The heat’s been sweltering. Rain fell for days on end. Blisters plague his feet.
Yet, Phil Deutschle continues to walk. His “daunting” 3,500-mile trek — through 11 states from New York City to the Pacific Coast — brought Deutschle to Terre Haute this week. Since his start near the Statue of Liberty in early June, he’s been walking for nearly two months and still has more than 2,700 miles to go.
He smiles easily, though. The newly retired Salinas, California, high school physics and astronomy teacher, author and world traveler has an inspiration and mission.
Deutschle lost his brother to suicide 60 years ago. Phil was a just 9 years old, growing up in tiny Woodcliff Lake, New Jersey, a town with just 2,700 residents then and no stoplights. His brother was a mere eighth-grader.
PHILIP DEUTSCHLE
Lest anyone think such tragedies couldn’t, or didn’t, happen in small-town America back in the day, they did.
“He was troubled,” Deutschle recalled Tuesday afternoon, while visiting the Vigo County History Center on Wabash Avenue during his Terre Haute stop. “He didn’t think he was worth anything, yet he was a straight-A student and a good athlete.”
Deutschle is carrying that memory, along with drinking water and basic supplies — stored in a lightweight, hands-free trailer that he pulls as he walks. Deutschle aims to raise awareness for the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.
That 3-digit, federally supported helpline — also reachable by texting TALK to 741741 — has drawn more than 5 million calls in since its launch a year ago, NPR reported earlier this month.
Despite the response, awareness of the number’s accessibility definitely needs raised. Just 18% of American adults knew the 988 lifeline existed in a May survey by Pew Charitable Trusts, according to the NPR report.
“I think it’s very valuable that we have this national number that people can call, and someone answers, and not a machine, and offers an ear,” Deutschle said.
Mental illness isn’t a new phenomena, as the personal story motivating Deutschle illustrates. Still, the need for assistance has heightened through the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2021, 5.5% of U.S. adults (14.1 million people) experienced serious mental illness in the previous year, according to a report by the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Even more sobering were the number of American adults who’d seriously considered suicide — 12.3 million, or 4.8% of all surveyed.
Retired California teacher Phil Deutschle is walking across the country this year to raise awareness for the 988 Suicide and Crisis Helpline. At each of his stops along the way, Deutschle paints watercolor pictures of local landmarks, like this one he painted of St. Benedict Church in downtown Terre Haute during his stop here Tuesday.
“I think one of the things that COVID taught us is that people are in distress,” Deutschle said. “Most of the people who were depressed during COVID were depressed before COVID, but then we’re coming to grips with it. It’s a national crisis.”
The concept of a transcontinental walk, as a tool for promoting the 988 helpline, isn’t uncharacteristic of Deutschle. After graduating from the University of California Northridge, he served two years in the Peace Corps in Nepal, and Deutschle captured that experience in his 1986 book “The Two-Year Mountain.” He’s worked as a teacher in Botswana (the subject of Deutschle’s second book “Across African Sand: Journeys of a Witch-Doctor’s Son-in-Law”), Denmark, Bolivia, the Navajo Nation and finally Salinas High School and Hartnell College in Salinas. He’s also climbed the Himalayas and bicycled across the U.S. and along the Pacific Coast.
Though he’s a licensed automobile driver, and has driven students and friends on trips, he’s never owned a car nor wanted one. “I’ve always lived within walking or bicycling distance from the schools where I have taught,” Deutschle said, “and this car-free lifestyle has (for me) way more advantages than disadvantages.”
So, this coast-to-coast walk fits his style. It represents both a push for 988 awareness, as well as a “do-something-big” retirement gift to himself.
“When I told a friend that I’m walking across the country, he said, ‘Well, of course you are,’” Deutschle said, grinning while seated across a table from the bust of Terre Haute poet Max Ehrmann on the History Center’s third floor.
The 69-year-old wears a serene smile, surrounded by a peppered-gray beard, spectacles and a ponytail emerging from a safari hat that bears a map of America.
Though his globetrotting lifestyle had never taken him to Terre Haute before, he arrived already familiar with one of its most famous native sons.
Apartment buildings became an artistic vision for Phil Deutschle, a Californian who is walking across the U.S. to raise awareness of the 988 Suicide and Crisis Helpline. He paints watercolor pictures of local landmarks along his journey.
“Eugene Debs has been a hero of mine since I was in school. I wrote reports about him,” Deutschle said. “So, I knew about Eugene Debs. I did not know about the Coke bottle.” Terre Haute, of course, is the birthplace of the contour Coca-Cola bottle, designed by Root Glass Company employee Earl R. Dean in 1915.
Deutschle absorbed a full measure of Terre Haute legends during his visit to the Vigo County History Center, which he praised as “very well laid out.”
And, as he’s done his previous stopovers on the walk, Deutschle painted watercolor pictures of local landmarks. Here, he painted images of St. Benedict Church, grain silos and apartment buildings.
His wife, fellow retired teacher Kathy Fugitt, flew in to spend time with him in Terre Haute. Their house in Salinas is two blocks away from the birthplace home of that California city’s most famous native son, “The Grapes of Wrath” author John Steinbeck. The couple’s daughter, April, is an actor 110 miles north of Salinas in San Francisco.
From Terre Haute, Deutschle is headed west into Illinois — Marshall, Greenup, Effingham and beyond.
At any given time, about 20 people are walking across the country for a gamut of reasons, The Associated Press reported in 2013. One of those transcontinental walkers cited in that story a decade ago was Denver, Colorado, resident Jonathon Stalls. It was a journey to heal mentally for Stalls, who later wrote his own book, “Walk: Slow Down, Wake Up and Connect at 1-3 Miles An Hour.”
“The walk was a transformational, life-altering event,” Stalls said via email Thursday. “It taught me — through 242 days of unhurried movement — how walking can be legitimate medicine.”
Deutschle has completed almost one-fourth of his trek. He’s walking 20 to 30 miles daily. He spends some nights in hotels, but also camps — the latter of which he’ll do more often in Western states, where camping-friendly federal lands are plentiful. He expects to reach the Pacific Ocean in November, with his goals met.
“I want to tell people about the 988 crisis line. It’s a celebration of my retirement. It’s an adventure,” Deutschle said, peering out the museum window overlooking Wabash Avenue. “And an adventure is when you don’t know what’s happening each day. I didn’t know I’d be coming to this museum.”
