Dave Brown's Walk Across America Heads to Ellicott City

Dave Brown has jogged from Atlantic City to San Francisco, back to Atlantic City and back to Sierra Nevada. 

“I’ve logged 8,900 miles [during] lunch," Brown said on the phone Wednesday. At least, that’s how many miles he's counted over the past 30 years.

By Thursday, he had made it to Maryland from New Jersey on his walk across the country in memory of his wife, Joan, who died the summer of 2011 after a fast and furious battle with ovarian cancer.

Brown wants to raise awareness of ovarian cancer. According to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), more than 22,200 women will be diagnosed with the cancer in 2013. Of those, more than 14,000 will die from the disease.

“Ovarian cancer is hard to detect early. Women with ovarian cancer may have no symptoms or just mild symptoms until the disease is in an advanced stage,” according to the NIH. “Then it is hard to treat.” 

Joan Brown, "the love of my life," had an especially aggressive form of ovarian cancer, her husband said.  

In March 2011, she began to feel ill—she went to the ER and was diagnosed with stomach flu. “It’s so typical,” Brown said of the path to diagnosing ovarian cancer. “It’s no fault of anyone … she had the symptoms of stomach flu, and how do you know any better?"

By the end of April, she had received a diagnosis, gone through surgery and was preparing for chemotherapy when the cancer came back. “It was bigger then than it was before … they said either chemo today or hospice today.” 

By the first week in June—just three months after her first visit to the ER—Joan was in hospice. “They said, 'You have a week.'” But after a round of chemotherapy, she rebounded briefly. “For three weeks, she was an energizer bunny,” Brown said. 

“She had friends over, went shopping, got things done around the house, was prepping me … she did everything she wanted to do and wasn’t sleeping.” At first, Brown said, he tried to get her to slow down.

“But what would you do if you just had a week? You wouldn’t be sleeping.” So she continued living. The last week in July, “she just ran out of gas,” Brown said. 

Joan died Aug. 1, 2011.

In the '80s, Joan had given her husband the book US 40 Today. Brown said he was “born and raised a Buckeye,” and for him, U.S. Route 40—Baltimore National Pike in Ellicott City—has always played a role in his life. He has relatives that live all along the road; he watched as its parallel, Interstate 70, was built; and he can recount its history, from its proposal by George Washington to its completion.

And Brown is a walker. “Walking is what I do,” he said. He is vice president of the Liberty Bell Wanderers, as a reformed jogger who has slowed down to become more aware of his surroundings.

Shortly after Joan died, a friend suggested Brown watch the 2009 movie My Run. Not sure what he was in for, Brown found the movie would change his life.

“I thought, ‘What does this have to do with cancer?’” he said. “But I’m sitting there watching it, and [the main character] says, ‘My wife died of cancer.’ It was dead on, word for word, what I had experienced a month before. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. I did both.” 

The movie is the true story of Terry Hitchcock, who decided to run 75 consecutive marathons to bring attention to the plight of single-parent families.

“In one microcsecond”—because of Brown’s background, his recent loss, his history of walking—“in the time you could click your fingers, I knew what I was doing, how long it was going to take, and what route I’d travel.”

Brown was going to walk US Route 40 from Atlantic City to San Francisco.

“I have been planning this for well over a year now,” he said in early March. "I have a three-ring binder with 38 colored tabs, [outlining] 277 days of walking with a map for every day in case my cell phone goes down. 

I’ve been waking up at 3 a.m. every day thinking ‘What did I forget?’ I tried to be like NASA with a backup for everything.”

So far, he has walked 110 miles.

Brown is documenting his journey, which began on Feb. 28, online. Along the way, he is taking pictures at some of the same spots where the authors of US 40 Today snapped pictures. And, he said, the authors of that book were following the path of someone 30 years earlier, taking the same pictures that he had taken. Side by side by side, they will show some of the same places on the national road in 30-year intervals. 

But the pictures, the book, the movie—they are all secondary, said Brown: “The reason for the walk is for her memory and ovarian cancer. Absolutely.”

Dave Brown is scheduled to enter Ellicott City on Sunday.