The ADT Journey – Week 13

Little do we know at times what impact our actions might have on others.  This would have been the case with my Moab Times Independent interview, if not for some serendipitous encounters on this next stretch.  As per my usual intent, the interview focused on the need for kindness and community, not our walk across the country.  As a tourist destination, Moab was ripe for this type of message.

Resort areas typically contain higher levels of homelessness.  You may have heard from your favorite economic interest group, or even an economic course, that “a rising tide lifts all boats.”  In regards to housing costs, rising tides lose out to spending cascades.  With increasing wealth disparity comes increased spending of disposable income by the wealthiest for the most exorbitant houses.  The inflated costs for housing at the top then cascades on down to the most modest homes.

Tourist destinations like Moab are most vulnerable to these spending cascades.  On the one hand they attract wealthy buyers for housing; on the other hand they supply a low-paying service job market for people who cannot afford the elevated housing costs.  My interview drew attention to this problem.

On our first day of leaving our Moab base camp for good I talked to a ranch caretaker who slept in her car.  The day after that, while waiting in the ghost town of Cisco for Ky to come along, three river guides spotted us while driving by with their transportation van and detoured to meet us.  They had read the news story about us and wanted to personally thank us for speaking out about their plight.

A BLM worker we met the day before also spotted us in Cisco earlier and gave us water.  We could have continued hiking at that point, but we would have missed the river guides that came around the same time as Ky.  We also needed to wait for Ky regardless to agree upon a destination for the end of the day.  When we could hike again we encountered 115 degree heat and a sandstorm in the open desert.  This was the first time I ever hiked through a desert sandstorm, in summer no less.  I do not recommend it.

This factored into the decision we made at our first campsite in Colorado to full pack the rest of the way into Grand Junction.  With a support vehicle this was wholly unnecessary, as we would be hiking on roads and going through towns the whole way, but we needed to be on our own at that point for peace of mind and reflection.  We had yet to confront Ky with our concerns, though she had confronted me with hers, but our decision spoke volumes.

Our first town stop was Fruita, where I had set up an interview with the Lions Club president.  While I gave news media interviews to provide information about kindness and community, I also conducted interviews during the journey to gather information.  In the case of the Fruita Lions Club I found out their involvement with the community was in steady decline.  The president felt that after he moved away in the near future the club would fold.  We stayed at a campground in Fruita that night.

We reached a mall in Redlands by lunch time the next day, where we stopped at an outdoor mall.  I caught up on emails first, with one of them coming from a reader of the Moab Times Independent article, thanking me for bringing attention to homelessness.  We then hit a Safeway supermarket for luncheon food, conversing with a grocery clerk on the way out.  He lamented living in a trailer because even a small, modest home was beyond his means.  By the time we were done talking he was almost ready to join us on our hike.

On our way to Fruita we encountered Dave, Marie and teenage son Zephyr, on their Saturday morning ride to the Utah border.  On their way back home they stopped again to give us their phone number, with an invitation to stay with them in Redlands.  Marie returned to us one last time to bring us Cokes from a store that we found out also offered free popcorn.

We also received an invitation from another bicyclist to stay at her home in Redland, but the family invitation came first.  In fact, while at the Redlands mall I received a call from Marie to check on whether we were coming and to make arrangements for picking us up at the mall.  Marie had bicycled across the country and the whole family was “our kind of people,” making for some enjoyable trail magic during our stay.

Our neighbors at the Fruita campground were Dan and Chris, two semi-professional golfers saving costs while playing in a nearby tournament.  Fresh off the sobering news of the Fruita Lions Club decline, I talked about our public mission with them.  We are a society in which volunteerism increases in response to issues of health, hunger and homelessness, but community involvement has decreased to paltry lows.  They encouraged me to give talks at colleges, reaching out to young adults who might change the future of community involvement.

We would see Dan again in Denver, but I took his advice immediately to heart in Grand Junction, where the first thing we did was hike onto the campus of Colorado Mesa University wearing our full packs.  On the way to the Outdoor Program’s office a social work instructor invited us in to speak to her class the next day. The director of the Outdoor Program arranged for us to be the first speaker of the semester for their Wednesday night programs.  These talks would be in addition to the talk previously scheduled for the Grand Junction Lions Club.

Because of that scheduled talk, the Lions Club put us up in a motel for one our nights in Grand Junction.  I chose this time to discuss with Ky her future.  Our delightful and meaningful three day stretch through a populated area reinforced my belief that we did not need support, for either our private or public mission.  Parked in front of our motel I opened with the projection that we would likely run out of funds for Ky by the time we reached the other side of Colorado.

This opened up the floodgates of grievances on both sides, with Ky hearing ours for the first time.  She conceded that she would be willing to stay at least for a while if the funds ran out.  Her concession was good enough for me to consider her as staying, and to problem solve towards that end.

Our blowup with Ky was the lowest moment of the journey, after traveling through the most stressful state for us in the hottest weather.  Yet during the stretch from Moab to Grand Junction our public mission increased in meaning and importance; moving forward from Grand Junction our roles in that mission would fall into place, including Ky’s.  The finances would work themselves out and I started feeling like Ky was “one of us.”  It appeared to me that Ky felt more like one of us as well, though the original “Thelma and Louise” bond she wanted with Cindy was not going to happen.