resources, underdeveloped infrastructure, and limited access to education and healthcare. Despite its poverty, the country received international aid, and efforts were underway to implement structural adjustment programs encouraged by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). However, these reforms often placed a heavy burden on the rural poor, as subsidies were reduced and public services were privatized, exacerbating inequality and slowing progress toward sustainable development.” (thanks again Chat GPT)
So, 1999. I was going to Burkina Faso less than a month after graduating from Bradley; getting on the plane was one of the hardest things I had ever done to that point in my short and sheltered life. As I wrote about the other day, we had a few days in Washington, DC to get oriented before we left the country, and once we got there I just remember the heat. The plane door opening felt exactly like opening the oven door after baking a cake. The rush of hot air was overwhelming, and immediately after disembarking I remember one of our group immediately turned around and decided to go home. That rush of hot air was all it took for the reality of what we had signed up for to rush over her. I think we only lost one volunteer that day, but more dropped off as the three months of training went on. And plenty more left during the next two years. I think we showed up as a group of 45 in June of 1999, and left as a group of 25-30 in the summer of 2001.
Collaine and I with our host mom during training.
I was surprised to find that I was one of the younger in our group. Many of my fellow volunteers had been working for a while, or were mid-career. Some were on their second Peace Corps tour, and several were quite a bit older. I was very naive about it all; I had envisioned that all of us were there to make a difference and to help make the world a better place. In reality, many of the other volunteers were there for their own personal reasons, and some even joined for a resume builder. These people were the most shocking to me. As soon as these folks got into med school or law school they were gone. I couldn’t wrap my head around it.
All in all, we bonded hard, that class of 1999. We came from all walks of life and from all over the country, and I still keep in touch with quite a few folks (hello all of you reading this!!)
Geoffrey, Cindy & Anne in Ouahigouya
So what was my job?? This is a great question. What is the job of the Peace Corps volunteer? It turns out they take the pressure off and consider ⅔ of being a volunteer as a cultural exchange. That means ⅓ of your job is being an American in the country. ⅓ is talking about your experience when you return (I’m working right now!) and ⅓ is the actual job you have been assigned to do in country. I was slated to be a health education volunteer, while many others were teachers. I wasn’t just a health education volunteer either…there were a small sub-section of us that were selected to help eradicate Guinea Worm. I’m not sure why I was selected for this special task, and I was literally freaked out by the prospect.
My AI friend tells me: “Guinea worm disease, a parasitic infection caused by consuming contaminated water, plagued many rural African communities in the late 20th century, trapping millions in cycles of pain and poverty. By the 1980s, the disease was particularly prevalent in countries with limited access to clean drinking water, including Ghana, Sudan, and Nigeria. Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and the Carter Center took on the eradication of Guinea worm as a major humanitarian mission starting in 1986. Through their efforts, the Carter Center collaborated with local governments, health workers, and international organizations to implement education campaigns, distribute water filters, and improve access to clean water sources. By the end of the 1990s, the eradication program had achieved remarkable progress, reducing the number of Guinea worm cases from an estimated 3.5 million in 1986 to fewer than 100,000 by 2000. This initiative highlighted the power of targeted health interventions and grassroots partnerships to combat neglected tropical diseases.”
One of the chief’s of village had guinea worm…even the chief’s got it!
The Carter administration had invested A LOT into the eradication efforts, and our Peace Corps group was essential to that goal. I was assigned to the small village of Zogore in the northern part of the country (not too far from Mali), and had 15 satellite villages under my purview. All of us volunteers were given shiny new green trek bicycles to get around our villages (riding mopeds was a no-no!), and my job was to help out the small health clinic in Zogore, and make progress in guinea worm eradication. I was also taught to do a health needs assessment and generally be of service to the community.
