Walking from sea to sea

Jeff Green | Jun 17, 2010

Ellamae Richardson with her guest Dana Meise

Just as the sun was starting to set at the end of a long pre-solstice day, there was a lot of activity at the home of Ellamae Richardson, just south of Sharbot Lake. Members of her family were gathered to say goodbye to her brother, who was preparing to travel back west after a visit.

Just then, a man walked up the driveway and asked for a drink of water. It turned out he had been walking for quite a while.

Dana Meise told Ellamae that he is walking across Canada along the not yet completed Trans-Canada Trail, and he needed a place to pitch his tent for the night, which he ended up doing in Ellamae's yard.

Dana's trip started in May of 2008. By mistake, a friend bought him a plane ticket to Saint John, New Brunswick, so he flew there from his home in British Columbia and then had to take a bus to St. John's Newfoundland, where his trip was set to start.

He walked all summer in 2008, until he reached a small town in New Brunswick. He then returned to BC for the winter, where he works in forestry. In 2009, he picked up where he left off and walked as far as North Hatley, Quebec, and then visited with the Governor General, Michaëlle Jean, and the prime minister’s wife, Laureen Harper, in Ottawa. They are both advocates for the Trans-Canada Trail.

He has ambitious plans this summer. He got an early start in mid-April, and his goal is to walk as far as Windsor, and then head north to Sault Ste. Marie (which may involve some boat travel) en route to his goal of Thunder Bay. “I walk between 30 and 40km a day, which takes from 5 to 7 hours, leaving me time to look around and meet people along the way,” Meise said. As of Monday night, he had walked 5389 km, 16 more than his fellow BC native Terry Fox ran during his marathon of hope.

Although he is raising money for “the Brain Injury Group” this summer (his dad suffered a brain injury some years ago) and has forged an alliance with the Trans-Canada Trails Association, his trip is not fundamentally a fundraising venture. It is rather the fulfilment of a lifetime dream. “When I was a kid, I wanted to be an explorer, but everything had been explored. When I heard about the Trans-Canada Trails project, I thought it would be an idea to walk the entire trail,” he said.

For a while he waited for the trail to be completed, but in 2008 he decided to stop waiting and started his trek. Where the trail is not complete he uses the roads, which he does not like doing. Walking up the fledgling K&P trail, which is slated to join the Trans-Canada Trail when it is completed, proved to be a daunting task because of some open swamps and non-existent bridges, but Meise did the best he could, with the fallback of walking along Road 38 when necessary. He walked from Godfrey to Sharbot Lake on Monday.

Among the few rules that Dana follows is to limit what he asks for from people along the way. He keeps all the food he needs, only asking for water, directions, and, occasionally, a place to pitch his tent. During his off time, Meise keeps a detailed journal, which he plans to turn into a book after his trip.

One thing that he has made note of are the connections between people. He makes use of email and his Facebook page to keep in contact with people and even to deliver messages from people in one part of the country to people living far away. “A lot of coincidental, even serendipitous things have taken place,” he said.

One of them happened with Ellamae Richardson. “When he walked up my lane and started telling his story, I already knew something about it, because my sister in Perth had mentioned him. He met her at Tim Horton's. And my brother lives in Nanaimo, BC where he plans to end his trip,” she said.

Dana Meise plans to complete his trip in 2011, which seems ambitious, but he points out that while the trail in eastern Canada is very winding, it is more or less straight from the Manitoba border to the Pacific Ocean.

He can be followed at www.thegreathike.com