Walk in Their Shoes: Can One Person Change the World?

CHAPTER 1

The Sleeping Sickness of the Soul

My teammates surrounded the mat, waving their arms and screaming. My coach was yelling too, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying. All I felt was my body wearing down, until the sounds faded, my vision blurred, and my shoulders hit the mat.

I was on the wrestling team in seventh grade, all 117 pounds of me, and this had been one of the most furious matches of the season. My opponent and I kept working for take-downs and reversals, until the third and final period, when he began pressing me to the mat. My teammates were urging me on, and I tried to resist, but my energy was gone.

He pinned me. At first I was just relieved the struggle was over. Breathing heavily, I then looked up and discovered why my teammates had been so loud and animated. I had been winning the match and was pinned with just three seconds to go. Three seconds! I lost because I had quit.

I was devastated, and while it may seem ridiculous, the lesson of that day has stayed with me all these years. What I learned had less to do with the shame of giving up (though that was terrible) than the unpredictability of events. Even when all seems lost, you keep going because you don’t know what’s coming next. You might be three seconds away from victory.

I grew up in Jackson, Michigan, a small, working-class community about seventy-five miles west of Detroit. We were a traditional Catholic family: my parents had five kids in seven years and sent us all to Catholic schools. Each day we had breakfast (usually plain oatmeal) and dinner together, and all seven of us had to be at the table for each meal. One of us would say a short prayer before we could eat, and sometimes my dad would extend his prayer to a ten-minute discussion of the gifts we receive from God. We traveled on occasion; my dad would pile us into the station wagon and drive to Florida to visit our grandparents, and when I was older, we’d drive to Colorado to ski. But my world didn’t stray far beyond Jackson. My father built a lake house with his brother, Bob, who had eight kids, and all the cousins descended there in the summer. We tooled around on motorcycles, developed a love for sailing, and swam until night fell.

When I was about six or seven, my mother started taking me regularly to the Vista Grand Villa, a nursing home. My mom explained that these elders didn’t have family or friends to visit them, so our coming made a difference in their lives. I can’t say that going to Vista Grand Villa was my favorite activity of the week, but I didn’t object to it either. We went almost every week and spent time with a woman in a wheelchair who couldn’t talk and had lost control of her limbs. Her name was Mrs. Marshall, and whenever we showed up, she broke into a smile and gave me a hug. Her words were incoherent, but it didn’t matter. I sat next to her and fed her applesauce, and she patted me on my head.

Those were probably the first times I realized that I enjoyed being around people for whom I could make a difference, and I believe it helped me to respect and feel comfortable around senior citizens.

My mother, Pat, had a degree from the University of Pittsburgh, but she was a traditional stay-at-home mom. Both she and my dad, John, loved all of us unconditionally and showed it. But Dad was sometimes too intense, impatient, or confrontational, and he wasn’t always close to us—four boys and a girl. But he did connect with me. At six feet two and 220 pounds, he was larger than life, a man who expressed his emotions freely and unapologetically. He would cup my face in his hands, look me straight in the eye, and say, I love you, my son. And I would look straight back and say, I love you too.

I hated to disappoint him. When I was sixteen, I begged him to loan me his car, and I drove to Detroit with some buddies to see my first concert, the Who and the Clash at the Silverdome. I had just gotten my driver’s license and didn’t pay attention to the time. All the way home I was hoping he would be asleep or else I was certain the shit would hit the fan. Sure enough, when I tried to quietly sneak through the kitchen at 3:30 a.m., my father was waiting there. But he was more disappointed than upset. You could have called, he said. Then he went to bed. I couldn’t believe he wasn’t angry, but I realized, and appreciated, how much he trusted me.

My mom is sensitive and compassionate and instilled those values in me, but my father was my mentor. He came to all of my baseball and football games, played catch with me, taught me how to sail and ski, and advised me on everything from the value of hard work to girls. Don’t let the blood rush out of your head in the heat of the moment, he would joke. But our most powerful connection revolved around faith, and his came easily. He didn’t have to puzzle over the meaning of God or work to feel His presence. It was always there, like an eternal gift, and it came from a very deep place within. As a kid, I used to walk with my dad to church, but he was moving so fast, with his long, intense strides, that I could barely keep up. Afterward he would leave the church relaxed, at peace. He had found union with God and the Eucharist, and I could return home with him at a much slower pace. You have to nurture and exercise your faith, he often told me, in order for it to grow and sustain you.

