Grieving Dad Hikes U.S., Preaches to 'Love Life'

By Dale Linder-Altman
The Standard Report

CBN.com – The wind's chilly fingers crept into his clothing, but Steve Fugate pulled his coat tight around his body, tugged his stocking cap below his ears and kept on walking. It was the last weekend in January and South Carolina was icy cold. A misty rain caused ice to freeze high in the treetops. But on an early Friday morning, he set out from the tiny town of Cottageville, and headed to the Colleton County seat of Walterboro where he would spend the night.

Friday’s mist turned into a freezing rain on Saturday, but Fugate headed south toward Florida anyway. What’s a little freezing, southern rain to Fugate? After all, in the winter of 2003, he walked through the northwestern Cascades and was frustrated when police insisted he take a 20-mile ride over Steven’s Pass in Washington because of the risk of avalanches.

“It really bothered me,” Fugate said. “I’m not about riding; I’m about walking.”

Fugate has walked more than 14,000 miles and worn out 27 pairs of shoes in the past five years. He carries a placard above his head with the message: “Love Life.”

Walking is his mission, Fugate said. It began after he lived through an experience that causes Fugate to weep even today when he tells the story.

“My beautiful, 26-year-old son went down on the beach, stuck a gun in his mouth and ended both our lives,” he said.

Stevie was an excellent student all the way through school and college and was never in trouble until just before he died, Fugate said.

In 1999, Stevie had been promised a job in his field of computer engineering in the family’s hometown of Vero Beach, Fla. That kind of job wasn’t easy to come by in Vero Beach, and Stevie thought it was worth waiting for. In the meantime, he went to work in the family business.

Stevie was so confident that the job would come through that he gave up his insurance. Then one night, he went out with friend and got drunk – something that he had never done before, Fugate said.

“My son ran through a red light and hit another car,” he said. “No one was killed, but his car, that was paid for, was completely totaled.”

Stevie had to do community service and pay several thousand dollars in fines.

“The same week that happened, the company he was going to work for lost their contract so they didn’t hire him,” Fugate said. “He had no job, and he was totally devastated. I told him, ‘This is not the end of the world.’”

Fugate, who has always been a dedicated hiker, handed over control of his car cleaning business and its profits to Stevie, and headed for a hike along the Appalachian Trail.

“I told him, ‘I’m going to hike this Appalachian Trail; you’re going to run my business while I’m gone and while you’re doing your probation and your community service,’” Fugate said. “’You take all the profits from the business and pay off your restitution, and when I get through hiking the Appalachian Trail; then you hike it, and I’ll orchestrate your trip.’”

But while Fugate was on the trail, he received an urgent message to call home.

“I was at Blue Mountains in southern Pennsylvania, and my son was doing everything right -- except for one thing,” he said. “He procrastinated on the community service because he was embarrassed about being seen by his friends.”

As a result, Stevie was taken to jail. He took the money from his father’s business to get out.

“He had never been in trouble in his entire life, and he totally and completely panicked,” Fugate said. “He thought he’d lost my business, thought he’d done everything wrong.”

Stevie left his father a note.

“He said he was very proud of me, and I would always be his hero,” Fugate said. “In one of his other notes he wrote that he hoped something good could come out of this, which I thought was absolutely ludicrous at the time.”

But that is what Fugate is trying to do.

“I’m trying to make something good come out of it and this is what I do to maintain my sanity,” he said. “It will never become clinical with me no matter how many times I tell it. I lost my boy.”

The pain of losing a child really does make you go nuts, and is the most powerful emotion there is, Fugate said. He likens it to nuclear energy, and said you can put it on the end of a warhead to destroy, or you can use it in a power plant to provide electricity for thousands of people.

“What I’m trying to do is take that energy and convert it and turn it around and use it – turn it into a nuclear power plant instead of a nuclear warhead,” he said.

Fugate’s grief might be the nuclear force that pushes him, but God has become the directing force.

"I was on my treadmill in my very comfortable office,” Fugate said. “I was training to do the Pacific Crest Trail to help me get over the grief of my son and for my own personal glory when God spoke to me.”

Fugate thought God was telling him to hike the United States.

“He said, ‘Walk across America’ – just that plain and simple, and I said ‘No,’” Fugate said. “And He said, ‘I want you to walk across America.’ I said, ‘I ain’t walking across America. I ain’t smelling car fumes and having people flip me the bird and throw things at me and cuss me out.’ I fought it for three weeks, and then I gave in to it because I knew it was God. Then He told me to wear a sign and put ‘love life’ on it.”

Many religious people have told him that he should put “Jesus Saves” on the sign, but Fugate said disagreed.

“No, that ain’t what God told me to put on the sign,” he said.

He doesn’t tell the people he meets about Jesus. His mission is to save lives. He talks to them about the value of life, about how wonderful it is, yet he gets the message of Christ across everywhere he goes, Fugate said.

“Somehow He always introduces Himself,” he said.

When Fugate is hiking, people often stop, asking him what he’s doing, buying him meals and giving him money so that he can spend the night in a motel every once in a while. The rest of the time he camps.

He goes into schools and talks to the students whenever he has the opportunity. He tells them that life is what you make of it.

“Life is that air you feel on your lip when you wake up in the morning,” Fugate said. “He’s sitting on the bed or in the corner. You’ve got to jump right out of bed and reach over and grab him by the throat and force him to submit to whatever you want to do for that day, and pretty soon life will get used to that and life will do exactly what you make it do. This is my creed.”

Fugate left Florida in March 2003, traveled west to California, up the Pacific Coast and back east along the Canadian border. He reached Maine last fall and then headed south. He spent Christmas with a family he’d never met before who invited him into their home and expects to be back home in Florida sometime in March.

During his travels, he has personally talked five people out of taking their own lives. But all the walking would have been worthwhile if only one life had been saved, he said.

Dale Linder-Altman is a second-year graduate journalism student in the School of Communication & the Arts. She can be reached at dalealt@regent.edu.