When Joshua Nathan first suggested walking across Kansas and filming a documentary about the experience, he said to friend Patrick Ross, “If you agree to it, you can’t back out. You’re either in or you’re out.”

Ross was in. The two shook hands on it in their Los Angeles kitchen and that was the beginning of a journey that would culminate in a feature-length documentary. The working title is “Kansas: An Eclogue.”

In 2015, Nathan and Ross traveled by train from Los Angeles, California to Garden City, Kansas to begin filming the people and places of their home state. The duo finished their trip seven weeks later in Lawrence. Now they are in the final phases of production and hope to premiere their film next year.

Nathan and Ross are native Kansans and University of Kansas graduates. Nathan’s degree is in filmmaking. Ross, whose degree is in human biology with a minor in business, describes himself as a “nontraditional filmmaker.” They live and work together in Los Angeles.

The idea for the trip was born out of Nathan’s mission to walk across Kansas.

“I had always wanted to go on a long walk of sorts — be a nomad for a spell and try it out,” Nathan said. “People, I think, convinced me that I was a little looney so I never did it.”

But the idea remained — waiting for the right kindling to spark the journey.

In 2014, Nathan was accepted into Werner Herzog’s Rogue Film School. At an event, Herzog told his student’s, “If you want to be a filmmaker, you need to walk on foot. When you walk on foot, you learn the hearts of men.”

Nathan said he and Ross had talked previously about filming a Kansas-centric documentary.

“This excited me and reignited that fire that I’d had earlier,” Nathan said.

“In the past, Pat and I had talked briefly about doing some sort of documentary on Kansas. And so I took this idea of walking, and I remember sort of accosting him in the kitchen. One day I said, ‘Pat, I have this idea. What if we walked across Kansas?’”

The two made plans to return to Kansas to journey through the heartland with camping and camera gear in tow. They began their walk at the 1,280-acre Lake Scott State Park in Scott City.

“The only real training we did before we left L.A. was we walked from our house in Echo Park to the beach, but we had maybe 10 or 15 pounds of weight on,” Ross said. “It was a 12-mile walk.”

Otherwise, the two conditioned themselves on the road. There was no practice run.

The trip certainly came with difficulties. The land itself seemed to challenge the filmmakers — as if to question their decision to leave Kansas and return with big-city ideas and equipment. They had to pay their dues.

Their first stop didn’t go as planned. It ended with the two of them passed out from fatigue by U.S. Route 83. The sun was setting on them. Overnight temperatures would be in the mid-30s. They had been walking for hours into a 30 mph headwind.

“That first day, I was like, Why did I let Josh talk me into this?” Ross said. “We were miles away from where we thought we would be and seriously dehydrated.”

The duo had been dropped off the previous night on the east side of the lake and spent their first full day walking in cold and windy conditions. They ultimately wanted to get to Monument Rocks in Oakley. After half a day of walking, they were still 16 miles from their destination and were forced to recalculate.

Budgeting for about 10 miles of walking a day, the two headed out of the park toward Keystone Gallery. Tired and sore, they decided to take a 20-minute break and fell asleep.

Earlier that day, they had spoken by phone to Barbara Shelton at Keystone Gallery. They were looking for a ride since they were so far of course and the day was escaping them. They also needed a place to camp. The people at Keystone Gallery told them they’d help them figure it out if they could get themselves there. So the guys kept walking.  At some point, they had to take a break. They laid down to rest their aching shoulders and fell asleep. If Barbara Shelton hadn’t gone looking for them at dinnertime, they would have been in a bind.

Shelton went out looking at the end of the day.

“We heard this angelic voice say, ‘You guys want a ride?’” Ross said.

And so they survived their first 24 hours on the open road.

The most they walked in a single day was 12 miles, though there were days they didn’t walk at all. Some days, they opted to get rides from people who heard about the trip through friends or online. None of the rides were pre-arranged — certainly not the one that put them in the back of a sheriff’s vehicle in Barton County.

A sheriff showed up to check on them and they asked him, as was their right, to get a ride to the county line. The officer obliged and they took a load off in the back of his squad car.

Every day brought a new adventure and a new challenge. They didn’t have a strict itinerary because they wanted to be able to move freely with whatever each day presented them.

“For me, it was really great to get out to the parts of the state that I had heard of but had never been,” Ross said. “Spending the night at the friary outside of St. Fidelis, camping out in people’s yards with their watchdogs watching over and protecting us as some far off thunderstorm is erupting — you know, genuine, special moments that you don’t get to experience much in your life.”

Both men said they felt overwhelmed by the interest of others in their project and the generosity that ensued.

“We were taken in by some pretty unexpected people and we were taken in by some people who, as far as they’re concerned, would probably be pretty happy if California fell into the ocean. There was an openness that was somewhat unexpected,” Nathan said.

Ross and Nathan recently received a grant from Humanities Kansas that will help them finish their film. Ross was back in Kansas this month working with Humanities Kansas and giving talks in Lawrence, Hays, Wichita, and Garden City about the documentary. He spent an evening in the Rhatigan Student Center at Wichita State earlier this month telling stories from the trip and discussing the importance of the humanities with a group of panelists.

“We have this amazing opportunity to get out and talk to people about Kansas and the subjects that we try to surmise in the film,” Ross said.

Nathan said the documentary is a labor of love. It’s the hardest thing he’s ever worked on. But they’re getting close to the finish line. He said they are determined to finish in 2019.

“It takes so much money to complete a film and to shoot a film, and if you don’t have it, then you have to embrace time,” Nathan said.

Ross said production is a time-consuming yet rewarding process.

“At every point of this project, just at the point when we seem to wrap our minds around what this film is, it keeps surprising us and opening a new window into the state that is really exciting as a filmmaker because that means you have a worthwhile project,” Ross said.

The duo said they’re looking forward to the day they can present the film to the people of Kansas and hope to have their premiere this summer.