 "Photo: Courtesy Google Images")
Patrick Dobson led a fairly normal life for 31 years.
He worked at the Ritz Carlton in Kansas City refurbishing furniture. He had his own place. He was dating a woman named June. He had a 3-year-old daughter named Sydney.
But in 1994, it really hit him - he wasn't happy. And he needed to make a change.
He wanted to show his daughter it was OK to take risks.
May 1 the following year, he decided to walk to Helena, Mont., "the biggest city furthest away from Kansas City in the Great Plains."
"Life was just really small," Dobson said. "And I was worried that it was always going to be really small - that the future was always going to be bleak … (I was) always working or getting ready to go to work."
When Dobson was a kid, he loved going on road trips with his family. But he only saw the world from the inside of a car.
"After a while, you realize there's a lot of space out there," he said. "You're only ever experiencing it at a gas station or restaurant or rest stop. … Walking, you notice things closer."
He said you notice the people, fence lines and nature.
"The boundaries between you and the rest of the world become fuzzed up," Dobson said. "Where do you end and where does it begin? You don't .... Just your presence in that landscape is going to change it."
Dobson was comforted by this realization. He said, it was "a relief not to have to be significant anymore."
But he wasn't always so sure of what he'd find - or if he'd even make it out of Kansas City.
Leaving was hard. And the first day he tried, he turned around and walked back home.
He left the next day with a backpack of extra clothes, boots, a tent, cooking kit, notebooks and pocket money - weighing about 55 pounds.
But his worrying stuck with him.
"The anxiety was probably the hardest thing," Dobson said. "Even though you get to a point where that disappears, it still comes back."
But things started to turn around in North Platte, Neb., Dobson said. It was when he began to "really see the people."
People almost always offered Dobson rides or a place to stay.
"You expect people to be like you - friendly and nice, but maintain distance," Dobson said.
However, that wasn't the case. The people were much friendlier than expected.
One woman even gave him the key to her house.
And he found the most generous people were the ones who had nothing.
"Suburban people never gave me a ride," Dobson said. "People with nice SUVs never gave me a ride."
But he still walked and sometimes had to sleep outside. Fortunately, the only big problem he faced was weather (though he had some close encounters with wild life and an unstable woman).
He arrived in Helena two and a half months later. He stayed for a week.
He canoed most of the way back home on the Missouri River.
When Dobson returned to Kansas City in September, he immediately started working on his book, "Seldom Seen."
"Coming back was so hard," Dobson said. "Coming back to the same job, same responsibilities, same pressures … except now you have these added pressures because you've learned so much more. You're not the same person."
He completed the first draft of his book in 2001. After going through "a thousand rewrites," he sent his final draft to the University of Nebraska Press in 2005. They sent it to a travel book expert who responded with 18 pages, typed and single-spaced, of corrections.
"It was brilliant," Dobson said with a smile. "Writers go their whole lives looking for that kind of critique."
It showed all of the book's strengths and weaknesses, Dobson said. He fixed the errors and resubmitted it a couple more times.
"Ultimately, the whole process helped me find the book," Dobson said. "You have to choose what's going on in the book in a literary fashion. [You have to choose] what's the climax, where do we learn the greatest lessons. … If you can't tell the story in a way which everyone understands, then who cares?"
He also learned to live in the moment.
"The future is going to come with or without me - so why worry?" Dobson said. "It's not about what will happen. It's about what is happening."
mcowan@unews.com
