For those that I’ve managed to pretty much permanently piss off by being over a year late with my thanks, I offer this:

The people who have known the whole story will perhaps have understood my tardiness in getting this written. To those who haven’t known the whole story, I hope for your understanding and forgiveness for my delay.

To all, I offer the most heartfelt thanks. Your sponsorship made it possible for me to be a part of something powerful and wonderful. It wasn’t just the money that was raised, it was spirit. Being part of something that unique was an experience I’ll treasure forever.

–Margaret

While I was walking I learned that my grandmother was going downhill. Friday evening she was failing. Saturday evening she was comatose and feverish. Herma Vera DeWoody Hammond died at 12:30 p.m. on Sunday August 11th, 2002 a day short of her 90th birthday. I was sitting in the medical tent on the grounds of a south Seattle elementary school collecting blister supplies and trying to decide whether or not my toes were really going to fall off if I took my shoes off to change my socks.
Say what you like about exhaustion, hallucination, and the goofiness of people claiming to be in contact with dead family members, but I felt her spirit touch me at the closing ceremonies later in the afternoon. I felt her there and I know she knew that I loved her. I have dedicated my triumph, and the determination that got me there, to her memory.

I got blisters, I got sunburn, prickly heat, and sore muscles in places where normal people don’t even have places (did you know that there’s a muscle that runs up the outside of your shin?). I developed a pathologic fear of gatorade, porta potties, sunscreen and anything having to do with peanut butter. I had the time of my life.

Registration/Day 1

We started Friday morning late Thursday evening. Thursday was the day that the three of us were supposed to present ourselves to the King County Fairgrounds in Enumclaw for a registration process that was reportedly going to take between 3 and 4 hours. Registration opened at 1p.m. and closed at 6p.m. All very well and good, easy enough to do. Except that all three of us were scheduled to work that day and we couldn’t leave the practice without a doctor. Long story short (I prefer not to dwell on the clusterfuck that Thursday became) we all ended up getting registered and getting tickets for a shuttle bus that would leave a hotel at least close to our hotel and take us to the fairgrounds Friday morning. We all ended up being signed up for “towel service” (which was the organizers providing us with two towels apiece each time we showered. MUCH more convenient than packing soggy towels around.) and we all ended up with tent assignments. These were all things that were somewhat in question as of about 2p.m. Thursday (by the way, did I mention that a considerable portion of Thursday was a clusterfuck?).

But by 8:30p.m. Thursday we were all in the same place, my house, at the same time and we were scarfing down some truly spectacular fettucini. We had reservations at the Mariott Courtyard in Federal Way for that evening so that we could catch a shuttle bus and none of our innocent relatives would have to get up at oh-dark-thirty to take us to Enumclaw. Out of a sense of strict paranoia I had called the Mariott earlier in the evening to confirm that our reservations did, in fact, exist. I received the welcome news that not only were they expecting us, they had agreed to open their restaurant at 4a.m. so that all the walkers that were staying there Thursday night could get a decent breakfast before the shuttles left. This took one of the potential kinks out of Friday morning (we had been planning to grab our gear, leave our hotel and go for a brisk morning drag to the local Denny’s). We still had to manage to get from our hotel on 320th to the Best Western on 317th at 4:30 in the morning since the shuttle that was leaving the Mariott had sold out by the time we were purchasing tickets (remember Thursday?), but we figured that three blocks wouldn’t be too much of a haul even considering the amount of gear we had and so it was all falling into place.
We finished our terrifically starchy dinner and started the hustle to get down to Federal Way so we could go to sleep. We were planning on getting up at about 3:30a.m. Friday so we could all shower, get breakfast, and have enough time to get to the Best Western to catch the shuttle at 4:30a.m. We ended up having to make a brief detour for gas, and back to work to pick up a shirt and a water bottle that had been forgotten, but it was only a little after 9p.m., we figured we were in plenty of time. We had neglected to consider that it was still Thursday (remember Thursday? It was a clusterfuck.). The highway department was doing nighttime construction on I-5 from Midway (just south of where we got on the freeway) to just slightly north of the exit we needed to take to get to the hotel. We didn’t hit the Mariott until 10:30 and when you’re planning on getting up at 3:30 then walking all day, 10:30 is NOT an acceptable bedtime.