When I arrived in country, there were about 30 cases of guinea worm in the 15 villages I was in charge of, but the villagers really didn’t see the worm as a problem. You see, guinea worm usually proliferates during a rainy season. In the rainy season, there are more water sources that can be infected, and because the villagers were primarily subsistence farmers, they would drink out of these puddles, some becoming infected. Over the next 9-12 months the worm would grow in the infected farmer and burrow through muscle and tendons, growing about three feet long (ew!). From there it would form a hot boil in the foot or ankle just about the time of the rainy season the next year. To relieve the heat and pressure the farmer would walk into the fresh puddle and the worm would sense this and burst out of the body, sending millions of eggs into the water source, again, creating a nasty infected worm puddle for the next farmer to drink from as he was watering his crops. Essentially, worms were the sign of a good crop year. Worms popping out of the foot meant there would be water for growing food, and food meant there would be eating.
So we had to work against the tide of villagers not really seeing the guinea worm as a problem.
How did we fight the worm? Sometimes we just passed out simple filters in wooden frames…even filtering the pond water through a t-shirt would be enough to remove the worm larva. Then we had educational materials like picture books that we would bring with us to the villages which showed the life cycle of the worm.
A side note here: communication was tough. Basically, I had to learn French to communicate with the village health staff, and then the health staff had to speak the local language to the villagers. I walked around with a French/English dictionary most of the time, and got really good at talking around something when I couldn’t find the right word. Most of the villagers didn’t speak French, it was the colonizer’s language after all, they only learned French if they went to school, and many of them didn’t. There were over 50 different local languages in the country, and my region spoke Moore. I did learn some Moore, but not a lot. Not enough to tell them about the life cycle of the guinea worm and why it was a good idea to put your foot in a bucket when you felt the worm blister coming on. If you put your foot in the bucket until the worm popped out, then you could throw the worm juice onto the ground and not infect the rainy season puddles again.
Interestingly enough, the worm burrowing through the body wasn’t the main health concern, it was the open wound and inevitable infection that would form after the worm popped out. Picture a strand of angel hair pasta coming out of your leg. That’s about how thin the worm was, and the three feet of it didn’t leave the body all in one go, no. It took a few weeks for it to fully exit the leg, so common practice was to wrap the worm around a stick and give the stick a turn or two a day until it had fully come out. Pulling or cutting the worm out wouldn’t do any good…it would then calcify in the body and cause other problems, so the stick method was the way to go. And because these folks were farming shoeless in the dirt, infection on the foot or ankle was all but guaranteed.
Fighting the guinea worm was a challenge. It was an elusive and slow-moving fight. Sometimes, people would show up from the ministry of health with some chemicals that we would pour into a known infected water source, and sometimes a foreign NGO would just show up in the village to build a pump that would bring up clean water, water that couldn’t be infected. But usually, we just had to talk about the life cycle with our picture books and make visits to check in on people.
Let me tell you, it was crazy how foreign development worked in Burkina. People from random countries would just show up and do things, or build things, or drop things off for the villagers. There was little to no communication ahead of time, and they were often surprised to find a white 20-something american living in the village. Sometimes I would benefit from the visits and get a fun treat or chocolate or something, but often I was a distraction and didn’t fit into their neat narritive of coming to the rescue.
I loved visiting these guys on market day. They had been scooped up and served in WWII on the front lines before being returned to Burkina.
But, back to my job. The guinea worm stuff didn’t take up a lot of my time. When I did my needs assessment and really spent some time talking with the villagers and observing what many of them came into the health center for during the week, I determined that the greatest health needs of my village were very simple. Many of them came down to keeping the health center clean and reporting the right information back to the Ministry of health.
Nursing was a civil service job in Burkina Faso, and students from all over the country would go to school then get assigned to a village for a year or two to be a nurse. Same with the teachers that were often found in village. The nurses and teachers were usually not from the area, and they were some of the only other people who could speak French, so they became our friends. But because the nurses weren’t from the village, they didn’t always care so much about the villagers and doing their jobs.
My first nurse Abdule was a great guy
Overall, I wanted the health clinic to be much cleaner, it was often disgusting. There were bats that roosted in the ceiling and bat droppings would fall onto all the surfaces. The paperwork was usually not filed in an orderly manner, and I spent many hours trying to straighten up and clean things. This was all important because when a villager did come in for a health reason, I didn’t want them to go away with an infection because of a dirty examination room. This was the most pressing health concern.
