Dennis Godby walked into Seattle’s Pier 62 last month and finished something that took him five years, five separate trips and one open-heart surgery to complete. The 70-year-old naturopathic doctor from West Sacramento had just closed out a roughly 3,450-mile trek across the United States, broken into stages so he could keep treating patients and stay close to his wife of nearly 40 years back home.
Godby finished the walk on September 24 at Pier 62 alongside Rich Saalsaa, who joined him for the final leg, according to the Sacramento Bee. About 20 people walked the final few miles with them, and Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson declared that day Health Equity Day. The final leg covered 760 miles from Bozeman to Seattle.
Five Summers, One Long Walk
Godby split the journey into five sections starting in 2022, limiting each absence to about five weeks at a time so he could remain near his patients and his wife, Wilma, the Bee reports. According to abridged.org, Godby spent roughly a month each summer on portions of the journey. The first four legs ran from Myrtle Beach to Knoxville in 2022, Knoxville to Milwaukee in 2023, Milwaukee to Fargo in 2024 and Fargo to Bozeman in 2025, per Walk USA for Health Equity’s own account of the project.
The toll on his body was serious. Godby had open-heart surgery after completing the first three legs, dealing with severe mitral valve regurgitation that he said could eventually have led to congestive heart failure, the Bee reports. Wilma Godby told the paper she is proud of her husband and admires his heart and his desire to make change — a comment that reads differently once you know what he was walking through physically to finish the trip.
What the Walk Was For
The whole effort was built around health equity — the idea, as Godby put it to the Bee, that a person’s wellness shouldn’t be tied to their skin color or ZIP code. Philomath News described the campaign as an effort to draw attention to how factors like ZIP code, income, education and access to care shape a person’s health. The Wisconsin Naturopathic Doctors Association’s coverage of the walk also noted it touched on rural poverty, the general inaccessibility of health care services and racial inequities…