Fortunately, that was about the last hitch in the day. Friday morning, or as we saw it, a continuation of Thursday evening, dawned at way too damn early. We got showered, stumbled to the elevators with our gear, tripped our way into the restaurant and were suddenly facing more food than I ever thought I would consider eating at 4 in the morning. The walk organizers had recommended that we have a breakfast consisting of at least 1000 calories, about 60% complex carbohydrates and about 40% protein. Have you ever contemplated a plate, a large plate, of scrambled eggs, sausage, croissant, fruit and cereal at 4a.m.? It’s repulsive. It was a matter of sheer bloody minded pig headedness that got any food into me at all and it was primarily because I figured that if I ate a big breakfast I’d get all sleepy (okay, sleepier) and I’d be able to catch a quick nap on the shuttle.

So here we all are at 4:30a.m. in shorts, walking shoes and our walker credentials; hats, water bottles, and what seemed a lot more like seven thousand pounds of gear than it had an hour earlier after we discovered that the Best Western at 317th was closer to a mile rather than 3 blocks away from the Mariott on 320th.
Panic ensues.
We stopped at the front desk to ask them to call the front desk at the Best Western and have them delay the shuttle so we could get our brisk morning drag done. A savior came into our lives in the form of the Mariott airport shuttle driver who volunteered to take us over to the Best Western and we thanked him for almost the whole trip.

I have these weird little flashes of memory from the first part of the walk. While I was walking I remember pretty well what was going on, but getting there and getting started is patchy.

The next flash is the shuttle bus. This was not your standard school bus, nor was it even a municipal transit type bus. This was a BUS. Plush cushy reclining seats, foot rests, arm rests, individual overhead lights, the works.
Unfortunately it was also equipped with a PA system and a very chatty driver. She felt it necessary to continuously have discussions on the PA with the person seated behind her and as we got further out into the tooleydingles she had a lot of fun pointing out various points of interest. The three of us were grouchy and trying to sleep, but at least we were better off than those people who had stayed at the Best Western the night before. We had had breakfast, but the BW hadn’t opened their restaurant so those people who had stayed there overnight were picking at peanut butter sandwiches and yogurt cups while we were trying to sleep off fruit and Belgian waffles. I guess it all came out equally.

The King County Fairgrounds in Enumclaw is a beautiful place to watch the sun rise on a clear summer morning. On the other hand, the fact that you’re there to watch the sun rise indicates that you’re up way too damn early in the morning. Being sleepy stopped really mattering once we got off the bus and were standing! waiting! ready to go! God we were hyped.

The crowd was actually pretty thin at 6 a.m. so we managed to get way up close to the front near the stage where the opening ceremonies were held. We got to watch people pour into the field in singles, in groups, and in teams. Wearing team tee shirts, waving signs (it was there that we first saw the “Chicks Walking Four A Breast” sign), wearing buttons and stickers, carrying waist packs, water bottles, walking sticks and cameras. People were stretching, testing laces, reorganizing their packs and talking and talking and talking. Stephanie was wearing a pair of convertible pants, the legs zipped out above the knee to make shorts, and she got into a very interesting conversation with a cute little grandma who asked her if she wasn’t going to get too hot walking in those “knickers”.
As the crowd thickened and the day lightened, we noticed the helicopters. KING 5 was the channel that had the biggest presence throughout the weekend, but at one point that morning I counted at least 6 news helicopters circling over us.
The organizers started the opening ceremonies about 6:45. They told us what the program was going to be and then turned the stage over to some obnoxious exercise guru who was going to teach us how to stretch. Aside from the fact that there were nearly 3000 people packed into a space that was only just large enough for us all to stand relatively still (and so expecting all 3000 of us to bend and stretch at the same time was a little foolish) this woman had one of those annoying quaalude soaked voices, that I’m sure she considers soothing, but I just found irritating. She was also fond of finishing individual stretching routines with the phrase “Now put your shoulders back, center your head and adjust your pelvic (no, I didn’t misspell that, that’s what she was saying) forward.” I don’t know if her teaching actually helped anyone that was there, but those of us towards the front were getting a little antsy by the time she finished.

