Lee the Horse Logger found slow wagon shrank tumor

Lee the Horse Logger likes to say that what we all need most is to slow down. What he did, though — how he saved his own life — was to get up and go.

Have you heard of Lee? He's made national and even world news for inching across America at 3 miles an hour in a horse-drawn covered wagon.

A Ph.D.-dropout-turned-rancher, Lee Crafton started his pioneer odyssey three years ago. His Montana ranch was sold out from under him, so he took his life savings of $75 and a couple log-pulling horses and set off to see America.

He has rolled and bumped to the East Coast and back, plus down to the Southwest. Seven thousand miles and stories later, he's now in Spokane.

If he can get his 50-foot-long horse team and wagon over Stevens Pass — how to do that safely is currently being negotiated with the state highway department — this modern-day Thoreau plans to clip-clop into Seattle within a month.

What I like about him is his utter lack of agenda.

"I'm not here to raise money or your consciousness. I'm not protesting or trying to convert you. I've got no message whatsoever," he said by phone last week from Mead, Spokane County, where he was camped in the parking lot of a ranch supply store.

But what grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me was the part of Lee's story that isn't an old-time curio. It's the reason he hit the road.

He's got cancer. Rather, he had cancer. Lymphoma, with a growing tumor in his neck.

When he got the diagnosis, in 2005, he didn't know what to do. He was leery about chemotherapy or radiation — "where they poison the piss out of you," as he puts it.

He didn't have health insurance anyway (still doesn't). So he went for naturopathic herbal treatments, and, believe it or not, the pioneer life as his own way of slowing down to take on his cancer.

He started taking chaparral, graviola, plantain and a couple dozen other herbs with alleged cancer-fighting attributes. And then sat on a wooden seat and watched America roll by, at 3 miles per hour.

Only it didn't roll by. It rubbernecked him, stopped him, quizzed him, invited him into its living rooms. Befriended him. Accounts in small-town newspapers often note that he "talked to 100 people by 10 a.m.," or "met most of the town in an afternoon."

It's been a revelation. He's met tens of thousands of people. Some became fast friends. One of them, Cindy Harff, said she saw Lee's wagon "coming down Route 30" in Pennsylvania and she hasn't been quite the same since.

"There's something about him that makes you stop and say to yourself: 'What am I doing with my life?' " she says.

"Being out here, in this community, is part of my treatment, of how I take care of myself," Lee, 48, told me. "The traveling takes a physical toll — I've gone through minus 36 degrees on up to 106. But if you're unhappy and you're under stress, you're not going to get well."

At some point, six months or so along, he could feel the tumor loosen its grip. It started to shrink. The pain eased.

He's now cancer-free, he says.

This is the part where he asked me to issue an all-caps bulletin, for when he arrives in Seattle: LEE THE HORSE LOGGER CANNOT CURE YOUR CANCER. He says cancer sufferers come up to him all the time wanting to know his secret. What's his cure?

There's no magic potion. Only this:

"What the cancer did is it kicked me in the ass," he says. "About all I can say is it woke me up. It got me doing things I should have done years ago."

It kicks you in the ass. Two weeks ago my dad got the news that he has bladder cancer. Last week he had an operation. Now he has a hole in his bladder and this week he learns what's next, whether it's chemo or radiation or God knows what all.

My dad is 80. He lives 2,000 miles away.

Lee said so long (actually he said "yee haw"). He wanted to get back to his horses, his wandering, his new life.

It's no 3-mile-an-hour wagon train, but I booked a flight to go see my dad this week.

That horse logger's got more of a message than he lets on. Sometimes to slow down you do have to get up and go.

Danny Westneat's column appears Wednesday and Sunday. Reach him at 206-464-2086 or dwestneat@seattletimes.com.