Meet Kentucky Walker:
Modern-day Adventurer and Free Spirit
To most of us, the men and women who live on the streets are disturbing reminders that we, too, could end up homeless should our fortunes go bad. There but for the grace of god go-I…
But for one man, a rootless life instead of the comfort and security of a permanent domicile is just what he needs to stay happy and sane. In fact, it has literally saved his life.
Kentucky Walker is his name and solo travel is his game. He ventures forth on foot, his worldly belongings stowed in a blue backpack weighing 19 pounds fully loaded. The contents therein are what he calls his “creature comforts,” though most of us would find them extreme in their frugality. His only other cargo is a one-gallon jug of water fastened to his arm with a bandana to keep his fingers from tiring out.
Unlike the typical “home bum” found destitute and starving in urban alleyways, he camps in stealth locations away from cities and towns, invisible to others. His daily routine starts at sunrise, when he packs up his minimal possessions — sleeping bag, padding, toiletries, extra t-shirt, jacket, hoodie, underwear, socks and pajama pants — and heads in search of coffee. Soon thereafter, he’s on his way to whatever destination strikes his fancy that day.
He wears a button-up shirt, long pants, Merrell’s shoes with Vibram soles and an Indiana Jones-style brim hat. Although he may go a while without bathing, he manages to maintain a clean, presentable appearance to everyone he meets as he wanders across this great land.
Most days involve unremitting exposure to the elements and a steady diet of truckstop coffee, spam singles and his favorite food, pizza. He mostly walks, but sometimes hitchhikes, and even occasionally boards a bus or train when he wants to get somewhere quickly.
“I have not had a bad day on the road,” he attests.
In his travels, he’s not above “spanging” from time to time — asking for spare change. “I put up a sign that says, ‘Ex had better lawyers.’ And I’ve made some money off of that one.” He’s been known to dumpster dive on occasion, and has learned to time his visits to Little Caesars to lay claim to leftover pizza when they close.
“I have not had a bad day on the road,” he attests, despite whatever challenges have come his way. “I’ve had a struggling time on the road, but not had a real bad day. I still go to sleep with a smile on my face and I wake up just the same.”
Kentucky Walker, given his nickname by a woman he met in Parsons, Kansas, was born Stephen Michael Haycraft in a small town outside Louisville, Kentucky. He owes his wanderlust in part to congenital factors, being descended from a long line of adventurers, some of whom crossed paths with explorer Daniel Boone and fought against the British in the Revolutionary War.
“I’ve always been an adventurer, a hiker, going out into the wilderness, enjoying myself. I’ve always understood why people would want to get away.”
But family genetics only partly explain why Haycraft has abandoned the workaday world, trading in his life as husband and provider for a free-form existence on the road.
The stout and muscular thirty-two year-old Kentucky native still bears the scars of his first suicide attempt at the age of seven, when he tried to slit his wrists. It took another two decades for him to try more creative approaches to killing himself.
During those twenty years, his mother abandoned the family, leaving him and his sister in the sole custody of his father, an abusive drunk. He was eventually forced into foster homes and at twelve, ended up living with his paternal grandparents. His grandmother, the one adult who didn’t abandon or abuse him, became his main source of moral support and parental guidance.
For most of his life, Haycraft’s personal relationships have been hugely disappointing and painful. Spouses have cheated on him, friends have abandoned him and family members have turned against him in times of need.
When Haycraft joined the Navy in 2006 at the age of eighteen, he was “very, very, very, very fucking angry” at the world. He went on to serve two tours of duty in the Middle East, spend a year in the forest service, marry three times, divorce twice and have a daughter by his second wife and a son with his current spouse, Noel, all by the age of twenty-seven. He would be diagnosed with PTSD and eventually awarded a monthly disability check, which is what he now lives on.
For most of his life, Haycraft’s personal relationships have been hugely disappointing and painful. Spouses have cheated on him, friends have abandoned him and family members have turned against him in times of need.
“Relationships are fickle,” he says. “My family would drop me on the street and support my ex-wife even though she cheated on me. And my friends — as soon as I went into the military from high school, we disconnected because I left them and they took offense to it. My best friend, Adam, he took offense to it. ‘You left me, you left me here high and dry.’”
No wonder, then, that he has suffered a long history of depression, a condition he describes as an emotional black hole. “I call it the black hole because when I cross that event horizon, I’m not coming out until I attempt [suicide].” He’s attempted four times.
In 2011, after divorcing his second wife, he chose his birthday to gas himself.
“I popped a lot of pills, drank a lot of alcohol that night, zip-tied my hands to the steering wheel and had the charcoal grill in the back of the SUV and proceeded to gas myself out. And I woke up with the windows down and the car doors open and everything out with the zip ties broken. I woke up on the concrete. It must have been my survival instinct.”
That same night, Haycraft tried again with different means.
“I put a shotgun to my chest, loaded a round in the chamber and I told God I wasn’t going to see the sun rise. I looked out the window and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. I saw the sun rise, and then I passed out.”
A man of faith, Haycraft explains his survival in spiritual terms. “God — it’s not my time until he says it is.”
He made one more try several years later, while separated from his third wife in Kentucky. On March 17, 2017, “I hung myself with an over-the-door power cord, simple-suspension rod. Eleven pounds of pressure on the carotid artery — it was supposed to work. The bolts sheared off. There’s no logical explanation for that except for it’s not my time.”