They gave us one last safety warning. The ceremonies wound down, the music started and we were off! The three of us grabbed each other’s hands so as not to get separated in the crowd and we started walking.

It was very exciting. As we left the fairgrounds there was a huge crowd of people along the sides of the path clapping and cheering. We were nearly halfway to our first rest stop (about one mile out) before the crowd died out. I was simply amazed at the number of walkers. The line stretched for miles. We were walking along nice quiet country roads, talking to (and apparently being extremely interesting for) the cows in the fields, picking blackberries, energetic and bouncy. We were amazed when the first rest stop came up, we couldn’t believe we’d already walked two miles.
This is not to say that we didn’t, at that point, need the portapotties. In addition to pounding into our heads the idea that we were going to be needing huge amounts of additional calories to keep us going, the organizers made it VERY clear that we were going to be engaging in hard exercise during the summer, and we WOULD drink. There wasn’t any question about it. They wouldn’t let you leave the fairgrounds without a full water bottle and at each and every rest stop the pit crews made sure that you were filled up before you left.

It was odd. too, that most people waited for the privacy of portapotties to strip down the layers that they were wearing. It must just have been that at the rest stops everyone was, well, stopping for at least a few minutes and you could strip conveniently without having to watch where you were going at the same time. My wardrobe for all three days was shorts, a tee shirt over a sports bra, and an overshirt. Generally I managed to loose the tee shirt before the first rest stop each morning, but I always put it on in the morning thinking I’d be cold (I don’t know why). Until the overshirt became too disgusting to wear I’d keep that on too. I was the only one in our team that didn’t end up super sunburned by the end of the weekend, but this deficit was filled by prickly heat so I didn’t lack for skin irritation.
The minimum age for walking is 17 years and I think that’s a good thing. If there had been any boys younger than that in the group (and actually there weren’t that many men walking to begin with which was probably also a good thing) they would have consistently been walking into poles or off bridges because a good half of the women walking were stripped to shorts and sports bras by about 11 a.m. each morning.

We turned off the back roads and started up the highway. It was one of those rural two lane two direction highways so walking along it was interesting to say the least. There was a lot of walking single file, there was a lot of skirting roadside ditches. We started playing a roadkill identification game among the three of us called “name the squishy”. I think I won by making everyone laugh after pointing to a roadside ditch and calling out “squishy tree” for a tree that had fallen into the ditch. The amount and variety of roadkill would only have been interesting to people working in the veterinary field, but we found it quite interesting (and distracting once our feet started to hurt). Just outside of Buckley there was a squishy coyote in the ditch that had obviously been there for a while. One whole half of its lower jaw had been scoured to clean bone.

All along the route cars were honking and people were waving. There was one family in a van east of Buckley that was circling along the main part of the line of walkers. We must have seen them 10 or 15 times. Come to think of it, there was a young man in the van, mid teens maybe, who was very enthusiastic in cheering us on. He would stick the whole upper half of his body out the window and wave and hoot and holler while his mom drove along the highway honking and his little sisters hung out the back waving. I now wonder if some of their dedication was due to him and the fact that, as I said before, most of us were stripped down to shorts and sports bras by that point.

On the highway we started to notice the first of the sweep vans and sweep riders. These were safety volunteers either in big vans or on motorcycles and when they went past you were supposed to give them a thumbs up or a thumbs down depending on whether or not you figured you’d be able to make it to the next rest stop. The sweeps provided a lot of the support that was so essential in keeping us from actually thinking about what it was we were doing. The vans were all decorated, from the Mariners theme van with Linda and her bubble wand (more on her later) to the van that was decorated, for some inexplicable reason, with paintings of the Rocky Mountains and was blaring John Denver music all weekend, There was also, literally, everything in between.
The sweep riders were a random group of motorcycle nuts who had their bikes decorated, one of them was carrying an Elmo doll in a crash helmet, and would alert the van drivers if someone seemed to be in trouble. The sweep riders were really quite a hoot. They ranged from Grampa, who was hauling around on an E-normous touring bike, all the way down to a guy who would only introduce himself as “Bubba” who was tall, narrow, weatherbeaten and rode an exquisite Harley. I mean, down to the ape hanger handlebars, chrome trim and everything. It was cool. He wore a bandana and shades all weekend, looked like he hadn’t had a square meal in months and here he is, his bike decked out in pink ribbons with an American flag flying off the back. The sweep riders also doubled as crossing guards. At one traffic light just before lunch on the first day “Bubba” had us convinced that if we stretched enough while we were waiting (“You must stretch 5 minutes for every 60 that you walk!” echoes the voice of the exercise guru) that the light would change in our favor. Endorphins do odd things to one’s capacity for rational thought. Turns out his wife had died of breast cancer and he spent a good deal of time up and down the west coast volunteering for events like this.