But the villagers didn’t always come. Many days, I would show up at the health clinic, and there was no one there. I would bring my book, or break out cards to play with the dudes that always seemed to show up and hang out around town. There were no set hours to keep, and no one cared when I showed up or didn’t show up, but with my American, type A personality, I went to the health clinic every day, even if the nurse didn’t leave their house. I would sit under the tree and at least be there. Many, many hours were passed during the two years just sitting under trees. It became difficult at times to feel like I was doing anything of importance, so would console myself in the ⅔ ratio of my job. I was doing ⅔ of my job just by being there! It was ok! I wasn’t failing!
Drinking millet beer on market day
Actually, making a difference during the Peace Corps was kind of a joke. We volunteers often felt useless. The teachers, too. Sure, teaching was important, but was an American volunteer displacing a local Burkinabe teacher who could have the job? Probably.
So I read books. I read a lot of books. There wasn’t much else to do. I drank millet beer, played cards, goofed around with the teachers, road my bike, and read. That was about it.
I could dig up countless stories, we had adventures, sure we did! We took vacations to the Ivory Coast where we got caught up in the coup of Christmas 2000, we went to Ghana and Togo. I had to get a root canal and they flew me to Senegal to the dentist! We survived Y2K on a beach, and I lived through stepping on a dirty hypodermic needle in one of the largest hot spots of AIDS in West Africa. Oh, there were the sicknesses too. I got Giardia about 5 times, amoebas, and other such parasites too. But mostly it was me and the books. I became really good at being alone. Sure, I was lonely and thought the world was passing me by, and had to constantly remind myself that I was the one having the adventure. That reading my 134th book was the adventure.
Actually, reading a book led me to my next big thing, hiking. I picked up There are Mountains to Climb during one of the first months in my village and instantly knew that hiking the Appalachian Trail would be my next thing. I only had two years to wait and think about that one!
But much like hiking, the best part of the whole experience were the people. In fact there is supposed to be a Burkina Faso Peace Corps reunion this August in Portland! It’s not just for our class either; it’s for all volunteers that were in the country, so that should be a blast.
I don’t really know how to think or feel most days.
Many of you remark on my positivity and resiliency, but I think a lot of that comes down to what my body and mind’s basic operating principles are: to be optimistic and hopeful. I think a lot of my current mental state can still be chalked up to denial, or disbelief. I truely can not conceptualize that I have Stage 4 cancer (at some point I said it was Stage 3, but really it’s Stage 4 due to the levels it has spread in my body…this is all an imprecise science…but at this point I don’t think it’s useful to pretend it’s better than it is).
I had another biopsy last week to try and figure out what mutation I have and determine the best course of treatment, but somehow that went awry and they sampled plain old bone that doesn’t have tumor. I’m not sure how that’s possible given the CT scanner that was used to try and target the tumor for sampling, but I’m left with a useless test and no more answers than before. I haven’t talked to my oncologist yet about the bum test, I’m sure he’s NOT HAPPY, so I’m not sure if I’ll get scheduled for another, or if he will have enough information from the blood testing that was done a little over a week ago.
Regardless, I’m left in the hazy in-between state of not knowing. I’ve been in this not-knowing place for many months now, and it forces me to live in the present like never before. I really want to plan my year. Typically I would have multiple hikes, trips, local river adventures, etc. mapped out for 2025, but all I can really do are pencil in some ideas about what Kirk and I would like to do, if I’m able, later this year. I am really good at going with the flow, but I’m also a lover of spreadsheets and calendars and get a lot of joy and satisfaction out of planning. For now I’m planning for the maybes. Why not map out a 2-week Portugal Camino walk just in case I can do it at some point this year? Why not think about river trips we might be able to take this year if I’m stable enough? That gives me something to look forward to, and a reason to keep on despite the not-knowing.