My father and uncle were extremely close, raised by parents with a strong work ethic and a deep religious and moral code. Their father, a carpenter, didn’t use the word darn because it was too close to damn. Growing up in Grand Rapids, they had a younger brother, Tommy. Early one morning when Tommy was nine, he left for his paper route. As he was bundling his papers on the sidewalk, a taxi jumped the curb, hit him, killing him, and left the scene. Later that day, my uncle and my dad rode their bikes to the site of the accident and saw the blood on the sidewalk.

Some people would have been so angry with God they would have abandoned their beliefs. Not so with my father, who never questioned his faith and lived his life as if he knew every day was a gift from God, as he liked to say.

A philosophy major at Aquinas College, he was also deeply influenced by The Seven Storey Mountain, the autobiography of Thomas Merton, which describes how Merton’s search for God led him to convert to Roman Catholicism. My father, in turn, exposed me to Merton’s ideas when I was young. In his early writings, Merton devoted himself to his search for spiritual meaning in a world that had been badly shaken by so much death and destruction, and as his views evolved, he became more outspoken about nonviolence, social justice, and civil rights, and my father conveyed those ideas to me.

*  *  *

I knew from a young age that I wanted to develop a faith as strong as my father’s. He gave me my spiritual foundation. Then, my years in high school and college broadened and shook my world in ways that shaped the rest of my life.

I was a typically insecure teenager. I was decent at sports and loved music and all the revolutionary bands of the 1960s and ’70s that celebrated the raucous youth movement of sex, drugs, and social protest. But some of the music also left me attuned, literally, to spirituality. My sister had a cassette of a live concert by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, and Stephen Stills’s exuberant wail Jesus Christ was the first nonviolent revolutionary! opened my eyes to an entirely different perspective on Christ. Until then, I had seen Christ as a gentle source of unconditional love, of strength. The notion of Christ as a nonviolent revolutionary was new and exhilarating, and gave me a completely different prism through which to view the world: Christ as an agent of change, a role model for peaceful transformation.

Stephen Stills ignited one type of vision, but J. R. R. Tolkien sketched another one of much greater depth and possibility, a world of sacrifice and salvation as an epic adventure. In high school I read the Lord of the Rings trilogy, mesmerized by Tolkien’s ability to weave his selfless characters into a spellbinding warrior tale of good versus evil. The books struck a deep chord. At the time, I lived in fear of being different and just wanted to fit in. Tolkien’s characters (hobbits, dwarves, wizards, and men) were all outcasts, but they also had the traits that I wanted for myself: courage, humility, and the willingness to sacrifice for others. They overcame their fears, took enormous risks, and were rewarded with redemption. That sounded pretty good to me.

*  *  *

I attended Michigan State University and loved the intellectual stimulation, the clash of ideas, and the search for truth that define college. I also loved the parties, the beer, and the freedom. I envisioned taking over my father’s company someday—he and his brother ran a restaurant supply firm—so I entered business school and chose finance as my major. Reading about religion and philosophy fulfilled a spiritual need, but finance appealed to my desire for precision and logic, and I reveled in the unassailability of numbers.

My college years also opened my eyes to new possibilities beyond my planned career in business. I met kids with diverse backgrounds and experiences, and I took time off to travel the country.

The summer of my sophomore year, I wanted to take a month-long road trip with a friend and my brother Dave, who is fifteen months younger than I. We hadn’t always been close, as we’re both intensely competitive and clashed while we were growing up. But in high school, we moved past that and became much tighter, with many of the same friends and a shared desire for adventure. Dave also enrolled at Michigan State, where we both majored in business, partied together, and were roommates in the same house. At six foot three and with superior upper body strength, Dave was a gifted athlete. His freshman year at Michigan State, he made the varsity track team as a walk-on, but he quit after one year. He didn’t like structure or hierarchy or early morning practices, especially after late nights drinking. He was a free spirit who attracted women in droves and took school far less seriously than I, but we would do anything for each other, even coming to the other’s defense in a couple of beer-induced scraps at keg parties.

