When Jon Dunham ‘00 set out on foot four years ago, he didn’t have much of a destination in mind–just a fierce need to walk up into the mountains. The daunting Pacific Crest Trail, which runs in the United States from Canada to Mexico, seemed like a good place to start. He picked up the trail at the Cascades near Portland. It was August–not a bad time for hiking. By November, he had reached California and the Sierra Nevadas, where the path was sometimes at 11,000 feet. An infection in his heel kept him from walking for about a week. He ran out of food. Eerily enough, he was right where the Donner party had been trapped by the snow. The very day he was able to come down from the mountains, the snow started.
In California, he walked along pleasant valley roads, and at Christmas, he flew home to Ohio. After a month, though, the road beckoned. This time he set out from Las Vegas, walking through Arizona and New Mexico down to the Texas coast. By then, he had been on the road eight months. Why stop now? The idea of rambling through Latin America intrigued him. In Corpus Christi, he stayed awhile with a friend, whom he tried to persuade to walk along through Mexico with him. His friend, he says, decided to get married instead. Dunham still jokes that walking was the better decision.
He’s been walking now for four years, and when I spoke with him, he was on the verge–poised to finally walk over the border from Venezuela into Colombia. As soon as his traveling companion, a donkey named Whothey, gets his papers, they can enter the country together. Before he’s done, Dunham would like to walk the rest of Spanishspeaking South America–Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay, Argentina, and Chile–all the way down to Patagonia. “It would be neat, I suppose, to make it all the way to the end of the earth–to Patagonia. But that’s a long ways,” he says.
Inside, Dunham shares a few observations from his first 6,000 miles on the road.
Pacific Crest Trail
This was beautiful terrain–really rugged. There’s the deep beauty of the forest, and these old, old trees that most people are never going to see. It’s so peaceful to stop and camp at the end of day, to be tired, to be looking forward to reading my book, to eating. It was a really solitary time. I would usually see someone every couple days, but sometimes I wouldn’t see people for weeks.
Los Angeles
In Los Angeles, I was homeless. I ate out of trash cans, panhandled, and slept on the street and in homeless shelters. The first time I ate out of the trash was hard. The actual eating of the things I found wasn’t hard. When I was a kid, my family spent a year in Papua New Guinea, where they eat spiders and grubs–all sorts of gross stuff. It just feels shameful to open up a trash can and dig through it–like you’re doing something wrong or immoral. You learn where you can eat and where you can’t. I always liked Pizza Hut because sometimes they’ll throw out their pizza in boxes. It doesn’t touch any other trash, and it seems…well, less wrong.
Padre Island National Seashore
There’s a barrier reef eighty miles long off the Texas coast that runs all the way down to Mexico. It took about a week to walk the reef. I had to build a cart to carry enough water, because no one lives out there, and there’s no place to get water.
Mariano Matamoros, Mexico
The señor I was staying with plopped down 300 pesos, and I had a brand new brown, black and red donkey–head down as if to charge–staring at me. He wasn’t any happier when I ordered him gelded; a Mexican ritual, which entails a lot of rope, a knife, and half a beer for the wound, half a beer for the man with the knife. Then we branded him, and I couldn’t help but wonder how I would ever convince him to carry all my things and follow after me.
Mexico
The autopista [superhighway] plows through mountains instead of going around them. There are no on-ramps and only two places in 120 miles to get on or off. But the Mexicans just take down the guardrails and get on in the middle of nowhere. That way they don’t have to pay the tolls, and they can travel between their villages. It’s this little war going on between the government and the pueblos.
Texisco, Guatemala
Apparently there are no burros in Guatemala and so Whothey gets lots of attention. Buses stop on the international highway just to look at him. Whole families come out to their porches to look. The kids run along yelling “caballo, caballo, caballo,” which means horse, or “mula, mula, mula,” which means mule. I tell them, no, it’s a burro. They kind of look at me like they have just seen me for the first time, pause, and then start chanting “caballo” again.
Guatemala
Guatemala has tons of sugar cane. Workers burn the fields and the ash comes down like little black feathers. The young men get black all over, cutting it all day. The air is full of this sweetness, like browning sugar. The volcanoes smoke in the background. It’s quite pretty.
El Salvador
All the public transportation in El Salvador is old school buses that have been retired from America. People go up and work there for a year or two. When they come back, they buy one of those buses. That’s a really good business when they get back to El Salvador because most people don’t have cars.
Colón, Panama
You can’t get from Panama to Colombia –you can’t walk to South America despite what you might think from looking at a map. In Colón, which is on the Caribbean side of Panama, I met a boat owner who gave us a ride to Colombia, where they refused to let us get off the boat. That was my first experience with Colombia.
Venezuela
Eastern Venezuela is a tortured, wild land. I’ve seen lynx, crocodiles, monkeys, sloths, snakes. There are anaconda here– the kind that grow to a hundred feet and can eat a man. Or at least they say so. I have seen centipedes up to 12 inches. Even the small ones are said to have the sting of a rattlesnake. At night the vampire bats bit Whothey. The land is all 10 years fallow. There is no old growth, just weeds. The trees are choked by weeds, and the weeds are chocked by mats of vines. It’s like walking into an old house where all the furniture is covered by sheets. No one has been here for years.
Much of my walking has been solitary. That’s part of why I started and part of why I continue. My favorite time of day is the morning when I have the whole day before me to think and to enjoy what I’m seeing and to be quiet.
When I walk here, I don’t spend any money at all because somebody always stops and gives me food. When I stop at night, somebody always gives me a pair of shoes or clothes. The people here are very generous, even though most of them are poor.
Latin America
Latin American families have a sense of place. They always ask me where I’m from, but I can’t really tell them. I was born in Indiana, grew up in Wyoming, went to school in Ohio. I lived in Texas. I lived in Oregon. All my friends in Wyoming have moved away, and the Latin American people don’t understand that at all. They might go away, but when they come back, all their friends are still there in the town where they grew up. They have a real sense of belonging. A lot of Americans–me in particular–don’t have a sense of that at all.