We walked into Buckley and got our first taste of the community support for the event. There was a little girl and her mom who obviously had some story to tell, although I didn’t have the chance to stop long enough to hear it, who were first along the route in a park in Buckley handing out candy. Mom appeared to be primarily the transportation and the money behind the endeavor, the little girl was wearing a bright yellow tee shirt that read “My Future Breasts Thank You” and was grinning fit to burst. As we walked up out of Buckley towards (I believe) Bonney Lake, we were passing along a strip mall. Many of the merchants in the mall had stands set up along the sidewalk and were handing out juice, smoothies, candy, and the Starbucks guy had Frappacino samples (he was very popular). There were also just regular people. I don’t know if they were out there because they were supporting someone in specific, or if they were there to witness the spectacle, or if they were just simply nice people supporting the cause. But there they were, handing out Gatorade (which was welcome because it was of different flavors than that with which we were being provided), collecting trash from us, giving us ice, offering to spritz us with spray bottles and being just all around supportive. I wonder how many ended up with sore throats. We couldn’t really spare the breath to hoot and holler to the extent that some of the spectators were doing and even still we ended up hoarse by the end of the day.

It was just before lunch on Friday morning that we met the dinosaur lady for the first time. She was another of the crossing guards, had a safety vest with several dozen buttons on it, a baseball cap with 5 across the front (I believe that meant that it was her fifth breast cancer walk) and she carried a little squeaky dinosaur. She probably would have made a good baseball player, she sure had the chatter down. I don’t think I ever heard her stop talking. A consistent susurration of cheer, greetings, nonsense, and commentary on some of the more outlandish costumes and decorations the walkers were wearing. All accompanied by the incessant squeaking of her little squeaky dinosaur. Dinosaur lady would hand out squeaky dinosaur kisses to anyone who walked close enough to her. Stephanie has a tattoo on her left shoulder that would always get a dinosaur kiss as we went past.

We started walking Friday morning at around 7:30. We hit the lunch stop (just a little over 12 miles out) at somewhere around 12:30. At each rest stop along the way there was a crew, and each crew was the same from day to day. The lunch crew were something else. We walked into the driveway of some Metro Park & Ride outside of MiddleofNowhere Pierce County (I spent the entirety of the first day absolutely lost) and met, for the first time, the lunch greeters. I don’t know if that was their official designation in the crew, or if they just took it upon themselves to be the lunchtime cheer delivery device, but they were great. A middle aged man, para- or quadriplegic, in a wheelchair and his buddy, a younger (early 20’s) somewhat stubby guy that would ride around on the back of the chair. They were decked out in chef’s hats and aprons, the chair was proudly flying the Italian flag and they both had the Italian flag painted on their faces. It got larger each day to the point where, at lunch on Sunday, it covered their entire face. The younger guy was greeting us with a hysterically horrible fake Italian mamma accent. He spent a lot of time assuring us volubly “I LOVE you, you’re BEAUtiful”. By the time we left the lunch stop on Friday, he was pulling people out of the crowd coming in and waltzing a few circles with them.
I’d like to take a moment to comment on exactly how hard this actually was. I thought I was in pretty good shape. I exercise regularly, I’d been training, increasing my daily walk time to up to two hours at a time, for 6 months and I thought I’d do pretty well at being able to keep up with a 2 1/2-3 MPH pace for 20 miles a day. As it turns out, I did. I did not, however, realize exactly how many more calories it would take to walk 2 1/2-3 MPH for 10-11 hours a day than it does to walk the same speed for only 2 hours a day. I ate what for me is an enormous breakfast at 4a.m. I was snacking on protein bars by 8:30, and at each rest stop after the second (only 6 miles out), I was taking down snack bags of pretzels, half bagels with cream cheese, peanut butter and jelly graham crackers and a fair amount of fruit. I was washing this all down with 32 ounce bottles of gatorade interspersed with 32 ounce bottles of water and by the time we got to the lunch stop I was still fair starved and willing to take just about anything in the way of food that anyone offered to hand me.

