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WW presents “Distant Voices,” a daily video interview for the era of social distancing. Our reporters are asking Portlanders what they’re doing during quarantine.
As a freelance photographer, Chris Nesseth is used to traveling long distances on foot. As he recently found out, though, walking 300 straight miles takes another level of stamina entirely.
Last year, Nesseth's sister and her fiancé decided to walk across the United States, from one coast to the other, as an act of fundraising for their mother's cancer charity, Time in a Bottle. Nesseth decided to join them for the stretch from Albuquerque, N.M., to Amarillo, Texas.
"In my head, I felt I could do it because I walk 10-plus miles all the time with my camera downtown, so I thought, 'This will be no problem,'" says Nesseth, a WW contributor. "I could've been more prepared, to say the least."
He ended up making it to his end point—and he's turned the experience into a photo book. Blistered Feet chronicles the trip through 100 photographs from the (literal) road, including makeshift campsites and abandoned towns along Route 66.
In this conversation, Nesseth describes walking along highways, sleeping under overpasses and on private land, and the people they met—or didn't meet—along the way.
Preorder Blistered Feet here.
See more Distant Voices interviews here.