Doug Peterson remembers coming home from work and walking around to the backyard, drawn there by the joyful sound of teenage laughter, and finding that his son’s friends had set up the family trampoline by the swimming pool.
With a combination of grin and grimace, he would watch the boys do flips and tricks into the cold, blue water.
“I’d be like: ‘Guys, you can’t be doing that. Someone is going to get hurt.’ And three days later, I’d come home and there was the trampoline again,” Peterson said. “We raised our kids to be free thinkers... That’s what I would beat myself up over, the fact that maybe we did too good of a job.”
“Page was a free thinker and he must have thought: ‘I don’t want to be here,’” Peterson added.
It was January 2015 that 17-year-old Page Peterson, the carefree boy who pitched on the baseball field and tore down the slopes on his snowboard, took his own life.
Peterson was so wracked by survivor’s guilt that it took him a year just to find the willpower to get moving, but once he did, the auctioneer from Oregon refused to stop, ultimately turning a rediscovered passion for cycling into a charity ride to raise money and awareness for National Suicide Prevention Month.
This month, he plans to ride from the Canadian border to the Mexican border, a distance of 2,369km.
His wife, Lori, is to follow in a camper van, and cycling clubs, high-school groups and everyday people are to join him as he illustrates that “we are never alone on this journey in life.”
“I read a book about recovery and it talked about exercise, so I dusted off the bike, went out and rode one day. I thought: ‘This was good.’ Then I went out the next day and I started doing some longer distances,” Peterson said.
It was during a talk with Alan Stuart, a friend and one of the founders of apparel company Pair of Thieves, that Peterson expressed the desire to do more.
Pair of Thieves, long active in philanthropy, created a special edition pair of socks that includes the telephone number for the suicide prevention hotline right on the sole.
The brand will also donate US$2 for each pair to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.
Starting the trek a couple of weeks ago, Peterson finds himself striking up conversations with locals in campgrounds where he stops each night.
He talks about how much Page loved to play baseball, how he would ride at breakneck speed down the slopes — how things changed those last few days.
“I could see it in Page’s eyes,” Peterson said. “He was struggling and I could not get anything out of him. ‘Are you OK? Are you sure?’ ‘I’m OK. I’m OK.’ And we knew he wasn’t, but we couldn’t reach him.”
Perhaps in some small way, Peterson’s ride to Mexico will reach somebody else.
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