Watch a video of Bill Galloway on his journeyHe was middle-aged, a little heavy, with a backpack and a ball cap. He had taken his running shoes off and was rubbing his feet on the bar's foot railing.
“I just sort of struck up a conversation with him, and it turned out he had a pretty fascinating story,” said Hughes, who has had all manner of folks walk into his bar with their stories.
Some of the stories told in bars are true. Some are assuredly not. And some, perhaps, are that confusing concoction of truth and failed memory, rationalization and self-generated myth, hope and dream.
This is Bill Galloway's story, an explanation for a life lived walking the country's highways, wandering from job to job, looking only for whatever comes next, good, bad, indifferent. It is Galloway's truth, reason enough to shoulder a backpack on a bright Thursday morning and continue walking to Atlantic City, N.J.
It starts 46 years ago.
“I grew up in northeast Ohio,” he said. “I was a kid who grew up looking at life differently.”
He had two brothers, two sisters, parents who struggled to make things work out. His dad was a welder, his mom drove a forklift.
At age 3, Bill suffered a brain aneurysm and was hospitalized. His parents couldn't handle his subsequent learning problems, and little Bill spent time in an orphanage before eventually reconnecting with his family in high school.
“I tried to stay with them, but it wasn't working out,” he said.
Eventually, he quit school in the 11th grade and set out on the road. What came next is what he described as a Forrest Gump-like life of wandering.
“I wanted to go see the world,” he said. “My family wanted me to get a job and settle down.”
He was 16 and that was 30 years ago.
Some would call Bill Galloway a homeless man, a transient, a drifter. Technically, it's true. He doesn't have a home. He moves from place to place. He's here today, gone tomorrow.
Right or wrong, however, the homeless have been stigmatized as losers and boozers, refusing to work, looking for a handout. Bill Galloway has spent enough time with the stereotype to abhor those who made it true.
“I'm not that person,” he said. “I'm not alcoholic, I'm not looking for somebody to give me something for nothing. I don't have the problems that they have.”
There's a pride about Galloway's homelessness. It's chosen, a way of life, not the result of misfortune or lack of initiative.
“It's the idea of the people I meet that keeps me going,” he said. “I'm a survivor.”
Over three decades, he has ridden bicycles more than 100,000 miles. He has walked across the country, twice. He has been to every state except Hawaii.
He gets by on a small Social Security disability and odd jobs. He worked as a truck driver for a while, but eventually lost his commercial license for reasons he can't quite put into words. But it had something to do with the learning disability that resulted from his childhood brain trauma.
And so he walks. Walking the road is life. Galloway meets people, some bad, some good, like Todd Hughes, who put him up overnight at Poor Henry's.
Most of us spend our days shuffling details within ordered lives. Did I pay the house bill? Who's picking up the kids after piano? How am I going to bring up a potential problem with the boss?
Bill Galloway deals with fewer options and greater consequences.
Where will he be tomorrow? Will he find a safe place to sleep? Can he take a shower at a homeless shelter without being hassled by the good-hearted network of people trying to help the homeless?
In a way, all the questions boil down to one - can he do as he pleases?
“I've lived a life not many people have lived,” he said, mindful that others might never take his chosen path.
He thought he might settle down a dozen years ago, when he met a woman he thought he might marry. Get a little house, get a steady job, stick around.
But it didn't work out. So he took off.
Again.
Recently, he spent time in Alaska, thinking the frontier mentality there might welcome an unskilled laborer with a decent job. Galloway did some menial jobs, driving small trucks, but it didn't stick.
Worse, he began having the symptoms of Hodgkins disease, which was first diagnosed in Wyoming more than three years ago.
When he talks about the disease, it's clear Galloway understands the life-or-death stakes. Yet he walked away from government-funded treatment in favor of what he sees as the healthy lifestyle of the road.
“I just wanted to start walking, start eating good food, sleeping, being outside and moving hard,” he said.
While in the hospital in Alaska, Galloway met a writer from New Jersey, who told him his life story might make a good book.
The writer told Galloway to give him a call if he makes it to Atlantic City. So at the first of August, Galloway traveled to Seattle from Alaska, determined to walk from the Pacific to the Atlantic.
He understands that he's sick. He understands that fall and winter are coming. But this is what he does. He moves on.
“I'm willing to gamble,” he said. “It's 50-50 whether I make it.”
Maybe there'll be a book, maybe there won't. Hodgkins may get him, but maybe not.
“I willing to die along the side of this road rather than in a shelter,” he said.
Then he shouldered his pack and headed east into the morning sunlight, to Drummond, the Dakotas, the Great Lakes and the shining sea.
Reporter Michael Moore can be reached at 523-5252 or at mmoore@missoulian.com.
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Nina wrote on Apr 5, 2009 6:53 PM:
and,..... Well,..... I can Say he is doing well, and Has left a Good Lasting Impression. May God Bless him on his journey.
Nina. "