Olivia Castillo
Plan II Honors, Physics
Honor Cohort (Class of ’26)
Tommy Wan
Plan II Honors, Civil Engineering, Government
Humility Cohort (Class of ’26)
Drew Wessels
Liberal Arts Honors, International Relations and Global Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, Economics
Honor Cohort (Class of ’26)
I spent this past summer riding a bicycle from Austin, Texas to Anchorage, Alaska with Texas 4000, the longest annual charity bike ride on Earth, to raise money for cancer. Initially, I joined because I wanted to do something meaningful and go on an adventure. What I ended up experiencing really can’t be distilled into a few paragraphs. But I guess here goes.
I already knew America was internally diverse; we all know that. But what I thought I already knew was really a fraction of a percent of what I learned I didn’t know: America’s pain, its contradictions, its unlikely beauty all sit so close together it’s almost unbearable to sit with. But over the course of two and a half months, we tried our best to understand. It didn’t matter where we were – the Navajo Nation; a small hippy enclave on the Oregon coast; an interstate town in the Great Basin of Nevada; the bikeable streets of Portland, Oregon; a sawmill town in the subarctic forests of Alaska – throughout the summer, we met strangers upon strangers who have been gutted by cancer. We met mothers, fathers, brothers, cousins, coaches, mentors, teachers, every kind of person you can possibly imagine, everyone – completely blindsided and destroyed by this disease.
On the Navajo Nation, a reservation larger than the state of West Virginia, a cancer activist told us their story. Between the 1940s and 80s, nearly thirty million tons of uranium ore were mined from Navajo land to build the American nuclear arsenal, most of it by Navajo men who worked without protective equipment, men who often didn’t even know what they were mining or what it would do to them. The mines closed decades ago. However, the waste didn’t go with them. It’s still in the water and still in the ground. More than half of the mines – over 280, by the federal government’s own count — have no funding committed for cleanup, more than eighty years after the first ones opened. As you might expect, cancer rates on the reservation are dramatically higher than the national average, and the government that caused it still won’t cover the cost of getting tribal patients the hundreds of miles to the hospitals they need for treatment.
Across most of the country, instead of uranium mines, we saw sawmills; oil and gas fields; industrial dumping in lakes: different poisons with the same result. Communities with cancer rates far above the national average, and few in power in a hurry to fix it. And somehow despite these bleak settings, we kept finding strangers living through cancer and worse who opened their doors to nineteen college kids on bicycles. I still don’t know how they did it. But we watched it happen, over and over, all 4500 miles to Alaska. In northern California, a woman named Monica cooked our entire team dinner, enough food for nineteen people she’d never met, served with the kind of joy and love that’s normally reserved for family. We found out afterwards that her son had died the year before. He was 21. The same age as most of us sitting at her table. I still don’t understand how she and her husband had the capacity, that year of all times, to feed and house a room full of kids who were exactly his age. Before we left, Monica told us her son loved dragonflies, and asked us to think of him every time we see one. Now I do.
On the Oregon coast, we pulled up to a small restaurant on Highway 101 and asked the owner, a man named Robert, if he had any leftovers he could spare. He ended up giving us more food than any nineteen people could reasonably eat. Yet again we received generosity we didn’t earn. He gave fish and chips, clam chowder, all of it, fresh off the line, worth hundreds of dollars, and refused every offer of payment. He’d spent his whole life on the water as a fisherman, he told us, and understood immediately what we were doing out there. For a while he just told us stories, the kind a man tells when he’s proud of the life he built — stories about trips up and down the Pacific coast, close calls, years spent doing exactly what he loved. Only after all of that did he mention that earlier that same year, one of his closest friends and brother had both died of cancer. I was driving the support vehicle that day, so I stayed behind as the team thanked him and packed up to leave. As I pulled out of the lot, I looked back and saw Robert sitting alone on a bench outside his restaurant, sobbing. We happened to be there that day. But I keep wondering how many days he’d wanted to say those two names out loud and didn’t, because cancer is one of those things people learn to carry quietly, and because admitting it out loud makes you a burden to everyone around you.
I think about these three particular people every day. But those two and a half months with Texas 4000 were full of dozens more stories just like theirs, equally heavy, equally kind, most of which I’ll never manage to write down. After arriving back in Austin in August, with barely a few days to process what felt like a lifetime’s worth of memories, I headed off to the East Coast. In West Virginia, in a town called Beckley, I toured a coal mine and learned what company towns were. For over a hundred years, West Virginian miners were paid in scrip, a currency that only worked at the company store, which meant there was no way to save, no way to leave, no way to do anything but keep working. Children worked the mines starting at twelve. The only real ways out were college, the military, or walking away from a culture your family had lived inside for generations. In the town itself, that same trap just wears a different face now; the coal jobs are mostly gone, replaced by an opioid crisis, food deserts, and whatever low-wage work is left.
I watched it in real time. During a thunderstorm, I watched an active mine let out for the day, miners’ faces still blackened with coal dust, deboarding a train that had come from 7 miles’ worth of tunnels underground. That same trip took me to the Mine Wars Museum in nearby Matewan, where I learned how, in 1921, the federal government dropped bombs from military aircraft on striking coal miners, along with their wives and children, in what remains the largest armed labor uprising in American history.
A few hours away, at Harpers Ferry, I stood in the firehouse where John Brown made his last stand in 1859, sixty years before the bombs fell on Blair Mountain, when he led a raid meant to spark an armed uprising against slavery. People still can’t fully agree on what to call him. Martyr. Terrorist. Prophet. Madman. Sometimes all four in the same sentence. Standing in a room the size of my apartment, I learned American history isn’t the straight line toward justice that we have been taught to keep walking. It’s a messy and violent fight, still unresolved, fought by people who didn’t know how it would end and often didn’t survive to see it. Company towns. Bombs dropped on striking miners. A man executed for trying to end slavery by force. None of that is the version of America I grew up being taught. But it’s the real one.
In that same state, I caught a live folk show, fiddle and banjo, and a full room. West Virginia had just shown me some of the worst things this country has done to its own people. It also showed me some of the deepest loyalty I’ve ever seen, to family, to neighbors, and to a handful of songs that have outlasted every company town and every bomb dropped on that exact ground.
I’ve spent four years at UT now, all of it made possible by the Dedman Distinguished Scholars Program, and in that time I’ve stood at the wall between the West Bank and Israel, refugee camps in Tunisia, moved through megacities and remote villages across Southeast Asia and the Middle East, stood at the Korean DMZ, sat inside NATO headquarters as Russia invaded Ukraine, and spent time with analysts across the American intelligence community in DC. Most of these times I walked away from those places not knowing what I was actually supposed to do with what I’d seen. How can one person even remotely make a dent in structural problems as big as we face?
But somewhere between Monica’s backyard firepit and a bench outside Robert’s restaurant this summer, I stopped being able to look away from one simple fact instead: the government bureaucrat, Robert, Monica, the woman at Window Rock, coal miners in Beckley — none of them can fix the systems they’re standing inside of. But every single one of them is still choosing to be kind within whatever room those systems leave them.
I often think about this quote from John Green: “We are powerful enough to light the world at night, to artificially refrigerate food, to leave Earth’s atmosphere and orbit it from outer space. But we cannot save those we love from suffering. This is the story of human history as I understand it — the story of the organism that can do so much, but cannot do what it most wants.”
John Green may be right. We might not be able to fix suffering. But I realized this summer that people can still choose to give strangers something – time, food, attention, a table, whatever they have – with no expectation of ever getting it back, even while carrying grief that would give anyone an excuse not to.