Walking Off the Fat, Across the Land

A Troubled Past

Even at 400 pounds, he never thought of himself as a fat guy. Perhaps because he never used to be, perhaps because it was the least of his problems.

Fifteen years ago, he was the fun guy. A slew of girlfriends, a bunch of friends, a witty streak so hot he would gladly take the stage at a comedy club open-mike night. Then one evening in October 1990, driving too fast against the setting sun, he struck and killed an elderly couple crossing the street.

The accident sent him to jail for 10 days, ruined him financially and dulled him emotionally. When he started to put on the weight, he just didn't care. He remembers little about the next three years.

After the birth of their first child, he grudgingly went to therapy, just so April would know she had done everything she could in case he killed himself. Medication snapped him out of his depression. But life didn't get any easier. A few businesses failed, and they went deep in debt on a house. And the weight, he realized, was bringing him down.

"There's nothing appealing about fat people," he says bluntly. "You can't impress them when you're fat." His jobs steadily declined in quality. In March he said he walked away from the latest, managing a muffler repair shop, after the owners sniped about him sitting down too much at work.

One morning that week, he turned to April in bed. "I ought to walk across the U.S.," he said. Once he left, he added, it would be hard for him to quit.

"If that's what it's going to take," she replied.

So he has a lot to think about as he walks. About the anger he carried around so long, and how pointless it seems now. About how accepting help from people doesn't shame him anymore, now that he sometimes has to ask strangers for water. And about the value of living in the moment, of just surviving that next stretch of road.

"It has nothing to do with weight anymore," he says. "It's about getting back to the person I was."

Vaught gets the reporter to drive him back west to the outskirts of Peach Springs, near where he stopped walking. At 5 p.m., it's still 92 degrees, and he looks for a place in the shade where he can wait.

He sees it about 50 yards off the highway, a culvert over a now-abandoned part of the original Route 66. "This is good," he says. He lifts his pack onto his shoulders. The strap holding it to his still-massive gut now has eight inches of excess past the buckle, compared with two inches when he began.

He manages to heave his body over the guardrail and starts walking. By the time the car has turned around and driven past again, his 350 pounds have vanished into the desert.

Staff writer Catharine Skipp contributed to this report.