‘I don’t smoke on the uphills’: Lazarus Lake walks across America (again)

Lazarus Lake shifts back and forth in a straight-backed chair, looking for the right spot to soothe his pinched nerve. After days of steep climbs and steeper descents, West Virginia’s Capon Valley is a welcome oasis. The world is mercifully flat again, if only for a moment. Somewhere out there, the mountains of Alleghany lurk. But Laz, the mastermind behind such grueling endurance tests as the Barkley Marathons and Backyard Ultras, doesn’t want to think about that now; the pizzeria fills with smoke.

A twenty year old rushes from the back to apologize while the man next to us still stares. He’s been speechless since Laz told him he just walked 17 miles over Timber Ridge to get here. Under a farmer’s cap pulled down to his squinted eyes, the man grins, rubs his jaw and finally says, “Are you coming again?”

“Yes, I started in Delaware.”

“I will be.” ‘ says the man, adjusting his cap. “And where are you going?”

“San Francisco.” Laz, let’s pause for a moment until the man’s eyes widen before adding, “Isn’t everyone walking around the country when they turn 70?”

Gary Cantrell, also known as Lazarus Lake or Laz, completed his first transcontinental trek in 2018. He called himself Lazcon and it took him 126 days to walk from Newport, Rhode Island to Newport, Oregon. This year, the day before April 1, he embarked on a second trans-con challenge from Fenwick Island, Delaware, to San Francisco. But there is a different tenor now; this walk is against medical advice.

Last fall, a routine checkup ended with the diagnosis of a 90% blockage in a carotid artery. Despite being warned that he could have a stroke at any moment, he increased his training mileage. Before surgery, he was taken for a heart test and told the doctors, “If I can’t do it, I’ll just have to start walking early.” Essentially, nothing less than dying would stop Lazcon 2024.

It’s now seven o’clock at the pizzeria and Laz has finally finished his 24-inch meat lover. I can’t help but shake my head as he steps outside for another cigarette. There to guide him for ten days, and after two years of working on a book about him, I know he’s a hodgepodge of health problems: a fused vertebra in his neck, Graves’ disease, a festering toenail, a blocked femoral artery in his left leg. leg. But I have also come to understand that he has never encountered a greater obstacle than the call of the open road.

Back at the four-room Firefly Inn, he spends two hours methodically documenting day 15 for his online followers. His posts include historical markers, geological formations and oddities along the walk. One day a new pair of jeans appears in the grass – his size – and he keeps them. Another day he discovers that he has been wearing his shorts backwards since the morning.

His followers also keep track of his mileage and know that it has decreased. Laz hoped to complete 27 miles in a day and finish before his birthday in August. But the figures now point more towards October. And on October 19th is his Big’s Backyard Satellite Championship – a difficult end to his free run. Earlier this week he wrote: ‘Unsustainable. I’ll have to go faster or I’ll end up having to stop.”

Two days after I wrote that, it looked like he might.

Just outside Berryville, Virginia, the day began at dawn with a deadly dance on a shoulderless road. Laz darts up and down the grass to avoid cars and after 10 hours of battling relentless headwinds, he’s only a paltry 15 miles away. It’s five o’clock – time stops – and I wonder if he’ll keep pushing. Instead, he leans over his cattle prod walking stick – ready – his face a cracked leather mask of frustration.

That night he groans in pain and shivers under the sheets until the alarm goes off at five o’clock. Ashen and swollen, he sits blankly staring at his box of foot repair tools. Maybe he should take a day off, he mumbles. For the first time since I’ve known him, he falls silent. We just look at each other. Then the nerve in his back pinches and he shoots upright in his chair. Somehow he is reborn in this moment. His face fills with blood, his eyes light up and an hour later we are on the highway towards West Virginia. He runs away as fast as I saw him. “Somewhere out there lies the ‘Alleged Heny,’” he says, pointing upwards with his stick. Since we hadn’t yet seen the mighty Alleghany Mountains, he jokes daily that maybe they don’t exist.