For our summer road trip I asked our dad if we could use his van. He agreed on one condition: that he come with us. So we packed our tents, our hiking boots, and our music cassettes and headed west. We made our way through the Black Hills and the Tetons, whose peaks stretched across the sky like God’s sculptures and where we hiked from Lake Jenny to the exquisitely named Lake Solitude. It was so peaceful you could hear every breath you took.

My dad brought his 35 mm SLR camera, a good one in its day, and I began experimenting with it. He let me use the camera during the trip (he made me read the manual first), and at the end, he said, It’s yours. I was grateful, of course, though I had no idea how critical that camera would become to my work.

The highlight of the trip, at least for my dad, was our excursion to see the massive mountain sculpture of Crazy Horse in South Dakota. Dad didn’t have any particular affinity for the iconic Lakota leader, but he wanted to see this giant memorial, still under construction, because it was sculpted by a New Englander named Ziolkowski.

Dave and I went on another trip the following summer, without our dad. (This time he forgot to invite himself.) We windsurfed in the Columbia River Gorge and then headed down the California coast all the way to Tijuana. I began meeting young travelers from abroad, who shared their backpacking or rock-climbing stories from Australia, Brazil, England, France, Germany, or New Zealand. They didn’t just visit these places. They lived them, and I wanted to as well. College now struck me as overly structured and tedious. So I spent the next three winters in Vail, Colorado, where I worked nights waiting tables so I was free to ski during the day. I mostly skied the back bowls, pounded moguls, and occasionally dropped into steep narrow passages known as backcountry chutes. When I was a student, my dad urged me, Test your outer limits, which I did, but I was now following the same advice in Colorado—launching off forty-foot cliffs, hurtling off the cornices, or competing on the pro mogul tour, where I wiped out and exploded on unforgiving bumps. No falls, no balls was my philosophy.

I was still going to school, studying finance and spreadsheets, but because I spent my winters in Colorado I took five years to graduate. I received some good job offers, but my wanderlust got the better of me. I had no real desire to make money or to save the world. I wanted adventure, and I knew that now was the time to find it.

After graduating in 1989, I flew to Europe with Dave. We went paragliding in France, walked the Berlin Wall in Germany, and hiked the Alps in Switzerland. Poland was still behind the Iron Curtain, but we got visas and visited Krakow, where we entered a post office and asked if there were any Ziolkowskis in the city. We envisioned tracking down some long-lost relatives. The postmistress just laughed, pulled out a thick book, and showed us page after page of entries of our last name.

We had a serious purpose in going to Poland: to see the Auschwitz and Birkenau concentration camps. The buildings had been left standing like vacant tombs. We saw where the rail cars pulled up with the prisoners and where an SS officer would decide who would go to the barracks and who would go to the showers. We saw the sign that read Work Makes You Free and the bins stuffed with eyeglasses, hair, shoes, pants, and other clothes. We saw the ovens where the bodies had burned and the grounds where the prisoners had been blindfolded in front of a firing squad.

There was something otherworldly and demonic about these camps, which made my visit to Maximilian Kolbe’s starvation cell all the more meaningful. Kolbe was a Catholic priest who provided shelter to Jewish refugees in Poland, until his arrest in 1941. He was sent to Auschwitz and was there when three prisoners escaped. In response, the deputy camp commander picked ten men to be starved to death in an underground cell. When one of the men yelled, My wife! My children! Kolbe volunteered to take his place and was granted his wish. In the cell, he led Mass each day and sang hymns with the other prisoners. They say he was the last of the ten prisoners to die.

That cell is open to visitors, and when I walked inside, I saw that Kolbe had carved a cross into the stone wall. I thought: That is the truest form of Christianity, sacrificing your life for others. I was nearly overwhelmed by emotion. To visit Auschwitz is to come face to face with evil. What Kolbe represented was a potent sliver of hope amid the darkness.

