Space and time started to play tricks on him. In west Texas, the highway stretched in a straight line to a vanishing point on the horizon. He had learned to take shallow breaths through his nose, so as to not inhale their fumes. The traffic consisted almost entirely of semi-trailer trucks surging past every 10 seconds at speeds of a 100 miles per hour. From there, he headed east, through the blackened badlands of New Mexico, through the gateway city of El Paso, and on to an endless spread of dry dun plains. He had begun 46 days earlier at the southern terminus of the Continental Divide trail. The land was flat (elevation: 11ft), but the clouds above it were colossal – a white mountain range, severed and levitated.Īs we walked, Eberhart recounted his travels thus far. “Welcome to my backyard,” Eberhart said, waving at the vastness with his cup of ice. His hands too were deeply tanned, but only up to around the base of his thumb the rest of each hand, shaded by the his cuffs of his shirt, was pink. He took his sunglasses off, and his eyes, arced against the sun, were fixed with deep, leathered creases, pale in their depths. He had a wild head of white hair streaked with yellow, and a white beard threaded with black. When he reached the car, I shook his hand, and he smiled. In his hand, he carried a chipped styrofoam coffee cup. His trekking poles were folded in the crook of his arm. A single plastic water bottle was tied to his belt with a piece of frayed blue string.
He carried a blue backpack no larger than a preschooler’s knapsack. We circled around and parked on the shoulder about 50 yards up the road.
As we passed a place on the map called Alligator Hole Marsh, we spotted him: a white apparition on the far side of the highway, walking upstream against the traffic. On the appointed day, my sister and I drove south-east from Houston, eyes peeled for a walker by the side of the road. If I could find him, I was welcome to tag along. He told me that he would be hiking east on highway TX-73 somewhere outside of Winnie, Texas, on a certain day in early June. After some delicate negotiation – he harbored a deep if not altogether ill-founded suspicion of journalists – he agreed to let me walk with him. I wrote to him to ask if I could join him for a few days. This, he claimed, would be his last long hike. He announced he would complete a grueling road-walk from New Mexico to Florida, in order to complete a route he had named the Great American Loop, which connected the four farthest corners of the continental US. Triumphant, fulfilled, and nearing his 75th birthday, he vowed to hang up his hiking boots. Then he went on to complete all 11 national scenic trails in 2013. First he completed the so-called Triple Crown of long-distance trails: the Appalachian trail (2,200 miles), the Pacific Crest trail (2,650 miles), and the Continental Divide trail (3,100 miles). Over 15 years, he had hiked 34,000 miles.