In America, some people view driving cross-country as a rite of passage, typically taken by young people on a mission to find themselves and explore what lies beyond their small corner of the world before heading off to college. For 29-year-old Chantz Rivera —a Bronx kid from humble means who acquired a string of odd jobs after high school— going cross-country seemed like a pie-in-the-sky idea, until some startling news changed the trajectory of his life.
Rivera packed some essential items, $250, and began his 3,000-mile journey from the Bronx to San Francisco, but he didn’t have a car. He decided to go on foot.
“I think it was just me wanting to better my life. Be more free, be more adventurous,” Rivera told The Bronx Times.
Rivera grew up in the Gun Hill Houses in Williamsbridge, where he still lives with his father and brother. His family didn’t always have the means to provide for a young urban kid wanting to fit in with the latest trends and at around 14 years old, Rivera began selling marijuana to buy the popular gear all the other kids had. While marijuana is legal in New York State today, prior to its decriminalization, people faced serious charges.
Rivera never did any hard jail time, but slinging weed on street corners got him into a lot of trouble with the law, accumulating a laundry list of misdemeanors. It’s also how he met the mother of his now 8-year-old daughter, Susanna; a daughter he wasn’t aware he had until his daughter’s mother lost custody of her child and pointed to Rivera as the father.
“Then a couple years later, she hit me with a paternity test to go to court. So I went to court, but the COVID thing was happening, so it kinda shut down court for a little bit,” Rivera said. “I was still going to court though, and then when I found out [I was the father], like 2021 or 2022, I was doing visits for a while.”
At the time of his visits, Rivera’s daughter had already been in foster care for several years. The foster agency made Rivera do a drug test, which he failed. While Rivera admitted to smoking marijuana, legal at the time, he vehemently denied ever doing harder drugs. As a result, his visiting privileges were reduced to phone calls, further straining his relationship with his daughter, whom he feels was being turned against him.
”My daughter was having a hard time seeing me because [she] kept saying stuff like, ‘Oh, my [foster] mom said you a bad man. My mom said to not go with you to the park. My mom said don’t go with you to the bathroom’ and stuff like that,” he said.
Not having the proper opportunity to get to know his daughter and feeling like a monster in her eyes, Rivera was left heartbroken and searching for purpose in life. Earlier this year, he decided to join the Army, but even that was a disappointing process. According to Rivera, the recruiter told him he had too many arrests and would not be able to enlist. A second heartbreak.
Rivera needed an escape, something drastic. With the exception of a trip to Florida when he was a teenager and a weekend trip in Washington, D.C., Rivera never set foot out of New York City.
So, on May 31, he started his walk to California.
Lessons from the open road
“I wasn’t in agreement with it at first, but being that he went through a lot of trauma within the past two, three years due to him and the custody battle with his daughter – I think at the end I was like, ‘You know what? You’re a grown man, you can make your own decisions. I’ll support you 100%, just be careful,’” Rivera’s father, William Rivera, told The Bronx Times.
Being frugal-minded, Rivera showered at truck stops, pitched a tent in parking lots and occasionally slept on park benches, getting kicked out of few by security at certain points in his trip. Being a kid from the Bronx housing projects, Rivera traveled with a chip on his shoulder, sure he would encounter some rotten people.
While walking across Ohio, he was approached by a man who claimed he wanted to help and offered to get him a motel for the night so Rivera could shower and sleep comfortably. At this point, Rivera was so impressed by the kindness of strangers, he thought nothing sinister of the offer. He got into the man’s car, they drove to the motel and the man entered the room with a bottle of wine.
Surprised and confused, Rivera said he just wanted to shower and rest, while the stranger insisted he just wanted to hang out for a while. Rivera gave in and went to get his remaining items from the car. When he returned to the hotel room, the man was lying in bed, wearing nothing but his underwear. Shocked, Rivera grabbed his things and hightailed it out of there.
“I feel like there’s way more nice people in this world than bad people, you know? I think it’s the city mindset. Being in the city, you think everybody’s just, like, for himself. [But] walking through the country, people were really nice,” he said.
People gave Rivera food, money and supplies, some of them knowing about his travels via his Instagram page @yo.mula, and others who knew nothing about him, or as Rivera put it, “ they don’t know me at all from a can of paint, you see? They just be looking out.”
He encountered a few other people making similar trips, most notably 52-year-old Robert Cowden who left his home in Oklahoma in April with his rescue dog Enzo. Cowden has suffered from alcoholism his entire adult life. He vowed to stay away from booze while witnessing how alcoholism affected his father, but all it took was one sip in his senior year of high school.
I was just an alcoholic out the gate,” Cowden told The Bronx Times, racking up two DUIs before the age of 21.
Cowden was in and out of recovery since then, suffering a relapse earlier this year that resulted in the loss of his job and long-time girlfriend. He attributes his recent backslide to a broken healthcare system. Cowden was struggling with his weight when his doctor put him on GLP-1s, much like Ozempic. He said the drug wasn’t working and his doctor put him on something stronger with more stimulants, but the drug was expensive and his doctor prescribed him something less expensive, but with even more stimulants.
“And then I kind of twisted off on some harder drugs,” Cowden said.
In a similar search for clarity and catharsis, Cowden set off on his cross-country trip with his 2-year-old spotted pointer mix, Enzo. The two plan to walk to Pittsburgh and then canoe the Ohio River down to New Orleans, and chronicle their distance on a sophisticated website created by Cowden, enzothegreat.com.
“I don’t know anyone who’s fallen as many times as me, I don’t know anyone who’s gotten up as many times as me, and I don’t know how many more chances I got to get up or fall down — but I have hope,” Cowden said.
As for Rivera, he took his inspiration from the 2007 movie, “Into The Wild,” based on the non-fiction book by the same name, written in 1996 by John Krakauer. The book is an expansion of Krakauer’s 1993 article, “Death Of An Innocent” published in Outside Magazine. The book tells the biographical story of Christopher McCandless, a young well-to-do man who, after graduating from Emory University, cut ties with his family, donated his savings to charity and left his material possessions behind to travel cross-country and eventually ventured into the Alaskan wild. However, McCandless’ expedition ended with his death. Rivera is much more hopeful, especially since he plans to stay where the weather is warm.
His supplies aren’t out of the ordinary for a camper: a sleeping bag, a tent, portable chargers, a backpack, a water bottle, plenty of beverages and a wagon to carry it all in. He also keeps several journals where he documents his day-to-day. For footwear, he prefers On Cloud or Nike sneakers.
Currently in Missouri, Rivera’s favorite part of what he’s seen so far was Ringing Rocks Park in Pennsylvania, where people bring hammers and bang on the boulders to elicit a sound of ringing bells.
“ Whatever you wanna do, you could do it. Don’t let the money stop you,” Rivera said. “You just need to take action. That’s what you need to do. Take action.”
Rivera hopes to reach the Golden Gate Bridge by Christmas and his father agreed to purchase his flight back home once he completes his journey.
Reach ET Rodriguez at etrodriguez317@gmail.com. For more coverage, subscribe to our newsletter and follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram!
