It Ain't Over (6 page)

“That trip was the number one thing on my bucket list. But life gets in the way.”

Kathleen Dodds, 49

Portland, Oregon

C
owboys had always been her weakness. As a six-year-old, watching a Western on TV with her dad, Kathleen Dodds was so smitten with the guys riding the range that she announced, “I want to ride a horse across the country!”

Some dreams never die.

As an adult, Kathleen began training horses, teaching riding, and fantasizing that one day she’d take a trip like the early American settlers. “I was always so interested in the pioneers. They were so brave,” she says. “They left everything they knew behind for a chance at a new life. So that trip was the number one thing on my bucket list. But life gets in the way. . . .”

Fast-forward to 2007, when Kathleen had to travel to New Delhi to have a grapefruit-sized fibroid removed from her uterus, a surgery she’d been unable to afford back home in Oregon. During a post-op checkup, she was stunned when her doctor told her: “If you had waited another month, you would have had uterine cancer. You are one lucky lady.”

That’s when a voice inside her head whispered—shouted, actually—“Take that trip!” It was time.

Her dad didn’t like the idea one little bit. No matter that she was an adult—she’d be a woman traveling more than 2,500 miles
alone.
What if she lost her way, became hypothermic, or was the victim of an attack? “This from a guy who’d been a scoutmaster,” says Kathleen, “taking me and my five siblings on camping and canoeing trips, teaching us how to start fires by rubbing two sticks together or use landmarks to find our way in the deep woods.”

But Kathleen was unfazed. Without a husband or kids to tie her down, she was raring to go.

The first order of business: getting in shape. Her clients pitched in and bought her a gym membership. She also started walking—four miles uphill to the barn every morning and four miles back down to her house every afternoon. Trotting at her heels was her 12-year-old Australian cattle dog, Solo—as in Han Solo—who had been with her since he was seven weeks old, so attached he refused to eat when she left him with a sitter. She had tossed and turned for months trying to decide what to do with the old guy.

“I knew if I left him, he would probably starve himself,” she says. “I didn’t think he could make it across the country, but he was never happier than when he was following me on a horse.” With the vet’s blessing, it was decided: Solo was going, too.

Kathleen ended her lease, sold her washer and dryer, and stored her furniture, car, and all her other belongings at a friend’s house. She asked her top student to take over her clientele, still worried that some students might defect. “I was torn about leaving my business behind,” she says. “I had worked really hard to get it to where it was.”

At dawn one day in May 2010, with Solo by her side, Kathleen quietly slipped out of Oregon City, wearing a black, floppy-brimmed Aussie hat and
hiking boots and riding a ten-year-old Appaloosa mare named Mystic. With a cell phone tucked in her pocket and a sleeping bag bungee-corded to the saddle, she had everything she figured she’d need: a tarp, inflatable mattress, change of clothes, underwear, jerky, granola bars, water bottles, $1,000, a hatchet, and a loaded gun (just in case she came face-to-face with any grizzlies). She also had grain and a first-aid kit for her horse: disinfectant, bandages, and Super Glue that she figured would heal up any of her wounds as well.

The first few days through Oregon, she tried to stick to a schedule, pushing herself to get from one campsite to the next. But at the first town, she threw away her intricate topographic maps, bought a regular state map and decided to also just stop people on the street, asking for the best way to get across the state. “I didn’t want to always be worried about making a deadline,” she says. “It was more fun to meet people.”

From then on, that’s how she rolled, using the local wisdom as her compass. There were only a few towns on her must-see list, like Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania (
Groundhog Day
was a favorite movie), and Upper Sandusky, Ohio, to visit a friend. Otherwise, she was all about the direct route. By now, Mystic’s four-year-old filly, Delightful, had also joined them to help carry gear (a friend had delivered her by trailer).

When there weren’t rural roads, the rustic travelers had to ride on highway shoulders—an odd sight with cars whizzing by at 70 miles an hour. Some would slow to a crawl and pull off the road in front of her. “I had to stop and ask what you’re doing,” they’d say, some slipping her 20 bucks before speeding off.

The travelers covered 20 to 25 exhausting miles a day. “There were times when I would just stand there staring around me, not remembering why I stopped because I was so tired,” Kathleen says.

Sometimes, she’d pass the time by shooting the breeze with her horses, using one accent for her part and another for their reply. “If anyone had seen me, they would have thought I was insane,” she says.

She sang, too, trying to piece together the full lyrics to John Denver’s “Country Roads” or Kris Kristofferson’s “Me and Bobby McGee.” One day, listening to the clip-clop of the horses’ hooves on the pavement, the Rolling Stones’ “Painted Black” came to her and she couldn’t stop humming it—
for three days
. “To get it out of my head, I had to go through the entire ‘99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall’ four times in a row!” she says.