*  *  *

Dave returned home, and I continued on to hitchhike across Australia, where I went scuba diving off the Great Barrier Reef, and then on to New Zealand, where I bungee-jumped 290 feet off a deserted canyon bridge. I returned to Colorado and over several months scraped together enough money for another trip. This time I was traveling solo and planned to see Thailand, India, Nepal, and China, then take the Siberian Express through the USSR and into Berlin and beyond. I intended to meet up with a friend in Sweden at the end. I was going to land in Bangkok, strap on my backpack, and just improvise. But a few days before I left, I started feeling nervous. These were beautiful countries but far less developed than what I was used to. I was about to land in a country with crushing poverty, thick jungles, and a population in which few spoke English. My father detected my unease. You don’t need to do this, he told me. I’ll reimburse you for your ticket.

That snapped me out of it. His kind suggestion was a challenge, and I wasn’t going to back out now. Of course I’m going, I told him. And I did.

I was trying to escape a life, and maybe even a future, that felt constricted and predictable. But it wasn’t just about the adventure. I wanted to immerse myself in different cultures. So in Thailand I took a bamboo raft down a jungle river, using a long stick to push off sand bars, because that was how the Thais transported their food and other goods. I rode working elephants through the jungle and trekked up hills to visit the tribes. I smoked a lot of marijuana and even once smoked opium with a shaman once in a tribal den. It was part of the culture, and though I didn’t know it fully at the time, these experiences were the beginning of my wanting to understand the world around me from the inside out. Only then, I felt, could I do anything useful in another country or even my own.

Nothing prepared me for New Delhi, India’s teeming, multiethnic capital. It was early August, and the temperature had to be over 100 degrees, a suffocating heat that seemed to rise from the asphalt. As soon as I left the airport, I knew I was in another world. I rode a tuk-tuk, a three-wheeled minicab, into town, where the streets were mayhem: careening rickshaws pulled by runners, rambling trucks blaring their horns, and lumbering cows on their afternoon stroll down the middle of a congested avenue. Hindus view the cows as sacred, so we were all dodging and swerving, trying not to hit each other or an animal.

Stepping onto the sidewalk, I was immersed in a sweaty mass of humanity. There was no personal space, no degree of separation, and I got a glimpse of abject poverty that exceeded anything I had ever imagined. Beggars without legs dragged themselves along the ground. Men with leprosy bared their ghastly abrasions beneath the hot sun. If someone wanted to sell you something, he was in your face. Only the pickpockets acted discreetly. I walked through the shantytowns and saw families living in shacks and children scavenging in mountains of waste. I had seen the homeless and the hungry in America, but they were nothing like this. America’s big cities have shelters and food kitchens and hospitals. However limited, those cities have resources. In New Delhi, starvation, disease, and neglect were all killers. The city’s most destitute appeared to have no one to advocate for their needs and nowhere to go but the street.

I had never seen anything like it and suddenly felt a jarring, helpless sensation. I had always read or heard that you can’t do anything to assist the shockingly poor, or that giving anything to beggars would only encourage them. But I wondered if that was an excuse for complacency. How better to relieve yourself of any responsibility for a problem than to say the problem is insolvable? The question festered. I was just a backpacker, but I was beginning to see that many people, in this city and elsewhere, were numbing themselves to their environment so they wouldn’t have to confront the suffering around them. The more I thought about our detached view of poverty, the more insane I thought it really was.

There was great beauty and religious depth in New Delhi as well. The majestic Hindu temples were oases of spiritual calm and focus amid the tumult. I had walked into plenty of churches in the States and in Europe, in which you might see a few older folks in the back praying intently. In these Hindu temples, which offered a sumptuous riot of colorful murals, fresco paintings, and cascading waterfalls, numerous faithful of all ages prayed and bowed in front of their deity with complete devotion. They lit incense and performed pujas. Prayer seemed to be the fabric that held everyone and everything together. What peace there was, as I saw it, could be traced to the stepwells of those temples.

