Reading Lyell Henry’s latest book, Trekking Across America (reviewed here), jogged my memory of my own trekker encounters and that led to this My Memories installment. I can’t be entirely certain that these two fellows would have been included in the subset of trekkers documented in Henry’s book even if they had made his 1930 cutoff, but I think there’s a pretty good chance.

Trekker number one was Eric Bendl whom a coworker and I passed on the way to visit a customer. With a website at WorldGuy.org, Eric was rolling a six-foot rubber globe from his home in Louisville, KY, to Pittsburgh, PA, to raise awareness of and money for diabetes, which had ended his mother’s life in 1987. He was about halfway there when we chatted with him by the side of US-22 near Sabina, OH. Photos and conversation from that day appeared in a short item in the Winter 2007 issue of American Road Magazine.

I encountered trekker number two barely a year later on the coast of California. After spending the night in Gold Beach, I pulled over as I was leaving town with thoughts of taking pictures of the beach. It was entirely too foggy for that but the stop let me meet Curan Wright. Curan had spent an uncomfortable night in the tiny park with a toothache he said was now subsiding. He told me he had just ridden his bicycle backward from Washington, DC, to raise awareness of HIV, homelessness, and the legalization of marijuana. He was HIV positive himself with plans to continue riding as long as he could.

I gave him a little money, wished him well, and departed, unsure of whether to believe his cross-country cycling story. I became a believer at the end of the day when I found support in some online videos. A video that I linked to from the trip journal for that day has gone missing, and I replaced it with a link to an AP video on YouTube that was made around the same time. That video is here, and a Flickr account for Curan that indicates he was still biking backward as late as July 2011 is here. I have found nothing more recent.

I think I was at least as surprised when I came upon Eric Bendl her second time as I was the first. It was nine years after that meeting in Ohio, and we were both a long way from our homes. I was driving Historic Route 66 in November 2016 when I spotted that giant globe on the old road east of Albuquerque, NM. Eric was already engaged in conversation with a local when I pulled over and after the three of us chatted for a while, the two of them headed off together. The local fellow left his car by the road with plans to return to it after walking with Eric for some distance. Eric had walked more than 6,000 miles since our first meeting and the WorldGuy.org website was very much still in operation.

Eric did a lot more walking and rolling after our last meeting. Sadly, his Facebook page reports his death from cancer on January 1, 2024. This guy was really something special.