Jimmy Wayne on the set of GAC's "Top 20 Country Countdown."

After a week in which Tennessee wind chills dipped frequently into the single digits, Jimmy Wayne is alive and well and in surprisingly good spirits.

Jimmy took off from Nashville on New Year’s Day on his Meet Me Halfway walk to Phoenix, a challenging effort in which he’ll battle fatigue and the elements as he raises awareness of homeless teens in America. It has been a sometimes lonely experience, he’s mentioned in his daily tweets, but he’s not going it entirely alone. People have left food along the side of the road with his name on it. The Hawk family gave him a place to sleep Sunday night. And one stranger offered goggles to help shield the snow from his face.

“There’s been so many people come out and offer me coffee,” he said Monday morning in a 10-minute webcast from the outskirts of Jackson, Tenn. People “just pull their car up on the side of the road and give me a place to charge my cell phone and, you know, even these goofy goggles here… Snow was gettin’ in my eyes, and I was thinkin’, ‘I need some goggles.’ And about a mile down the road during a stop, [a man] gave me these goggles. There’s so much good out there in this world. I know that sometimes we tend to say, ‘You know, it’s a cruel world’ or ‘the world sucks’ or something. But really it doesn’t. I think when you get out and you really try to promote goodness, it attracts [good people]. You guys have proven that.”

The webcast gave a sense of Jimmy’s experience. Wind noise in the microphone frequently obscured his comments, and he noted that his hands were freezing when he took them out of his Marmot gloves. A reflector patch is affixed to his ski cap to make sure he’s visible to traffic, three supply packs are strapped to his back, and he uses a pair of poles to aid in his walking. Jimmy stopped before crossing the highway when a car breezed by after delivering much of his webcast along a quiet railroad track. In the background was brown farmland and barren trees, signs of the winter season.

Jimmy specifically chose the coldest period of the year to begin his walk because he felt it would have maximum effect. He was homeless during the winter when he was 14 years old in North Carolina, and he wanted to give followers a sense of what it’s like to have to live outdoors. Many radio stations have followed his journey on a daily basis, and he now has more than 10,000 people signed up to his Twitter account. He’s gained as many as 200 followers in the space of just an hour or two as his story gets out.

“What if we generated so much awareness that we got 500,000 people to get involved in this campaign?” he said. “What a difference 500,000 people would make if 500,000 people donated one dollar to HomeBase [a Phoenix agency for troubled teens]. That would make a substantial amount of difference in that organization or [in Nashville’s] Monroe Harding.”

Forecasters are predicting easier conditions ahead. The high in Jackson should reach 50 degrees Thursday, according to AOL’s weather site. And Jimmy is certainly looking down the road.

“I’m on my way to Memphis, Tennessee,” he said. “I can’t wait to get there, ‘cause I know there’s a good rib place there to eat. I’m gonna definitely check that out!”

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