One man, dog and donkey on a mission

I can remember when my friend Drew first burst into my room. I was busy on my computer, and I wondered what the awestruck look on his face was for.

"You have to go to Omaha!" he said, nearly out of breath.

"Why?" I asked.

"Eric the Donkey Guy!"

"What?"

On a visit home to Omaha, Drew had run into a man on the side of the road with a dog and a donkey. That's right, a donkey. Somehow Drew had gotten the man's phone number and found out he was walking from Ohio to Seattle to talk to Bill Gates about education reform.

"Are you high?" I asked.

"I'm dead serious," he said.

So, I called "Eric the Donkey Guy," a.k.a Eric Sheets, left a message and got a call back several days later. After a brief discussion with the Rockford, Ohio, native about how awesome our name was, Sheets told me he would be stuck in Omaha for a few days because his donkey had been "locked up" for biting a little girl. In the meantime, he told me to visit his Web site, milesofsmilesforever.com, to read about his journey. I was still skeptical.

When I went to his site I was greeted by a badly photoshopped stickman revolving around the screen. The site had a mission statement, a GPS tracking log, even a blog and photo gallery. Most importantly, there was the total distance of the trip, "MapQuest: 2,276.33 miles of smiles."

Sheets called me again a few days later, and we had a few conversations before he was able to rescue his donkey and leave Omaha. We agreed to meet up along Highway 92, north of Lincoln. He'd be walking.

The trip took me through downtown Seward, a picturesque part of Nebraska with the City Hall and Dairy Queen only blocks from each other. Single cab pickup trucks lined the streets. It couldn't have been a nicer afternoon.

I rolled down my window to get a better look at the array of old two-story buildings from another era that dotted the blocks within my view. I continued north along Highway 15, which eventually intersected Highway 92 about 20 miles north of Seward. Several smaller tractors shared the single-lane highway. Everyone waved.

Shortly before I reached my destination, I got a call from Sheets. He asked me if I might have passed him. I told him, no, I wasn't quite there yet. He seemed relieved, saying that he had to step off into a cornfield to "relieve mother nature," and he just wanted to make sure I hadn't gone too far.

I reached the intersection and headed eastward, minutes away from finally meeting the guy walking across the United States with a dog and a donkey. I suddenly became nervous, expecting to spot the subtle scene of a man with two animals alongside the road at any second. I tried to imagine what they would look like from afar, but I couldn't. I mean, could you? Finally, just when I felt I'd been driving too long, I saw a large, colorful mass lurking alongside the road in the distance. It looked much too large to be a man and two animals. My gaze fixed as I drove another mile, closing in on the indistinguishable object on the side of the road.

I slowed down and couldn't help but smile so big I could feel it in my ears. There he was: a man with a dog pulling a donkey with a heaping mass of equipment strapped to its back. I laughed in disbelief, honked and gave him a thumbs up. Don't ask me why I gave him the thumbs up.

I pulled off the road into a small, dead patch of field across the highway. I turned off my car and composed myself, realizing this was actually happening. By the time I got out, Sheets was already there, ready to shake my hand. I was surprised how young he was and how healthy he looked for someone walking from Ohio for the past three months. He was barefoot.

His dog and donkey trailed behind him. The two animals were linked by a thick strand of blue rope, one end attached to the donkey's bridle and the other to the dog's collar. The dog, curious about the new visitor, came over toward Sheets and me, pulling the bashful, reluctant donkey behind it.

ericvanwyke@dailynebraskan.com