The long walk home: firefighter’s fight for mental health support

Steven Sukkau
Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
Winnipeg Sun

Six kilometers east of Elie, Manitoba, at the 290-kilometer marker, a man with blisters on both feet and shin splints in both legs had to stop walking. Which is not surprising, given he had set out to walk nearly five hundred kilometers across the province in the first place.

The man is Andrew Cherkas, an Aircraft Rescue Firefighter who has spent his adult life running into the places everyone else runs away from. A week into his journey, the one meant to carry him across Manitoba in thirteen days, he found himself limping by the side of the highway, waiting for a ride. He had walked 22 kilometers that day before his legs staged a rebellion. His goal pace, 12 minutes per kilometer, had sagged to 16. His shoes, once full of determination, were now just full of pain.

The number left on his personal odometer: 199 kilometers. The number on his mind: 1977.

That was Preston Heinbigner’s firefighter registration number. Heinbigner, a Winnipeg Fire Department member, died last year, a line-of-duty death that was less about flames and more about shadows: mental health struggles that never relented. Cherkas is walking in Preston’s name, in Preston’s memory, and for the many other Manitoba firefighters who still live with the same invisible injuries. His target is to raise $197,777.77. The obsessive precision of the number is a feature, not a bug: this is a firefighter’s fundraiser, and firefighters like details.

Cherkas knows something about the shadows. In 2021, he was diagnosed with PTSD and nearly lost his life to it. He has talked openly about the darkness, and more importantly, about what cracked it: asking for help. “The people I was afraid would judge or think less of me,” he says, “were in fact the people who became the most supportive. They became pillars I leaned on.”

Which makes the walking both metaphor and method. He started Steppin’, the name of his trek, because he found walking helpful for his mental health. The rhythmic forward motion, the way a long road forces you into small, manageable goals: get to the next mile marker, the next town, the next bend in the gravel shoulder.

That was the plan, anyway. Then came the blisters on Day 2, which opened and then infected. Then came shin splints, and the suspicion of stress fractures in his left tibia. Doctors told him to rest for weeks. His carefully sketched map to September 23 was torn up by biology.

It would be easy to imagine this as failure. It is not.

Because along the highway, people honk their horns in encouragement. Fire departments send trucks to trail behind him and donors click “submit” on GoFundMe pages talks about firefighters and stigma. About how too many still believe that needing help makes you weak. About how the real problem isn’t only culture but infrastructure: the fact that it can take months to get a professional appointment, when someone in crisis needs help today. He talks about the danger of seeing news reports about overtime pay or leave of absence without understanding what they’re masking: the trauma that accumulates, unrelieved.

And so this walk, even if interrupted, is not just a walk. It is a lesson in endurance, a blunt advertisement that says: Firefighters are hurting. Firefighters need help.

What does Cherkas want, when it’s all over? The honest answer: he doesn’t know anymore. His finish line has moved. His body has forced him into uncertainty. He jokes about not being able to answer the “what will you do first” question. Right now, what he’ll do is heal. Later, he’ll find a way to finish.

Because that is what firefighters do. When the plan burns down, they improvise.

And because the truth of the walk is not whether he makes it to kilometer 489 without stopping. It’s whether enough people hear what he’s saying before he gets there.

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