At lunch- or dinnertime, they’d stop in flyspeck towns with names like Point of Rocks (Wyoming) or East Palestine (Ohio). Some were so teeny it seemed that within a half hour of her arrival, everyone in town knew who Kathleen was and what she was doing. Newspapers even featured her on their front pages. Local families were so intrigued they invited her into their homes—for a hot shower, a warm meal, or a soft bed.

When Kathleen began her lone-wolf journey across the country, she never envisioned that her days would be far from lonely. Her new acquaintances started calling their friends in the next towns ahead on her route telling them she was coming. “I’d get to a town and go buy grain and the feed store would donate it to me or I’d go buy lunch at a café and somebody had already paid for it,” she says. “It’s humbling to know how kind the people of this country really are. They will help a total stranger.”

Some she’ll never forget. Like Brooks, a leather-faced, soft-spoken, reallife cowboy nearly 80 years old whom she met in a Rocky Mountain pass; he called every rancher he knew for 100 miles ahead and told them to keep an eye out for her.

The great thing about moving three miles an hour, Kathleen discovered, is that she had plenty of time to take in the roadside attractions: the family
of black bears in Oregon (thankfully a half mile away); the minerals weaving pretty patterns in the desert sands of Wyoming; the pastel wildflowers speckling the cornfields of Nebraska; the white Indiana farmhouses that were so tidy they looked like paintings; the leaves changing to fall rusts, oranges, and yellows along the winding rivers in Ohio.

“Every state has something pretty about it,” she says. “You don’t notice that kind of stuff when you’re flying by in a car.”

But at times, it still seemed like the Wild West. In Idaho, she was cornered by a skinhead, who told her that a woman shouldn’t be out on the road alone and that he’d show her what a woman should be doing. One look at her loaded gun put an end to that conversation.

Kathleen pressed on, and just before Thanksgiving, after a half year on the road, she stopped traffic—literally—as a police cruiser escorted her across a bridge from Pennsylvania to New Jersey. As she arrived in Green Village, New Jersey, where she was to spend her last night, she was still wearing the hat that had shielded her from sun, rain, and wind for six months. Now it was a faded brown.

“I felt like Superwoman,” she says. “It was the hardest, most painful, most fantastic thing I’ve ever done.”

But the triumph of her adventure was not without its costs. Most devastating was losing Solo, who died of a heart attack two weeks into the trip. She also discovered that while she had been away, her rent had doubled while her business had dwindled to a half-dozen clients.

But given the chance, she’d do it all again. Maybe someday she will.

“I gave up everything to do this trip, but I gained so much,” she says. “I was beaten down emotionally and physically when I left, and now I love who I am. I know I can do anything I put my mind to.”

Spoken like a true pioneer.

Tina Reine, 47

Palm Beach Gardens, Florida

“T
he elephant man.”

That’s how Tina Reine says she felt as a child in Evansville, Indiana. Born with severe facial deformities, including a cleft lip and palate, Tina was bullied mercilessly by her classmates for years.

“I had things thrown at me. Kids made faces at me,” she says. “One time a boy told me I looked like I had been hit by a Mack truck.” It was hard, but throughout the years of torment, Tina’s staunch defender was her older brother, Mike.

“He would stand up for me and get into fights with the kids who bullied me,” Tina says. “If it hadn’t been for him, I don’t know what would have happened.”

Although she had undergone a series of corrective surgeries starting at six months, the deformities were still obvious.

“I knew I didn’t look normal,” says Tina. “And nobody ever let me forget it.” Feeling like a complete outsider, she escaped into her own world. “I didn’t really have friends, so I’d play by myself and pretend I was someone else. I
loved to dance, sing, and put on plays in my room for all of my dolls. They were my only friends and they made me feel safe.”

Tina remained tucked inside her own shell, isolated though protected, until her freshman year in high school, when tragedy befell her family: Her big brother and guardian angel, Mike, was killed in a car accident.

“I was devastated,” Tina recalls, “as were my parents. My extended family kept telling me that, as the only child left, I had to be strong for them. So I did my best. Mike had always been super-involved in school and extracurriculars, so I decided to put aside my own insecurities and take up that same role. I didn’t want my parents to worry about me, and it also gave me a distraction from my own grief, so I just threw myself into every single activity that came my way.”

Among those self-assignments was auditioning for the school play, a production of the musical
Mame
. Tina was selected for the chorus; it was the first time she’d ever performed in front of a real audience.

“It might have seemed like a small thing to other people,” Tina recalls. “After all, I was just in the chorus. But for me, it was huge. I had been hiding myself all those years for fear of being made fun of, but now here I was, standing in front of everyone, self-confident. I don’t know whether it changed the way my classmates saw me, but it definitely changed the way I saw myself.”

When her parents came to see her perform, Tina remembers, “they were floored. I seemed like a totally different person.” From that point on, Tina knew she wanted to continue being onstage.