Lazarus Lake says, “I don’t smoke on the uphills” as he strolls across America once more.

In 2018, Lazarus Lake, sometimes known as Gary Cantrell, or Laz, finished his first transcontinental walk. He’s currently making an effort at his third, defying medical advise this time.

TFD – Embark on Lazarus Lake’s epic walking journey, defying medical advice and embracing the spirit of endurance in this grueling adventure.

Lazarus Lake is shifting in a chair with a straight back, trying to find the perfect position to release his compressed nerve. West Virginia’s Capon Valley is a pleasant oasis after days of high climbs and even steeper descents. If only for a split second, the world is thankfully flat once more. The Alleghany mountains are waiting somewhere. But Laz, the mastermind of such grueling endurance tests as the Barkley Marathons and Backyard Ultras, doesn’t want to think about that now; the pizzeria is filling up with smoke.

The man seated across from us continues to stare, and a twentysomething scrambles over from the back to apologize. Since Laz informed him that he had just hiked 17 miles across Timber Ridge to arrive here, he has been unable to speak. Grinning and rubbing his jaw, the man wears a farmer’s cap down to reveal his narrow eyes. Finally, he asks, “Come again?”

Indeed, I did begin in Delaware.

“I am going to.” The man says, fiddling with his hat. “And where are you heading?”

“Frankfurt.” When the man’s eyes widened, Laz paused and said, “Doesn’t everyone walk across the country when they turn 70?”

In 2018, Lazarus Lake, sometimes known as Gary Cantrell, or Laz, finished his first transcontinental walk. He traveled 126 days to walk from Newport, Rhode Island, to Newport, Oregon, and went by the name Lazcon. He began his second transcontinental challenge this year on April 1st, the day before April Fools’ Day, traveling from Fenwick Island, Delaware, to San Francisco. However, the tone has changed; this walk goes against medical advice.

Following a regular checkup last fall, a 90% blockage in a carotid artery was discovered. He increased his training miles in spite of being told he could suffer a stroke at any time. When he was brought in for a cardiac test prior to surgery, he said to the physicians, “I’ll just have to start my walk early if I fail it.” In summary, Lazcon 2024 was not going to be stopped by anything short of death.

At the pizza, it is now seven o’clock, and Laz is just now finishing his 24-inch meat-lover’s. Shaking my head, I watch him go outside for another cigarette. There to crew him for 10 days and having worked on a book on him for two years, I know he’s a smorgasbord of health issues: a fused vertebrae in his neck, Graves’ Disease, a festering toenail, a blocked femoral artery in his left leg. However, I’ve also realized that he has never encountered a challenge bigger than the lure of the open road.

He spends two hours painstakingly documenting day 15 for his online followers back at the four-room Firefly Inn. Along the path, he puts information on historical sites, geological formations, and oddities. He finds a fresh pair of jeans in the grass one day that fit him perfectly, so he keeps them. He finds out one day that he has been wearing his shorts backwards since the morning.

His fans keep tabs on his mileage and are aware that it has been declining. Laz planned to complete his 23-mile daily goal and celebrate his birthday in August. However, the figures currently lean closer toward October. His Big’s Backyard Satellite Championship is on October 19, which is a strict deadline for his stroll. Unsupportable is what he wrote earlier this week. Either I have to move more quickly, or I have to stop.

It appeared that he might have two days after writing that.

The day started with a lethal dance on a backroad without shoulders, just outside Berryville, Virginia, at sunrise. Laz is only a measly 15 kilometers up the road after ten hours of battling an intense headwind. He darts on and off the grass to dodge cars. It’s stopping time at five o’clock, and I wonder if he will continue to press. Instead, he’s bent over his walking stick like a cattle prod, done, his face a mask of chapped leather from frustration.

That night, he moans in pain and twitches under the sheets till the alarm rings at five. Ashen and swollen, he sits staring blankly at his box of foot-fixing tools. He’d maybe better take the day off, he mumbles. For the first time since I’ve known him, he falls quiet. We just look at each other. Then, the nerve in his back pinches and he jolts upright in his chair. Somehow in this moment, he’s reborn. His face fills with blood, his eyes brighten, and an hour later we’re on the highway headed to West Virginia. He bounds along as fast as I’ve seen him. “Somewhere out there lies the ‘Alleged Heny,’” he says, pointing up with his stick. Since we hadn’t spotted the mighty Alleghany Mountains, he jokes daily that they might not exist.

