The walking wounded

In the winter of 1978-79, a brutal snowstorm hit eastern Oregon. A 30-year-old woman trudged outside through the blizzard, enduring the icy cold with her head down. Though she was bundled in a down jacket, her feet felt like stumps. They had no ­sensation. Her hands felt numb, too. Then she heard a twig snap. “I thought who in their right mind is out in this weather besides me?” she recalls. When she looked up, she saw a ­gorgeous fawn staring at her. The deer wore a blanket of snow across its back, and the encounter heartened her. “It was as though this little animal said to me, ‘Barbara, you can make it.’”

Barbara Jenkins did make it. A few weeks later, she and her then-husband, Peter, finished their walk across America. The walk catapulted the Christian couple into fame and fortune. Their story was featured on the cover of National Geographic. Bestselling books followed, along with TV appearances, radio interviews, and three kids, Rebekah, Jedediah, and Luke. But when news broke of their divorce in 1987, they were forced to step away from the spotlight.

Now, decades later, Barbara is out with a new memoir, So Long as It’s Wild. In the book, she retraces the couple’s cross-country trek, updates readers on what’s happened since, and dismantles the sugary portrait of the Jenkins’ marriage by the Christian press.

Perhaps you remember the Jenkins’ story from the 1970s: Peter and Barbara didn’t know one another when he started his epic walk across the U.S. A Walk Across America chronicled not only his physical journey from Alfred, N.Y., to New Orleans, La., but his spiritual one. Booze and drugs had left him hollow. In Alabama, he attended an event that was wilder than the wildest of parties: a revival. That night, he responded to a call to repent of his sin and accept Christ as Savior.

Barbara says she was attracted to the things of God for as long as she can remember. As a girl, no one in her family went to church, so she walked there alone. Church helped her escape from a tumultuous home life. She had stacks and stacks of Bibles and preferred to read the Bible over other books. In time, she became a social worker, and eventually enrolled in New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary because of her love for Biblical ­history. As it happened, Peter had been invited to stay on campus for a stretch. When Barbara saw him—blond hair, blue eyes, and tattered clothes—she said it seemed like he’d just stepped off a ship from Norway. “He looked like a Viking,” she told me in a recent interview.

The two began a whirlwind romance, and Peter asked Barbara to marry him and finish the walk together. But she didn’t want to carry a 35-pound pack on her back for miles under a scorching sun (or through blizzards). She had no interest in pinching seed ticks off her skin or swatting away swamp mosquitoes. And sleeping in a tent? Not the honeymoon she envisioned. She planned to break things off with Peter after attending one last church service together.

Then Sunday came. At church, a guest speaker named Mom Beall told of Abraham’s servant who sought a wife for Isaac. The speaker quoted a line from Genesis 24:58: “Will you go with this man?” Stunned, Barbara took it as a sign from God. Yes, she would go. After Peter and Barbara reached the Pacific Ocean, they co-authored The Walk West to chronicle their trek from Louisiana to Oregon. Yet they divorced after nearly 12 years of marriage.

Looking back now, Barbara sees how the media and public held her and Peter out as a model Christian couple. And in her recent book, she says they played right into their roles: “We were all smiles for the camera and in front of others.” But behind the scenes, their relationship was fraught with frustration and disappointment.

So Long as It’s Wild recounts Barbara’s most intense moments on the walk, good and bad, but also gives readers an intimate peek into her crumbling marriage. She details Peter’s explosive personality and the verbal abuse she says he unleashed on her. And she writes of their failed attempts to build a life together after the walk.

Much of the tension stemmed from trying to reconcile a restless husband who longed for the road with a homebody wife who wanted to settle into a permanent home. Barbara is aware that her own flaws contributed to the marital friction. “I was … self-righteous and stubborn as an Ozark mule,” she writes in her book. But she blames the ultimate demise of the marriage on Peter’s infidelity. She says she hasn’t spoken to him in years. Peter didn’t respond to my interview requests and hasn’t updated his Facebook page since 2016.

Though So Long As It’s Wild kept me up until 3 a.m., I have to admit I was hoping Barbara would delve more deeply into how she wrestled through the very public implosion of her faux-fairy tale marriage—and how, or even whether, her faith saw her through.

Interestingly, her son Jed explores Barbara’s faith in his own book, Mother, Nature. Jed is a gay man who says he’s renounced the evangelical interpretation of the Bible. Barbara doesn’t agree with Jed’s lifestyle, she says, but simply assures him she loves him, that God loves him even more, and that the story isn’t over yet.

After all these years, does she still interpret the Genesis quote that Sunday in church—“Will you go with this man?”—as a sign from God?

“Oh, absolutely!” she tells me. The heartache that followed wasn’t God’s fault: “Anywhere along life’s path, we can all choose to go a different way.”