The not-knowing is also a great place to look-back. The looking back at past periods in my life has been a fun adventure, and I’ll admit, a challenging one. I posted my PCT video montage a few days ago, and had a complete break-down when I got to the northern Washington section. It probably had a lot to do with my music selections (Phish’s Swept Away (sob!) and David Grey’s Slow Motion (), but also it really brought home the fragileness of life now, life then, and the fact that some people don’t make it out of this cancer journey. Some do pass on to another state. I keep not believing that’s my path, so it’s overwhelming when some of that pierces through my optimism.
I’ve lost people. Missy, my best friend in high school and college lost her cancer battle (lung cancer in a non-smoker!) a year ago in October. It was fast too. From March to October we rallied around Missy (me in my typical disbelief) as she and her wonderful husband Garrett and cutest young son ever, Parker, and her family did everything they could to keep her going. Our group of friends were able to have a video call with her just a week or two before she passed, and I was so grateful to have had that time to connect with her again. I didn’t believe she would actually go, or that I would find myself dealing with something similar a little over a year later. So today I’m going to go back to explore my time in Wisconsin; Missy’s Celebration of Life was the last time I visited Wisconsin in October of 2023.
Here are a few photos of my dear friend and I:
So here I am, feeling a bit more raw than usual on this Monday morning in March. Wisconsin has always been an important part of my story, and I credit my time(s) there with helping me become the person I am today.
Wisconsin can be broken down into two phases:
Childhood (I was born a cheese head and lived there till I was 12)
Post Peace Corps (I moved to Madison for about 7 months in 2001 after I returned from the Peace Corps)
Most excitingly, I have an upcoming trip to attend the International Trails Summit in Madison in mid-April too! I really hope I’m healthy enough to go, and if any of you cheese-heads are reading this and want to connect while I’m there, please let me know! I have a bit of time on the front end, and would be willing to tack on a day or two on the other end as well…
Childhood
No trip back to my birth would be complete without explaining how my adventurous and amazing parents ended up in the Midwest. For all of the non-traditional life paths I have taken, a pretty big deviation from the technical and engineering-focused life choices of my three brothers, hearing more about the early Wisconsin years puts a lot into context. My folks did a great job of showing me that anything is possible, and that idealism can be a good way to make decisions in life.
My dad grew up in California in the San Jose area, and joined the Air Force after college. He was stationed in West Virginia when he met my mom in the 70s. My mom found her way to West Virginia from Lafayette, Louisiana when she took a job as a nurse and moved out of the south with her brother, my Uncle Al, also in the Air Force.
Legend has it my uncle was planning to introduce her to a dude named Steve at an Air Force party. She met Steve and it was a quintessential head-over-heels love affair, but as it turned out her Steve wasn’t Uncle Al’s Steve! Didn’t really matter though, my folks were quite taken with each other. The wedding happened a short while later, and that’s when the adventurous spirit that I inherited from them both appeared.
I will probably get some of these details wrong, but essentially my Dad had decided to leave the Air Force, and the plan was my folks would get in a car, road-trip across the country, and find a place to call home along the way. That place happened to be Wisconsin. They made it to central Wisconsin, and happened upon an old farm house in a very rural part of the state that spoke to them. Somehow, the idea of living like the Amish, a kind of back-to-the-earth ethic, was strong at the time, and the white-washed old farm house with apple orchard in the rolling glaciated idyllic Wisconsin was going to be the setting for their new start.
The nearest big cities were Stevens Point (where I was born), and Waupaca (where I went to school), and the farm house was bracketed by the small little towns of Almond and Wild Rose. I mean, just the names sound so picturesque. I don’t remember a ton about the farmhouse, but stronger memories remain from when my folks bought some property and started building their own house by hand a few miles away when I was about 5. Community and friends were a huge part of their (and my life) during that time. My folks formed some strong bonds with other young couples, and we spent many hours together as our the families came together for cider pressing and chicken plucking parties. Many of the families were also doing a homesteading-back-to-the-earth thing in central Wisconsin, and we 70s kids benefited.
