Out of Eden Walk: Walking the DMZ

Paul Salopek: Well, like you, I wasn’t aware of it until I started doing a little research. I thought it was all a land border. But, the Han River is one of the major rivers in Korea. It leads upstream to the South Korean capital of Seoul. So, it’s always been very strategic. And where we kind of met it, on foot, it’s up to two kilometers wide (1.2 miles) with the hills of North Korea kind of shining green on the north side. So, we followed this waterway for about 40 miles.

Yeah, a lot has been written about how the DMZ has been kind of rewilded for 70-plus years. Since it came into being back in 1953, people are generally not allowed to go there. So, it’s kind of gone back to nature. It’s become a very strange kind of war zone, ecological preserve. And scientists say that it harbors up to 6,000 species of wildlife, including 100 endangered species. There are cranes in there. There are bears in there. There are martens. There are eagles. In our walk along the watery part of it, we saw black-faced spoonbills, an endangered waterbird. We saw water deer. We saw flocks of seabirds. It was quite amazing.

You know, Carolyn, to be honest, I was expecting more people. From what I had read and seen in movies, I thought there’d be a lot of military personnel kind of peering at each other with binoculars or what have you. But it wasn’t the case. At least on this stretch that we walked. In the course of two and a half to three days of walking, we passed one truck with some young South Korean recruits in it. And then we went through one checkpoint where there were some young soldiers with weapons, and that was it. Otherwise, it was pretty quiet. Again, almost like walking on a nature trail, albeit next to bunkers and tank traps.

Yeah, I was surprised. So, we’re walking along this kind of embankment, and there are these signs in Korean. And I said, “What do they say?” They’re facing the North side. They’re not facing our side. And my walking partners read them and said, “Well, these are kind of welcome signs to any defectors who have the strength and the wherewithal to swim this river.” We’re talking a little over a mile, pretty stiff current. And it’s a big river. If they make it up onto the South Korean embankment, they presumably walk to where these signs are. There’s a big button there that they can mash, and it sets off some sort of notice so that South Korean military officials can come and open a door and welcome them with water and food.

Not many because, in recent years, the North has really cracked down on security. Although, in South Korea right now, I’m told there are about 30,000 or so North Korean defectors living.

You know, I’d never been to South Korea before this walk. So, I had the typical kind of vague associations and stereotypes, like K-Pop culture, the lights of Seoul city. You know, a very successful, booming economy, very innovative people. And on this tiny little hamlet adjacent to the DMZ, again along the river, there was this octogenarian woman crouched under a crab apple tree, handwashing her laundry, using well water. It was like stepping back in time. Most of her hamlet was depopulated because there has been the same rural-to-urban migration, the exodus from the countryside to the capital that I saw in China. We asked her, “Well, how is it, you know, living next to here?” And she kind of looked over her shoulder and said, “I don’t know. I never think about it anymore. I’ve been here most of my life, and I’m just kind of a farmer.” Yeah. She was not fazed at all.

This is something that also was a bit new to me. So, I always had this kind of imagining that there are these sister countries who are kind of like circling each other, daggers drawn, one of them nuclear-armed — the North — and desperate at some point to kind of get back together to become a whole Korea again. But I quickly discovered, Carolyn, and it was a surprise to me, especially among the younger generation, when I would ask them about these geopolitical issues, about your neighbor to the north … people just shrugged. Younger people had other things on their minds. They tried to make a living. You know, it’s a very hyper-competitive economy. [It was] almost like they had to stop and think, “North Korea, yeah, that country over there.” They did not think of it as part of the former Unified Korea. I think too much time has passed, is what my Korean friends have told me. And fewer and fewer people believe in reunification.

You know, the potential is there, but the sense that I got is that not too many South Koreans that I met had that kind of lingering at the forefront of their mind these days. It seemed almost like foreigners were more concerned about it than the South Koreans themselves that I met.