Tom Turcich was seventeen when two of his friends died. The promise he made then took fifteen years to keep.
At night, the year he was seventeen, Tom Turcich would lie in bed with a pillow over his face and his fingers pushed into his ears, trying to practise being dead. He wanted to know what the nothing would feel like, and he never could. His mind would not go quiet. There is no way, it turns out, to rehearse the place where the mind stops.
His friend Ann Marie Lynch had died that year. Sixteen years old, a field-hockey player, the kindest person he knew, killed in a jet-ski accident off the New Jersey shore in the summer of 2006. A second friend, Shannon, died soon after in a car accident. Turcich had grown up in an easy, happy house, no divorce, no drama, dinners full of laughing, and death had never once felt real to him until it was suddenly all consuming.
The thing that finally reached him was a film. In a speech class a teacher played a few minutes of Dead Poets Society, the scene where Robin Williams tells a room of boys to seize the day. Carpe diem. Turcich took it literally. If he could be gone as suddenly as Ann Marie, he wanted to have spent the time on something first.
So in that same class, his final year of school, he stood up and said it out loud: he was going to walk around the world. He had read about a couple of men who had tried something like it, Steven Newman and Karl Bushby. Saying it to a room of classmates who would forget by lunchtime turned a daydream into a promise he could not take back.
Then, and this is the part the highlight reel skips, he did nothing dramatic for eight years. He went to college, ran a fraternity, took a degree and a stack of loans. He moved back in with his parents and spent his twenties paying the loans down, saving every spare dollar, drawing routes and reading about visas at the kitchen table. He had a girlfriend of four years he might have married, and he ended it, because he could see the life waiting on the far side of it: the apartment, the sofa set, the slow gathering of possessions that end up owning you. He had made a promise, and a mortgage is a short cut to breaking it.
"I didn't want an apartment or furniture either. In fact, I was repulsed by the very idea of them. There was no greater bed than soft grass in the afternoon shade. A tent below the stars was more gratifying than the finest tin-press ceiling. And what was furniture but vanity?"
He left on the second of April 2015, the day before his twenty-sixth birthday, pushing a stroller full of camp gear down the driveway while his mother stood in the road and cried. A few months later, in Texas, he carried a mange-ridden puppy out of a shelter and called her Savannah. By the end the two of them would have crossed six continents and thirty-eight countries, something close to twenty-eight thousand miles, and Turcich would be the tenth person on record to walk around the world, Savannah the first dog.
He was not built for this, and never pretended to be. He winces a little at the word adventurer. He trained on a stair-stepper and a handful of weekend hikes. He survived his first month on the road with the help of supermarket painkillers. He had packed a camp table, two folding chairs and a Spanish translation of Harry Potter. He lost a few toenails working out what to carry. He needed gloves.
Nothing about it was specialised. No licence, no club, no technique to learn. His days were plain to the point of monotony: wake, walk, find food, walk, find somewhere to sleep, and do it again. Twenty-odd miles most days. Forty-five pairs of shoes across seven years. The country changed around him without pause, and the work never changed at all.
The walk nearly killed him twice. Somewhere in Argentina or Uruguay he picked up a bacterial infection that went undiagnosed for the best part of a year. By the time he reached Scotland it was putting him on the ground; one morning he stood at a mirror and counted his own ribs. His weight had dropped from a hundred and sixty-five pounds to a hundred and eighteen, on a six-foot-two frame, before a doctor in London found the drug that worked. He went home, took seven months to get his body back, then flew to the exact place he had stopped and started walking again.
He had half-expected it to make him into someone larger. Instead he kept meeting people, a shepherd on a Turkish hillside, a child hauling water up from a well in the Peruvian desert, who were braver and kinder and more capable than he was, and who were there simply because that was where they had been born.
There was one day where he walked from a green, easy stretch of Ecuador into a dry, poor stretch of Peru, and watched a whole life turn on which point of that line a child grows up on. People are small, he came to think. A life is shaped far more by where it begins than by how badly anyone wants.
"To know the world, you must exist in it. And to exist in the world, you must accept that you will be wrong, that you will be hurt, and that you will be made a fool a thousand times over."
One morning a boy rode past him in a Turkish village on a donkey, eating grapes, in no hurry to be anywhere. Turcich had walked across continents to be stopped cold by a child who had walked nowhere. A boy, a donkey, the patience to enjoy the grapes. Savannah had been making the same case the whole way. On the worst days, sore and sick of the whole thing, he would watch her, a dog with no destination and no idea there was meant to be one, and try to copy her: put one foot down, then the next, and let how he felt about it be its own weather. "Be like Savannah," he says now, when people ask what the walk taught him. "Take in the moment."
On his last birthday on the road, his thirty-third, walking the final stretch toward home with Savannah at his heel, he set down what the years had given him.
“Foster serendipity. Wander in the unknown. Stray from the routine. New friends and great adventures are out there," he wrote, "but you have to be out there too."
He walked up his parents' driveway on the twenty-first of May 2022. The street was full of people who had come out to see it. Someone had chalked messages along the pavement; there were coolers of beer and water on the verge and a press of friends and family closing in around him. Ann Marie's parents were there.
For three months the glow of it held.
Then, one ordinary afternoon, walking Savannah to the park, it occurred to him that the thing he had aimed his whole life at since he was seventeen was finished, and that the days would keep coming regardless. He went down into the first real depression he had known. Years before, he had lain in the dark trying to feel his way into the nothing on the other side of death. Now he had reached the far side of his one great purpose and found a quieter nothing waiting, the ordinary kind, the kind everyone has to learn to live inside.
"She never seemed so small. A meaty twenty-five pounds, sat on her rump, teeth too tiny to puncture the skin, and years of walking ahead of her."
He was climbing back out of that when Savannah got sick. Her kidneys were failing and there was nothing to be done. In May 2024, almost two years to the day after they finished, a vet put her down, and she spent her last three hours lying on his chest, the way she had in ten thousand tents. He had carried her across Algeria and the Atacama and off a glacier in Kyrgyzstan that nearly took them both. This he could not carry her through. He has said he did not know anything could hurt that much. He still walks every day, an hour or two, wherever he is. It is the part of the seven years he chose to keep.
Where to find Tom
Tom Turcich's memoir, The World Walk, is out now. He's online at tomturcich.com and on Instagram as @theworldwalk, where much of the photography in this piece first appeared.