Then there was the earth-bermed house. My parents were very interested in energy efficiency and sustainability at the time, and decided to build an earth-bermed house. It would face south to get the passive solar rays, and have dirt mounded against the sides and back of the house to the roof to help create a stable temperature inside. This earth-bermed house would later be eclipsed by the house they built in Illinois a few decades later, a real earth-ship! The Illinois house was completely ensconced in earth (about 5 feet on top of the poured concrete structure) complete with solar tubes to bring some light into the back corners of the house. My dad called it the hobbit hole, and it was about the coziest place around. They left their hobbit hole in 2020 when they decided to move to Lafayette to be closer to family as they aged, but those houses and the memories of living close to the earth and the natural rhythms of nature left strong mark.
Wisconsin and our little slice of paradise was the perfect place to grow up. I’m a solid generation X kid, and a true product of the 80s. I don’t think we got more than a few TV channels until I was in high school, and even the VCR got very limited action in our house. My three younger brothers and I spent the majority of our childhoods running around outside, climbing trees, building forts, riding bikes, reading books, and finding ways to entertain ourselves.
My parents were still quite ensconced in the community vibes of the area after the new house was built, and we had multiple families with kids our ages within biking distance in all directions of our house. We had acres of woods to explore, and there were lakes and ponds and creeks and corn fields that featured heavily in our play. We lived close to several Amish families, and when their horse and buggies would drive past the house, we would play dodge-the-horse-poop on our bikes. Sometimes we would visit them to buy fresh eggs and marvel at the peacocks that would parade in their yard. My parents let us on a looooong leash, and we would often spend all day adventuring with our friends in the woods. Because I had three younger brothers, I would need to find my own escapes, and would often climb a tree with a book to find some quiet. I became quite attached to reading books outside…one of my great loves to this day. I 100% believe this upbringing is what paved the way for me as an adult to be so comfortable outside, with being alone in the wilderness, with change and uncertainty…I learned how to occupy myself. I learned to find awe and wonder in nature. I learned how important friends and community were, and grew up with the wisdom of Mr. Rodgers and Sesame Street guiding my upbringing. It was as good as it could get.
When I was 12, my Dad, who had been working in computing at the University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point, took a job at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois. I remember this time with excitement and anticipation… perhaps that was because I was on the cusp of my teenage years and the premise of moving to a larger town with malls and more boys was quite exciting. I was solidly into my New Kids On the Block obsession phase, and did I mention boys?
Post Peace Corps
It wasn’t until 2001 that I returned for my second Wisconsin phase, the post-peace corps pre Appalachian Trail time. It was all because of Cindy that I returned to Wisconsin. Cindy was a fellow volunteer, and I remember meeting her at the beginning of our Peace Corps time. We spent a few days in Washington DC in the summer of 1999 when we all had to report for the start of our service, and got whisked around town for a few days getting LOTS of shots and going through various orientations. It was a bewilderment of activity…but I remember sitting next to Cindy on the bus and discovering our Wisconsin connection.
Fast forward to training…we lived with host families in Bobo-Dioulasso during the first three months while we were in country. Cindy and Mia’s family lived fairly close to us (I roomed with Collaine…and fun fact, all four of us are currently Oregonians!), so she became part of my core friend group…which was cemented when we received our village assignments and were both sent to the far northern part of the country. Cindy and I both traveled to the regional center of Ouahigouya to get things like mail and interaction with other volunteers. We spent long hours playing cards, drinking beer, and sweating under the hot hot sun. More to come on the years we were in Burkina Faso, but it was during the first few months of my service that I had decided that I would hike the Appalachian Trail when I was done, and somehow convinced Cindy to hike it with me.
When our time was coming to an end in 2001 and I was still planning to hike the AT in 2002, Cindy convinced me to move up to Wisconsin and spend the fall/winter in Madison as we prepared for the hike. It was an easy sell…I found a job at the university, moved into a group house with some of Cindy’s college friends, and embraced my cheese-head origins for a short while.
