Not only is today my first day of walking alongside the interstate, today is also the first walking day that ends within the tent which I’ve been carrying for over a hundred miles.
In what I later would end up calling an enormous blessing and perhaps life-saver, my brother and aunt paid me a surprise visit just before I left Cottage Grove. They walked six miles with me, all the way up to the I-5 interchange.
Reaching Cottage Grove meant that the easily-to-follow, north-to-south, parallel-to-I-5 roads were no longer. My only option was to try walking some dirt logging roads within the mountains, to get from A to B. I had only a most basic cell phone at the time, and no GPS, and dirt logging roads through the mountains are notoriously confusing: they almost never have signage, and they’re rarely if ever intuitive. Even a local logger who was speaking to me just outside Cottage Grove was trying to figure out how I could make it through all connections via logging roads and more from Cottage Grove to Oakland, Oregon (yes, there is such a town). The logger couldn’t find any effective answer, so I was ready to take the situation into my own hands, and do whatever I needed to do to make it through.
I probably would have opted to walk the tracks, which hug I-5. What I didn’t know though, until Ryan, my younger brother, showed up just in time to explain it to me, was that walking next to a busy highway, you cannot hear the train coming. He explained how those who must work the tracks have spotters constantly watching for trains, as trains are difficult or impossible to hear, and can only be sighted to avoid in time. Not knowing this could have cost me my life. Through later miles, walking on busy roads near the tracks, I would learn just how true the existence of this locomotive acoustic shadow is. Many times, trains ended up sneaking by the roadside before I’d actually hear them.
Thanks, Ryan– you’re a lifesaver.

Of all of the alarmist “advice” that Matt, my older brother, was shoutcasting to me in the weeks leading up to the Walk, setting up my tent before first having to use it ended up being the one useful piece of advice with which I walked away. Suspecting that today would end outdoors, I set up my tent on my lunch break, perched atop a small hill above the interstate. To my surprise, it was less intuitive than I figured, and took me a while to figure out. Of course, had I been a seasoned outdoorsman, perhaps I could have figured it out in a snap. I’m new to this all though, so I’m happy to have followed the advice to set up the tent in advance, because where I ended up eventually selecting to camp for the night, hidden next to I-5, was not the place in which I would have wanted to figure out the tent.

All in all, the evening went by very well– first night in the tent: success!