Fat Man Walking

Dear Readers,

The other night I was up late working on my term paper about metaphors and somehow I ended up learning about Steve Vaught, a.k.a., the Fat Man Walking. Have you ever heard about this guy? He weighed 400 pounds and he was depressed so he decided to take charge of his life and to take charge of his weight and he walked across the country! He lived in San Diego and he walked all the way from San Diego to New York City, in 2005 and 2006. He got tons of media attention back then. Now he gets less media attention, because he’s old news, I suppose. His story is no longer current.

Steve Vaught took a laptop along with him on his walk across the nation, and he maintained a website, which is at the other end of this link:

http://www.thefatmanwalking.com/

That night when I first discovered Steve Vaught I spent about two hours reading his journal. I was procrastinating homework, you understand. I didn’t read the entire thing, but I read a good chunk of it. It felt really immediate and natural and honest, and I thought I had stumbled on to something really special. I thought I had stumbled on to the Great American Story. And I know it sounds funny, but I kind of felt like Steve and I were kindred spirits, that we were feeling the same emotions and thinking the same thoughts. It was like Steve and I transcended our own individuality, somehow, and entered into eachother's minds.

Steve’s journal shared a lot of elements with On the Road and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Into The Wild. Enjoying the freedom of the open road, battling with demons from the past, relying on the kindness of strangers, getting into adventures, having lots of time alone with one’s own brain- all the stuff I like to read about.

Well, as I was stressed out about doing one of my last papers for the fall 2008 semester, the idea of leaving it all and running away appealed to me. After a few minutes of reading Steve’s online journal, I was emotionally invested in this guy. I wanted him to get to New York and I wanted him to lose weight and I wanted him to become more emotionally healthy, and I wanted him to demonstrate to the nation what a little perseverance and determination and wanderlust can do. I think I even said to myself that night, when I was emotionally invested in the Fat Man Walking, that Steve Vaught was my new hero.

Here’s some stuff that he wrote in his journal and published on his website that particularly inspired me:

I will make it to New York because it is important for more than just myself to do so. Unless I decide to stop at the New York state border, seven miles short of Times Square, and then just go home having failed to reach my goal. Either way I still win because I will be a happier and healthier person because of the experience. Incredibly, so will all of you, because everyone who encourages a person to face down their fears and freely walk into the firestorm of their own personal demons, has helped more than just that person. They have helped all of us, because there is one more happier person in the world.

Isn’t that inspiring? Doesn’t he sound determined and wise? I agree with Steve that one more happy person in the world helps the whole world, somehow.

Here’s another wonderful tidbit I copied and pasted from his online journal:

Is it a diet that we need or a comedy club? Do we really need to learn to count carbs and run screaming from fats or do we need to learn to let go and try to live a happy life. In the process defeating the demons and taking away the things that hold us down. I don’t know the answer, I am looking just like everyone else but what I do know is that the answers that we have so far are not working all that well and maybe it is time for some new ones. Happiness seems like a good place to start. Now go and call someone that you haven’t talked to in a while and let them know that you were thinking about them. Then sit back and consider the ripple effect of so simple a gesture.

Wisdom! Truth! Inspiration! Hooray!

Steve became sort of a celebrity, and lots of overweight people were so inspired by his story that they began to go on long walks and get into shape and they began to take charge of their lives. People may dismiss this whole story and the Steve-followers as pop-psychology, or watered-down philosophy, or watered-down spirituality, kind of like Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, but… it seemed to be working for a lot of people and it seemed to be inspiring a lot of people, and Steve’s journey seemed to be a force of good in the world.

His description of the countryside was beautiful. I could just imagine him out there, on the side of the road, walking and walking and walking. Walking off a little ways from the road at the end of the day to set up his tent and sleeping bag, seeing the sun set in the evening, seeing the sun rise in the morning, not being confined by the walls of some third-story apartment.

I was especially excited when Steve went through Flagstaff and through the Route 66 area. He stayed on Route 66 for a long time, I believe. There’s something so American about that pathway, the mother road, winding through the heartland of America, all the way from Chicago to L.A., wandering through the thickest part of the country. So much history happened there, on Route 66. (And so many souvenirs are for sale in gift shops along Route 66 now!)

But something about Steve’s journey wasn’t right. My first tip-off that something was amiss was that he left his wife and kids to go walk across the country. He was just going to leave them alone, and the Vaught family wasn’t too well off financially, either. But at the outset of his journey he said that when he got back from his journey, he would be a better father and a better husband. So I went along with the story and I agreed with Steve. “It’s good that he’s making this cross-country trek,” I said to myself. He just needs a little time and space to breathe and exercise and get his head together, you know what I mean? We all need time like that. And since his case was extreme, since he was very overweight and very depressed, he needed an extreme solution- he needed to walk across the country!

It all sounded so romantic.

And then I read that he got a divorce.