The next morning, he’s even better, downright giddy. At 5am, he’s shuffling and grunting in the dark. “Farred up this morning,” he writes in a quick post. “Farred up. I am in by god west virginnie.” A quick piss, then he cracks open a Dr Pepper. Several gulps and a smoke, and he’s checking his left pinky toe. A nail as thick as a throat lozenge is purpling underneath. (He cut a hole in his shoe so it can stick out.) On the ball of his foot, he attaches a small grey neuroma pad the size of a dime. It alleviates some pain, but “damn it hurts” as he pulls on his socks and shoes. In the car, he chugs a Bang energy drink, 16 ounces of purely legal, calcium-infused, liquid speed.

But there are surprises along the way. With a swift turn to the left, the ground tilts nine degrees upward. Laz has to pause ten times at the base of Timber Ridge, a multi-tiered ascent. He points to a crater of falling rock that is a thousand feet below and exclaims, “Good God.” “I thought that was the top when we first started.” He leans over his knees and stretches his back. He wants a cigarette but resists and says, “I don’t smoke on the uphills.”

Everything else goes as planned for the remainder of the day: a Gatorade at ten, a chocolate milkshake for lunch at two, about five cigarette breaks, and a grand finale with the coldest Dr Pepper in the cooler at five. The scent of pizza and grasslands finally awakens our senses here in the Capon Valley. Laz peers toward the skyline. “Is this Heny as claimed?”

To him, they represent a new physiographic province rather than just a mountain range. He had begun on the Coastal Plain, traveled through the Piedmont Plateau, ascended the Blue Ridge, and entered the Appalachian region’s Ridge and Valley. The Alleghanies are next. Should they be real.

In many respects, a walk across the nation is a voyage through life and death as well as the past and present. Rock cuttings along the roadside display bands of dark red Devonian shale, which are the remains of a period when West Virginia was submerged under a shallow sea. Older guardrail terminals with the potential to impale an automobile are replaced by more recent types designed to absorb stress. Roadkill is scattered about in various forms of decomposition, and wildflowers crack through pavement to breathe. And highways don’t hum, they thunder – a rush of hot air as semi-trucks blow by – sometimes knocking you back, sometimes sucking you in.

In 2021, there were 7,443 pedestrian deaths in the US due to car accidents. There were even more the next year. Laz knows exactly what’s at stake. 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 that scares him, he admits, “is not finishing”.

This singularity of focus leads to his grumpiest moments when movement and lost time lead away from the goal. Yet, the heart of his walk is an 18-mile detour south into Oklahoma – to Oologah Lake – to the memory of Alluwe, a once-booming oil town sunk beneath its waters. As a young boy, he watched the Army Corps of Engineers flood it and the old homes of his parents and grandparents. Some of his earliest memories are hunting arrowheads there with his father Frank. Now, Frank lies buried a few miles away next to Laz’s mother Earlene who passed away in 2022. Though he’s spent the majority of his life in Tennessee, Laz will forever be an Oklahoman. The state is burned into the leather of his belt.

On my final day of crewing him, I can’t help but keep watching as Laz lumbers up an onramp for a little while longer. He claims he’s prepared to tackle Corridor H, a raised four-lane road in West Virginia that climbs steadily to the summit of South Branch Mountain. Apparently, Timber Ridge had only been a warm-up.

The last pitch is so long that it curves softly around a stand of trees before stretching out like a highway to heaven. I park my car and travel a few miles along an old road that runs roughly parallel to the corridor. From there, I can wait safely for a text if he needs anything before the next turn off. Across a meadow the size of six Central Parks, the corridor guardrail forms its own grey horizon.

I sat for an hour. Not a glimpse of Laz. My stomach starts to wriggle. I understand that this mountain will be too much. Too much after the continual walking days and days. Too much considering his state. I begin searching the map. Maybe there’s a way to go around. Then, there’s a seemingly unmoving speck of yellow, like the lint of a tennis ball cast against nature’s enormous canvas of browns and greens. I squint. It’s Laz, inching beneath a blue ocean sky.

It will be close to five when he arrives at the summit. During the next thirty yards, he stops twice and then limps forward, bracing against the hood with both hands, head down, and a cigarette tip that is brilliant red in the wind. I take the coldest Dr Pepper from the cooler’s slush and observe his expression while he sits and downs a large glass. He gestures west, his eyes beaming like those of a child. “Observe,” he says. “They are no longer alleged.” In the distance a faint line of mountains cut across the sky. The Alleghanies.