I had now been exposed to far more of the world than I had ever seen on television or read about. I knew I was on a search for meaning in my own life but had no idea what trail would get me there.

The link between suffering and spirituality came to a head when I packed myself into a crowded third-class car on a train to Varanasi. The spiritual vortex of India, Varanasi is a place of sacred pilgrimage. Many Hindus travel there to die so they might break the cycle of death and rebirth, in hopes that they will no longer have to endure the suffering of earthly existence. They don’t just wait for death; they celebrate it, blessed to be liberated spiritually and to have made it to their eternal resting place, the Ganges River. I watched as these pilgrims bathed in the sacred water. Family members carried the dead bodies of loved ones, wrapped in white cotton, to the ghats and reverently placed them atop piles of wood. The closest male relative of the deceased, dressed in white, his head shaved except for a short ponytail, sprinkled holy river water on the body as he walked around it three times. Then the fires were lit. With smoke whipping in the stiff breeze, the cremation lasted several hours. When the fires died, the mourners scooped the ash in their hands and scattered it in the swift currents of the river.

Salvation awaits the dead. But what about the living?

I was still processing what I had seen when, days later, I was riding on top of a truck from Varanasi all the way to Kathmandu in Nepal, where I planned to climb up into the Himalayas. Many hikers would fly in rickety double-engine planes to the Solo Khumbu (Everest) Region and start their trek from the dirt runway in Lukla. But I had little money for airfare and believed that hiking through the rain forest would get me in shape for the high altitude. So I trudged through the jungle during a monsoon, drenched by the rains for eighteen hours a day. The muddy, miserable trip took me eleven days, but it was worth it; had I not walked, I would never have stumbled across a village called Kari Kola.

Inside a large communal hut, I dried out, peeled the leeches off my body, and drank some hot tea. Outside in the rain, the villagers were singing boisterously, drinking rice wine, and reveling in a celebration. Members of a British expedition were also in the hut, some of whom had been partying as well. I asked what was going on, and they explained that they were here a year ago, when they had given the village the equivalent of $5,000 toward building a school. Now back on another trip, the Brits were being feted for their contribution.

As I spoke to others in the hut, I learned that the villagers did not have running water or electricity. The children suffered from preventable diseases. Most of the villagers were illiterate, they didn’t have enough to eat, and their huts, made of stone, mud, and thatch, could be wiped out by mudslides. Yet they were celebrating the construction of a tiny school and dormitory for children who would otherwise need to walk hours to get to class. I saw the pride, determination, and hope of a community that had been neglected. I had never seen anything like that in the developed world. It was a revelation.

About a week later and farther up the trail, I met two other trekkers, Scott from Colorado, a quiet mountaineer with dark hair and a thick beard, and Claude from France, a strong, gregarious climber with a giant red beard. After hiking together over some high-altitude passes and viewing the sunrise on Mount Everest, we decided to climb the 20,000-foot summit of Imja Tse, better known as Island Peak because it appears as an island of ice when viewed from a distance. It’s breathtaking but daunting, with steep slopes and narrow ridges, a mountain sometimes used by climbers preparing for Everest. We were required by Nepalese law to have permits and a guide, as well as Sherpas, to carry our supplies. We had none. We rented mountaineering equipment, including crampons, ice axes, and ropes, and then spent two days hauling it to our makeshift base camp at 18,000 feet. At that level the air is quite thin—the highest peak in the continental United States is a little over 14,000 feet—and as the three of us rested in our two-man tent, it felt as though we were stealing oxygen from each other.

The plan was to begin climbing at midnight so we could reach the summit by dawn, which would allow us to return before the sun’s heat increased the risk of an avalanche. But almost as soon as we began, Scott said he couldn’t continue. Then, about a hundred steps later, Claude said he had to stop because his rented boots were killing his feet. He handed me the rope and said, You try it.

It was dark, and also snowing, but I thought I could do it alone. I could follow the pinpoints of light from a Swiss expedition about an hour and a half ahead of me. But I soon lost them in the valleys and folds of the great peak, and I didn’t know which route to follow. After a few hours of climbing, confused and disoriented, I sat down in the frozen darkness, closed my eyes,