Florida man walks to praise the living

by W.R. Valentine , Staff Writer—— Last Saturday afternoon outside Rogers City, a middle-aged man could be observed walking south along US-23 pulling a modified bicycle cart with a banner sign over his head that said, LOVE LIFE. Occasionally, a passing car would toot its horn and the grizzled sojourner would lift his arm to give that kind of hand flapping wave normally used for sending one?s kids off to school on the bus.

Discretion may be the better part of valor but curiosity trumps it every time. Not wanting to pass up a story, this reporter turned around and headed back to find out what this pilgrim was doing in our county. Was this some religious fanatic looking for an ear to bend? Or, was he just some homeless guy with a new twist on survival in an indifferent society? It was time to find out.

Upon being approached, the man smiled like he had just noticed an old friend coming back to greet him. After the first handshake and the pleasantries that are exchanged between two strangers meeting on the highway, it was apparent that this was a man on a mission. Standing in that rare phenomena in northern Michigan known as sunlight, the stranger identified himself as Steve Fugate of Vero Beach, Florida. He quickly shifted into conversational mode and started to tell his story in short, sharp sentences like, ?My only boy shot himself to death for no good reason.? And, ?I had to do something to get over the grief and give myself a reason for living.?

After some prodding, the man agreed to take a little time out from the road and sit under a large shade tree away from the noise and grit of the highway. What follows is an interview with a Live Man Walking.

Why did you decide to start walking around the outer borders of America?

I took something anybody can do and turned it into something not everybody can do, because I want attention. Not for me, but because young people are dying. How does your walking address that problem? It brings attention. My sign is in big, bold, red letters: ?LOVE LIFE? ? there it is.

People see your sign that says ?LOVE LIFE.? What do you expect them to think when they see that?

I?ve had such a broad spectrum. I met two sisters who had not seen each other in eight years because of bad blood. Then they saw this sign coming down the road and they started laughing and they gave up the bad blood. One woman was on her way back to her motel room in Florida. After having seen her children for the first time in a while, she was all ready to take her own life when she got back to the motel room. She took a look at the sign and broke down. I saw her the next day and she told me she saw my sign and turned her car around four times to take a look at it and she did not kill herself. My friend, Larry, reads me emails every once in a while over the phone and people say, ?That sign and the things he said to me changed my life.? And it is like the sign was just for them. There is a new group of believers in the teachings of Christ, I call them ?Elvis Christians? because they have ?left the building? and they don?t try to force anything on anybody else, they just believe.

What about the media? Do you talk to people on TV or radio? Do the television people catch you on camera a lot of times?

Yeah, Las Vegas did a nice little short on me last year. I was walking across a little stretch of desert just outside Las Vegas. It was just beautiful. I went on a talk show in Waco, Texas. I?ve had probably eight or nine TV spots but I like the newspapers. There is more circulation, the message gets out, everybody sees it if it is in a hometown paper. In Louisiana, there was this little bitty paper and this young man stopped me and said he had been laid off and all he could afford was to buy me a Moon pie, a big package of Juicy Fruit gum and a Slim Jim. He had seen the paper the day before at a friend?s house, lying right there on the coffee table. His friend?s 18-year-old son had tried to kill himself and his friend said ?what do I do, what do I say to him?? Afterward they came back to his apartment to clean up and all of a sudden his friend was jumping up and down, ?I can?t believe this, I just found out how to act with my son.? The newspaper article had a lot of detail on my talks, it said ?face them with the truth, hit them?show them they don?t have the right to do this, it is very selfish.? He went off armed with that and was getting good results.

So you see, there is a difference between TV and newspapers. All a TV can give you is a few seconds, a sound bite. That?s okay, that is good, it helps because it brings attention and then people come and talk to me. But the newspaper tells a story. Everywhere I go I come across people on my walks that have been touched in some way by this act of suicide. They are lost, there is no quick fix, in life or in death. It is such a horror. When it?s your child, no matter how it happens, losing your child creates enormous grief. But with suicide, the guilt that comes on is absolutely incredible. The tragedy is that this is preventable. I met a guy who was 42 years old in North Carolina. He was a drunk. He was likeable, had a clean apartment, worked every day, was liked around town, but he got drunk every day.

When he was 11 years old, his 17-year-old brother shot himself in front of him and the man runs from that scene every day. What am I gonna say to him, ?drinking is bad for you?? I just said ?God bless ya.?

How did the letters of the sign come to you?

I have to say the words came to me from God. I don?t have any other explanation.

Did the sign come to you when you were on the road? Before you went on the road?

Before I went on the road. It came into my heart and said ?you are going to walk across America.? And I said, ?Aw hell, that ain?t God, it?s just me. I ain?t walking across America.? And I fought with it for three weeks, then, I became resigned to it. I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was God speaking to my heart, plain and simple, it was what I was supposed to do. A lady, wife of a minister, wrote something down on a piece of paper when I started my journey. I am still not sure if I like it. It said, ?The journey is your home.?

When do you think your journey will come to an end?

When I get what I want. You gonna ask me what I want? I have no idea, but I will know when I get it. I told an ex-girlfriend, who asked if I was enjoying all the attention and I said, ?I would rather have my little boy back.? (Steve wipes the tears from his eyes and takes a minute).

So, you may keep walking for years to come yet?

My daughter says I will probably die on the road. I kind of hope that?s not true, I want to go down and live on the Peace River in Florida. I meditate, I get in tune with the infinite, I walk in it. I don?t always walk in it, but I progress at it all the time. My solitude is very holy to me. That has to be true, spreading a message, yet the solitude is always there, it allows one to hold that long thought.

You can really study a thought. Solitude is so important. I guess the bottom line is, particularly after I started doing this, I have expressed my admiration and respect for the small newspapers. I find that 85 percent of Americans I meet are indifferent to what I am doing and 13.5 percent are the greatest, curious, most wonderful, beautiful people in the world who want to know what I am doing. Then there is that, one and a half percent of the people who are truly evil. Your travels are to communicate with that 13.5 percent? The 85 percent are not bad people, they are just people that are in economic bondage. It is the lust for comfort that is prevalent in this land.

A lot of people say, ?these young people have it made? and I say ?that?s not true, they have creature comforts, but there is a creature that comes with those comforts and it?s called pressure.? I never had that creature. Why are you talking mainly about young people? My focus is on young people and the victims are getting younger. At the end of 2000, it was the third largest cause of death for youth, and the age group was 15 to 30 years old. By the end of 2003, the target age group had been lowered from 10 to 24 years old. That is frightening. That is a big jump.

There is no immunity from this problem. I had a couple from Stockton, California pull over. They had a top of the line BMW SUV, Rolex watches, Johnston-Murphy shoes, they had it all, they were both super groomed. They stopped and politely said, ?Can we talk to you just a moment?? Their 31-year-old only son had co

mmitted suicide. It had happened a year before. They had read about me in the local newspaper and they were standing there looking at me wanting me to give them answers. I am sorry but there is no cut-and-dried answer. There is nothing I can say, I won?t stand here and lie to you and tell you it gets any better, but I will say this to you, you can just cry so much. That?s what I said to that couple. My mother lost an 18-month-old son and my 14-year-old twin sister. I saw her nearly destroy her life and ours with her but I totally forgive her for it. When you lose your child, you lose your mind.

******

Abandoning the neutrality of a journalist, I invited him home for dinner and gave him a spot to pitch his tent for the night. The next morning at dawn the dogs growled a little bit but by the time I got up to look out the window, he had packed his gear and returned to the highway. God speed, Steve Fugate.