A few months into his journey, and… Steve and his wife decided to get a divorce. What?! Where did that come from? His journals made no mention of problems in his marriage, really. In his journal he focused on the beauty of the nature and he gave impromptu sermons on how to treat other people decently and how to live an emotionally and spiritually full life.

I thought that all his newfound head-clarity would make him more content with his marriage. I thought part of the purpose of him walking was to improve his marriage, not end it. But Steve wrote something like, “This is my journey. This is my life. I’m doing it on my own terms. I can share or withhold as much personal information as I deem appropriate. Only my wife and I know what’s really going on with our marriage, and you don’t know us well enough to criticize our decision to get divorced.”

“Fair enough,” I thought. “I understand that I can’t fully understand Steve's situation. I don’t really know what he’s going through. Who am I to judge this man who is doing so much good for the world?”

I kept reading his journal.

And then something else happened to make me doubt Steve’s majesty: he got tons and tons of corporate sponsorships. Lots of companies learned about his story and they gave him backpacks and shoes and money for hotel rooms and stuff like that.

But really I didn’t mind all that. After all, Steve wasn’t asking for that stuff, he was just graciously accepting attention and products. Wouldn’t you do the same if you were in his place?

Then something else suspicious happened. He decided to take a month off and go train in Los Angeles with some hotshot personal trainer named Eric the Trainer. Eric the Trainer paid to have Steve flown out to Los Angeles and live at his gym and work out for a month, right in the middle of his cross-country journey.

That sounded fishy. It sounded like Steve was selling out. It sounded like he was giving up the romance of the road for a comfy life in some swanky gym in LA. What was that all about? But, again, Steve was in charge of his own narrative, and he explained it all perfectly. He talked about how walking was getting his lower body in pretty good shape, and it was helping him lose weight, but his upper body wasn’t getting any attention. Once again, Steve wrote something like, “This isn’t a movie. This is my life. I don’t care if anybody thinks that the ‘story’ should be different. I’m just an honest man doing the best I can to make things right.” I believed him, and I was enthralled with his story.

I kept reading, and finally, over a year after he set out from San Diego, and after filling up a lot of pages in his journal, Steve got to New York City.

Hooray! He was on Oprah! And the Today Show! And on a lot of news programs!

But that was just the climax of his media attention. Steve had actually been followed a long way by a documentary crew, and nearly every little town that he walked through sent out their local newspaper and did a story on him. His website also received something like a gazillion hits a day.

“Hooray!” I thought. The story was over and his life was better in so many ways. A book deal was in the works, a documentary was being made about him, he had offers to walk across Europe or to walk in different cities, or to somehow take part in the giant industry that gets money from fat people who want to look like the people they see in magazines and on TV.

But then I wanted to know about where Steve was now. I left Steve’s website and I googled him. And I quickly became very disturbed. You have to understand that this was all going on late at night, when my emotions were heightened, when tears came easily.

Well… the documentary failed. They finished making the film, but nobody would buy it or distribute it. The book deal failed, too. In fact, the publishing company sued Steve for something like 70 grand because he apparently signed something and the publishing company already spent a lot of money on a ghostwriter and Steve hated the book and broke his contract or something.

Here’s another crazy thing. Steve won’t let anybody see him step on a scale. Nobody really knows what his final weight was. Steve claims to have lost about 110 pounds on his journey across America, but at the end of the journey, Steve’s still a very fat man. Just look at pictures of him. It doesn’t really look like he transformed himself very much at all. And one of the guys on the documentary crew said that Steve couldn’t have lost more than 40 pounds on his entire trip. Remember, Steve started out weighing 400 pounds, and he spent a month in a fancy LA gym, and he spent more than a year walking across the country… so, you would think that he would have lost a little more weight, right?

Well, after Steve’s big NYC appearance, someone other than Steve paid for him to get a flight back to San Diego.

And then I read this news article about how only a week after he arrived in New York City with a huge crowd of people cheering him on, only a week after he was featured on Oprah, he was back in San Diego, broke and homeless.

Rumors surfaced. Rumors about how much Steve had actually walked. Maybe he got a lot of secret rides across the country. What were his next plans? He was a car mechanic or something before, would he go back to that line of work? No, he said, he wouldn’t do that. He never wanted to do that again. His next plans didn’t really involve getting a job at all.

His plan for the future was to just roam the world, relying on the kindness of strangers.

Sounds wonderful, huh? Kind of wonderful and romantic… roaming the world… seeing the sights… meeting people… thinking, keeping a journal…

Does it sound wonderful and romantic, like Steve Vaught is really in tune with something that we who stay in one place and hold down jobs are not? Or does it sound like Steve’s crazy? Or a false prophet, or… just a guy looking for 15 minutes of fame, or... misguided?

Who was this man?

Who was Steve Vaught?

Was he a hero? Was he a fraud? I really want to know.

Sincerely,
Telemoonfa