The next morning he is even better, downright dizzy. At five in the morning he shuffles and grunts in the dark. “This morning lingers,” he writes in a short post. “Increased. I’m in with god west virginnie.’ A quick piss, and then he rips open a Dr Pepper. A few sips and a puff of smoke, and he checks his left pinky toe. A nail as thick as a throat lozenge is purple at the bottom. (He cut a hole in his shoe so it can stick out.) On the ball of his foot he attaches a small gray neuroma pad about the size of a dime. It relieves some pain, but “damn, it hurts” when he puts on his socks and shoes. In the car he drinks a Bang energy drink, 500 ml of pure legal, calcium-infused liquid speed.

But the road always has surprises. A quick left turn causes the land to tilt nine degrees towards the sky. It’s the base of a multi-level climb known as Timber Ridge, and Laz has to stop ten times. “Good Lord,” he says, pointing to a pile of fallen rock a thousand feet below. “When we started, I thought this was the top.” He leans over his knees and stretches his back. He wants a cigarette, but resists, saying, “I don’t smoke on the slopes.”

The rest of the day goes as usual: a sip of Gatorade at ten, a chocolate milkshake for lunch around two, about five cigarette breaks, and a grand finale at five with the coldest Dr Pepper in the cooler. In the Capon Valley our senses are finally alive with the smell of pizza and meadows. Laz looks up at the horizon. “Is this the alleged Heny?”

In his eyes they are more than a mountain range; they are a new physiographic province. He had started on the coastal plain, headed to the Piedmont Plateau, climbed the Blue Ridge, and entered the Ridge and Valley region of Appalachia. Next: The Alleghanies. If they exist.

A walk through the country is in many ways a journey of past and present, of life and death. The rock cutouts along the road reveal dark red bands of Devonian shale – remnants of a time when a shallow sea covered West Virginia. The guardrail terminals range from early models that could impale a car to newer versions that are made to absorb shock. Roadkill lies scattered in various forms of decomposition, and wildflowers crunch through the sidewalk to breathe. And highways don’t hum, they thunder – a rush of hot air as semi-trucks blow by – sometimes they knock you back, sometimes they suck you in.

In the United States, 7,443 pedestrians were killed by motorists in 2021. The following year there were even more. Laz is well aware of the danger. He walks with a bright yellow vest and waves proudly at road crews wearing the same – a “brotherhood of the vest,” he says. The only thing he fears, he admits, “is that he’s not ready.”

This singular focus leads to his crankiest moments when movement and lost time distract from the goal. Yet the heart of his walk is a 18-mile detour south into Oklahoma – to Oologah Lake – in memory of Alluwe, a once-thriving oil town that was submerged underwater. As a young boy, he watched as the Army Corps of Engineers flooded the land and old homes of his parents and grandparents. Some of his earliest memories are of hunting arrowheads there with his father Frank. Now Frank is buried a few miles away next to Laz’s mother Earlene, who passed away in 2022. Although he spent most of his life in Tennessee, Laz will always remain an Oklahoman. The state has been burned into the leather of its belt.

On my last day manning it, I can’t resist standing around a little longer and watching as Laz plods up a driveway. He says he’s ready to tackle West Virginia’s Corridor H, an elevated four-lane highway that continuously climbs to the top of South Branch Mountain. It seems that Timber Ridge had just been a warm-up.

The final field is so immense that it stretches like a highway to the sky, until it gently curves around a stand of trees. I drive a few miles up an old road, roughly parallel to the corridor, and park. From there I can safely wait for a text message if he needs anything before taking the next exit. Across a meadow the size of six Central Parks, the corridor’s guardrail forms its own gray horizon.

I sit for an hour. No view of Laz. My stomach starts to struggle. I realize that this mountain is going to be too much. Too much after days and days of endless walking. Too much for his condition. I start searching on the map. Maybe there’s a way around it. Then there is a seemingly motionless speck of yellow, like the fluff of a tennis ball thrown against nature’s vast canvas of browns and greens. I squint. It’s Laz, crawling under a blue ocean sky.

When he reaches the top, it is almost five o’clock. He stops twice in the next thirty meters of descent and then limps forward until he is sitting with both hands on the hood – his head down – the tip of a cigarette bright red in the wind. I grab the coldest Dr Pepper from the slush of the cooler and study his face as he sits and gulps it down. His eyes come to life like a child’s as he points west. “Look,” he says. “They are no longer alleged.” In the distance, a faint line of mountains cut through the sky. The Alleghanies.