The next day, frustrated by repeated failures to end his own life, Haycraft decided to let the world at large bring about his demise.
“I grabbed my pack with a dollar in my pocket and I told God that if I can’t kill myself, the world will do it.” The result wasn’t what he expected. Instead of ending his life, the world opened him up to a whole new way of living.
“That opened my eyes. That put me in my place, where I’m supposed to be.” And where he is supposed to be, he reckons, is on the road.
“I made it to California on April 12, 2017. I felt reinvigorated, I felt great, I felt like I could accomplish anything because I just made it cross-country with a dollar in my pocket. The date stands out in my mind because I haven’t gone into the black hole since then.”
After rejoining his wife in California, where she and his five year-old son Enzo were living with her parents, he made an earnest attempt to re-enter the workaday world and be a reliable provider.
“I was executive security bodyguarding, working for a CEO. And I lost it, I broke. I was getting depressed again, I was losing it. I took off in September in 2017.” He’s been living on the road ever since.
“Coming back into the civilian world just doesn’t work,” he realizes. “This year [2019] has been my year of acceptance, and her year of acceptance of who I am now.”
A life without the unpredictable vicissitudes of personal relationships gives Haycraft the psychic space to focus on his daily experiences.
The only thoughts of suicide Haycraft has these days are thoughts of “social suicide,” that is, a life without the messy social complications most people deal with every day.
“Been there, done that and got the t-shirt, and now I can’t do it anymore.”
A life without the unpredictable vicissitudes of personal relationships gives Haycraft the psychic space to focus on his daily experiences. “When I’m looking up at the stars, I don’t worry about that shit. It’s not even in my mind. I feel content and great in those silent, silent moments because my head’s not spinning. Me, myself and I, and me being able to witness that we’re on this earth, being able to feel the earth’s pull of gravity.”
His hard-charging, adventuresome ways have yielded to a serene, be-here-now attitude and Zen-like focus on the present moment. “I’ve learned to slow the fuck down. And I slow down because you can take in the moment. And being truly here and now in the present moment is the most important thing you can do.” As a result, he now experiences a profound connection to the natural world. For example, he recalls waking up in Mammoth Cave National Park at dawn and beholding an awe-inspiring scene.
“God could have painted this picture for me… it’s a canopy of trees, the sun’s just coming through, and I see these deer coming across this canopy. And then this hawk comes through, right under the canopy over the deer. That’s my happy. And I see that all the time, every day I wake up. I feel very connected to everything around me.”
Wherever he is in his wanderings, Haycraft is sure he’s always right where he should be. That includes volunteering his services in Houston during Hurricane Harvey and lending a hand to an aging traveler named Bob whom he met hitchhiking from Michigan to California.
“I would like to keep friendships going, but after a while it seems monotonous. It seems like I’m falling into the same insane routine that I was in before.”
While he has forsaken the workaday world and its trappings, Haycraft doesn’t totally avoid personal relationships. He enjoys the serendipitous connections he makes on his travels, what he calls “single-serving friends,” a term gleaned from the film, Fight Club. These are one-off friendships that last for a limited time, like a car ride, and then end, leaving him free to continue his travels alone.
“You have a lot of those,” he says, admitting that he sometimes misses longer-term relationships. But long-term relationships require a normal life, so it comes down to the lesser of two evils — loneliness or suicide.
“I would like to keep friendships going, but after a while it seems monotonous. It seems like I’m falling into the same insane routine that I was in before. And then, once I hit the road, I’m happy. It’s like, what’s going to happen next? Who am I going to meet next?”
The one personal relationship he misses most is the one he has with his five year-old son, Enzo. “It’s very rough. I miss him all the time when I’m out on the road. But I see him happy and it helps me kind of deal with it.”
Enzo considers his father’s lifestyle and absence from home nothing unusual, Haycraft says. “My five year-old is too young to understand it, but he knows daddy is an adventurer. As long as he can remember, I’ve been doing this.”
His relationship with his wife, Noel, is another story. While a life of non-stop wandering has been good for his mental health, it’s been hard on his marriage. “We do love each other very much, but living with each other and being with each other just isn’t going to work. She wants a boring life, and I can’t give her that. I belong out there, I belong on the road.”
With Haycraft committed to his current lifestyle and Noel wanting a more traditional arrangement, they plan to amicably divorce. “It’s easier to face the facts and accept it than it is to keep on trying to fight and keep on going insane.”
However extreme his way of life may be, Haycraft says many people tell him that they envy his freedom and wish they could live the way he does. “I don’t blame them for wanting to live my life because I think living a nine to five is just fucking nuts.”
For most people, the chief obstacle to packing up and heading out in search of adventure is the comfort and security they become addicted to. He insists that a life on the road is actually “easier done than said.” The key is to get out of your comfort zone.
“You have to get out of your comfort zone to experience it. And a lot of people don’t want to do that because it’s scary. A lot of people call me fucking crazy. But you know what? I step into an unknown world where I don’t know where I’ll be tomorrow, and I have a wonderful sunrise and wonderful sunset that I can enjoy somewhere. And I’ve never had a bad fucking day.”
And how many people can say that?
