A message from the desert isn’t lost on Ted Koppel

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To Tom Blomquist, survival means many things.

There's the bigger picture of surviving the cancer he was diagnosed with a year ago. It still controls all that he is able to do. Though the prognosis now seems favorable, each day brings new questions as he analyzes pains and changes in his body's capabilities … is the failing eyesight just part of aging? … are the headaches just a side effect of the radiation? … or could they be signs that the cancer is back?

All of these things he must balance with the requirements of surviving each day in a dilapidated trailer in the middle of the desert, where he has no running water and just enough electricity (from a few borrowed solar panels) to power a few small lights and a laptop computer. He lives in this place by choice, as we've chronicled previously in the Nevada Appeal.

Against all of this, he must also tend daily to the survival of hope. When that is gone, he realizes, all is lost.

To this end, he has relied on the radio, on books and on his many friends.
One friend he never met was Leroy Siever, a journalist who died one week ago from cancer.

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As he pondered the conversation, many thousands of people around the country were doing the same thing. And hundreds of them were going to his Web site, www.getthisshirt.com , and clicking on the link that said, “Tom's History & Who Is This Crazy Bastard Anyway?”

He even sold a few shirts.

http://www.nevadaappeal.com/article/20080822/OPINION/30989/1029&parentprofile=1061