Peter and barbara jenkins walk across america
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The walking wounded
In the winter of 1978-79, a brutal snowstorm hit eastern Oregon. A 30-year-old woman trudged outside through the blizzard, enduring the icy cold with her head down. Though she was bundled in a down jacket, her feet felt like stumps. They had no sensation. Her hands felt numb, too. Then she heard a twig snap. “I thought who in their right mind is out in this weather besides me?” she recalls. When she looked up, she saw a gorgeous fawn staring at her. The deer wore a blanket of snow across its back, and the encounter heartened her. “It was as though this little animal said to me, ‘Barbara, you can make it.’”
Barbara Jenkins did make it. A few weeks later, she and her then-husband, Peter, finished their walk across America. The walk catapulted the Christian couple into fame and fortune. Their story was featured on the cover of National Geographic. Bestselling books followed, along with TV appearances, radio interviews, and three kids, Rebekah, Jedediah, and Luke. But when news broke of their divorce in 1987, they were forced to step away from the spotlight.
Now, decades later, Barbara is out with a new memoir, So Long as It’s Wild. In the book, she retraces the couple’s cross-country trek, updates readers on what’s happened since, and dismantles the
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In August 1979, a young couple landed on the cover of National Geographic for walking 3,000 miles across America. I was half of that couple.
It all started when I met a man who had walked from New York to New Orleans, the same place where I was working on a master’s degree. He was on a quest to discover himself and understand the country after Vietnam had ripped the nation apart. We dated for several months, fell in love, got married and left New Orleans in July 1976, headed to Oregon. On foot.
We walked across Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Idaho and Oregon. We walked 15 to 20 miles per day, carried 35 to 75 pounds on our backs and slept in a tent at night. We experienced dramatic adventures like trapping alligators in Louisiana and being attacked by outlaws in southeastern Colorado. I fell off a glacier at 13,000 feet and was hit by a car in Utah. We also walked across the Cascades of Oregon in the coldest winter since 1919.
While on the road, we met and stayed with farmers, ranchers, homemakers, teachers, secretaries, and other working men and women of America. We photographed them and told their stories, eventually publishing three bestselling books: “A Walk Across America,” “The Walk West” and “The Road Unseen.”
“The Walk West” sold millions