We found a spot to sit up against a fence at least mostly out of the sun. It was at that point that we got our first inkling of what we were actually doing to our feet. We all peeled (literally) our shoes and socks off and suddenly, and for the rest of the weekend, the conversation always came back to feet. I didn’t have any blisters yet, but my feet were exceptionally happy to be unconfined, resting and cool. It’s amazing how comfortable just the physical act of not standing can be.
We ate (we engulfed) we changed our socks (ah, happy socks, cool socks, dry socks), and then we made a mistake. We stood back up again. We discovered the worst kept secret of events like this; it’s the stopping not the continuing to move that’s the hardest.

After we got the kinks worked out though, the afternoon became the best part of the day. We headed off into the suburbs and were wandering around being spectacular. I use that word in the sense of “we were being a good spectacle” not that we were being any more stupendous or energetic (definitely not more energetic) than we had for the rest of the day, simply that there were more people around to watch us doing whatever it was we were doing. It was a hoot! The YWCA’s afternoon day camp was out practicing their cheerleader routines on us, people were sitting in their front yards waving at us, people had set their sprinklers up on the sidewalk so we could run through them, it was great. There was one family –grandma and a horde of grandkids– that were sitting along the sidewalk with spray bottles and squirt guns asking if we wanted to be squirted. This is in addition to the sweep vans running up and down honking at us and the nearly frenetic enthusiasm of the afternoon pit crews. I don’t remember where the first stickers were passed out that afternoon, but after that every pit stop and every grab and go became a search for new stickers. I do remember that my first was a little smiley face just over the section of my ID badge that read “meals” (put there with the intent of distinguishing between the vegetarian and carnivorous walkers, but I thought the smiley face and the position were good irony considering my appetite).

For almost the whole afternoon the scenery was better (suburban neighborhoods are a considerable improvement over rural two lane highways if you ask me), the traffic was less nerve wracking and the promise of the end of the day was just that much closer. We started noticing the “theme” pit stops. There was one that was all decked out like Gilligan’s Island…palm trees, costumes, theme song and all. I think the ones that morning had been less entertaining simply because there was less to work with. At the morning pit stops we were shunted off the highway into, as one notable example, gravel pits and so forth. During the afternoon we got small parks, empty lots etc. Much more entertaining.
Later in the afternoon we got to the point where we were walking along Lake Tapps. At this point, the water wasn’t so tempting. Looking back on it we should have taken advantage of the fact that we were so close to the water if for no other reason than we REALLY needed a swim 24 hours later and didn’t have the energy to leave the course and jump in.
Then, right in the middle of what we thought was the last bit of energy we had for the day, we had to stop and get on a bus. We asked the closest crew member why. We weren’t exactly enthusiastic about standing in line to wait for a bus so we could get off the bus and then walk another five miles. It turned out that the walking conditions between where we were and where we needed to be were poor, no sidewalks, the neighborhoods weren’t exactly good, and so forth, so we stood and waited. And STRETCHED! Stopping, and standing for half an hour or so (fortunately we were in the vanguard of the crowd when we got to the bus, by the time our bus left there was a line a half mile long) then sitting on a bus for about 10 minutes is guaranteed to cramp every single muscle in your entire body if you’ve preceded your bus trip by walking 15 miles. One woman on our bus pulled a calf muscle getting off and was still flat out in the grass getting massaged after the three of us had gotten through the portapotties and were ready to go again.