How would I characterize this second Wisconsin phase? To start I’d encourage you to play Brian Eno’s Ambiant 1 Music for Airports.
The house I lived in was off of Monroe Street (near the football stadium and Lake Wingra) and was pretty crunchy. What do I mean by that? My housemates listened to records, we didn’t have a TV, they brewed beer and were very wholesome. A record I played over and over and over was Peter’s Ambiant Music for Airports. This became my musical touchpoint for this phase of life.
I got a job in the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Wisconsin Madison, and while I didn’t really have a background or much interest in landscape architecture, it was a very Wisconsin department to work in. I ended up really loving the professors and faculty that I worked with, and this is where some seeds were planted in my brain, or the seeds of influence started overlapping. There is a big conservation ethic and history to Wisconsin, and several influential people like Aldo Leopold and John Muir were also cheese-heads.
Leopold was extremely important to the Landscape Architecture department as he experimented with the revolutionary notion of restoring ecosystems damaged by human activity, both on his own land along the Wisconsin River and at the university’s arboretum. In his book, A Sand County Almanac, he weaves science, history, humor, and prose to articulate the bond between people and the natural world with the hope that people would treat the land with love and respect…an ethic and operating principle that I now hold central. I seek to use long-distance hiking as a way to deepen our connection with the natural world. If we can understand that we are a part of nature, and that what happens to the natural world is happening to us, we will act differently.
So this Wisconsin time was fruitful. Ideas and influences were taking root. Philosophies and ethics were germinating, and this whole time was one great meditative and contemplative phase for me. Cindy was living in Milwaukee at the time, and we would meet occasionally to hike and talk about gear (neithor of us really knew what we were doing with the whole hiking/backpacking thing), but we kind of figured some things out that winter. I didn’t know many people in town, so spent many hours walking the city, reading books, visiting coffee shops, and generally flaneuring my way around town.
I didn’t have a lot to do as a student liaison in the Department of Landscape Architecture, so I took it upon myself to find useful projects to keep my brain busy and help out. I decided to redesign their website, so I taught myself web design using Dreamweaver (the platform of the day) and had great fun designing the website after a technical landscape architecture rendering. This was when I started to apply my design skills to whatever I happened to be working on, and credit a lot of my creativity and out-of-the-box thinking to trying to be useful and learn something wherever I happen to be. I also took it upon myself to archive the department’s records, which stretched back decades. I carefully organized and catalogued file box after file box of papers and materials that choked the office. It was a way of keeping myself busy, which was the main goal. There is nothing I hate more than having to pretend to be busy or occupied. I’d much rather give myself a daunting and impossible task than have nothing to do.
All in all, this second phase of Wisconsin life was fairly short and sweet. In the spring of 2002, Cindy and I made our way out east and started hiking the Appalachian Trail…something that obviously has become the passion and obsession of my life.
My April trip back to Wisconsin is going to be a wonderful overlapping of all of these worlds. The nonprofit American Trails puts on an International Trail Summit every two years, and their Executive Director, Mike Passo, happens to call Marshfield, Wisconsin home (Marshfield wasn’t too far from where I grew up). I’ve been getting to know Mike and Candace at American Trails since I started my consulting business two years ago, and gave a webinar presentation through their weekly series right after I started. Give it a watch if you like!
When I started my second business, Intentional Hiking, in the fall of 2023, I hosted American Trails during my launch event and our connections continue to this day as they might take on some of the work I had planned for 2025. More to come on this come, but I’m very grateful for the work American Trails does!
So for all of you Wisconsin people that may read this blog post, like I said in the beginning, if you want to connect while I’m there, please let me know asap and we can try and make something happen.
It’s about time for either another cup of coffee or a green tea, so I’m going to sign off and see about this Monday.
), but also it really brought home the fragileness of life now, life then, and the fact that some people don’t make it out of this cancer journey. Some do pass on to another state. I keep not believing that’s my path, so it’s overwhelming when some of that pierces through my optimism.
She-ra Hikes 