Trail Stories - What Would Your Dead Self Say?

At 40 years old, 16 years into a nonprofit career he was good at, Jeff Lewis stood by a hotel pool in Orlando and watched his future arrive — a parade of men who all looked the same, dressed the same, and carried themselves like they'd long since stopped asking questions. He decided he didn't want to be one of them. Within a year he'd resigned and started walking from Georgia to Maine. This episode traces that decision back to its real origin: a friend named Eric, gone in three weeks from a cancer diagnosis at 43, and the concept Bluey and another friend invented at a campsite afterward — your dead self, the version of you who's already lived it all and knows exactly what you should do. It's the framework that got him to the trailhead, through the rocks of Pennsylvania, into a stranger's campsite for bourbon and an unexpected knife scare, and eventually into a memoir he wrote in five caffeinated, tear-streaked weeks. He earned his trail name losing rock-paper-scissors to an eight-year-old. He's kept it ever since, on principle. The full interview with Bluey drops Wednesday on the Hiker Trash Radio feed.