The rest of the afternoon was mostly downtown Auburn. We were walking from the elementary school where the bus dropped us to the middle school where we’d spend the night. It was hotter because of our proximity to so much pavement so we started gathering handfuls of ice at the pit stops and putting it down our shirts, under our hats, and wrapped in bandanas that we tied around our necks. We got to be a very drippy group of people.
The last pit stop was at 16 miles. There was a grab and go (a mini pit stop) at 17.5 miles. We were so hyped at that point that it was only another 2.5 miles that we skipped the last grab and go. We pulled into Cascade Middle School in Auburn at just before 4p.m. By our clock (we didn’t count waiting for the bus and the bus ride) we’d managed to walk the first leg of our journey in just a little over 9 hours including pit stops and meals.

Seeing the camp that first afternoon was absolutely mind boggling. Tents, tents, everywhere tents. We expected to have to put up our tents, but they’d managed to get a pack of hyperactive boy scouts to set the tents up for us (all 1800 of them). Semitrucks spewing steam and lines of women waiting with their shower gear outside of them. More portapotties than I’ve ever seen in my life. Portable sinks with running water, a fleet of U-Haul trucks jammed with our equipment, and three full sized field kitchens with an anthill of kitchen workers dishing out food as fast as they could. What was even more amazing to me was the line of ambulances outside the medics’ tent. Outside of the random accidents –I know one woman got tagged by a car and one silly git was 81/2 months pregnant when she started and went into labor during the first day–, and the women who were in questionable health to begin with –generally the cancer survivors– the way the walk was organized actually made it very difficult to get yourself injured or sick. There were at least 8 ambulances, they each left and returned at least once between the time we got to camp and the time we went to bed. How the women who got themselves hauled off for heat stroke, hyponatremia, and dehydration managed it I do not know. Feh! Silly people.

We found our assigned tents, got our gear and the very first thing we did was get our shower things so we could hit the showers. We weren’t only sweaty, we were gritty, sticky in spots (there was lots of PB&J at the pit stops), and so muscle sore that even though it was hot outside we were dying for a hot shower. We had to sit in line for a while (the operant word here being sit) but the line actually went pretty quickly.
I’m not sure how it works, but when they promised that everyone would have a hot shower, they delivered. You climb in to the back of this semi and there are…….full sized shower stalls. Rubber traction mats on the floors, little dressing rooms outside of each stall so your towels and clean clothes stay dry and blessed, blessed hot water. I’ve never been so glad for running water in my entire life.

Our second goal after getting cleaned up was to get something to eat. Once again, I was amazed at exactly how hungry I was after eating all day. We went back to our tents to drop our things and Andrew was there. I’m not sure how he managed to winkle my tent assignment number out of the officials at the entrance without my having put him on the “official visitor” list (a mistake), but there it is. He asked if he could talk to me in private for a minute, Steph and Laurie went to get some dinner and that’s when he told me about Gram.
He said that he and my parents had discussed not telling me He gave me all the information that was available –she was failing, had been in “a bad way” since the previous Wednesday and wasn’t expected to last another week.

My heart broke.
I was exhausted, I’d been up since 3:30 that morning, had walked all day, and was starving, and the only thing I wanted to do was to pick up and leave to go see her.
More than physical conditioning, you need to have the mental strength to be sure of seeing something like this to the finish. My determination to finish left. I wanted to leave. I wanted to finish, but I needed to leave and I was in tears. I called Mom & Dad and was told that there was nothing I could do if I did quit, that Gram would want me to finish, and they still didn’t know how long she had left. I agreed that I’d at least sleep on it and make my decision in the morning.
I walked to dinner in the circle of my husband’s arm, tears streaming down my face, and perfect strangers asking if there was anything they could do, was there a problem, could they call someone for me.
I discussed it with my teammates after we had eaten and were back at our tent pasting up our blisters and smearing various types of skin goo on sunburn and prickly heat. I told them I didn’t know if I could finish, but that I would at least stay until the next morning and probably go until after lunch the next day since we had to trot out our team shirts. At that point I’d pretty much decided that I’d quit at the cheering station where my folks and Andrew would be meeting us after lunch the next day.
It wasn’t very late, but it was getting darkish. We had absolutely no interest in the evening programming — “news” and entertainment (including dancing for some damfool reason. Who was the prat that thought we’d be interested in dancing after walking all day?) at the main stage– so we just called it a day and fell into bed. I had brought a book, but didn’t have the energy to read.