Paul Salopek: Basically, it’s some iteration of, “Who are you?” “Where do you come from?” and “Where are you going?” over and over and over again.

Yes, they do. Of course, that’s one of the common questions, as well. There are questions about my well-being and logistics. People are curious about my equipment. People are wondering how I manage shelter. All these things that are repeated. Even my readers ask these same questions, too. So, this small talk that you mentioned kind of lubricates the first interactions that gets into hopefully deeper and more meaningful conversations.

You know, now that you ask, I haven’t really thought about, do I have a method? Like anybody, I guess I do, maybe even a subconscious one. If I’m moving in the early part of the day, I can engage with people very superficially. I can say, “Hello, how are you?” You know, “Nice day,” etc … [things] you’d say to a neighbor as you’re walking by their front yard. But, if it’s getting later in the day, and my walking partner and I are starting to look for shelter, and we might need a little help, I can … stretch that introduction out, that shallow greeting, into something much more deeply: “Hey, what are you doing? What kind of activity are you engaged in right now?” And that turns some chitchat into a more hefty conversation. And I can basically share as much about my journey, calibrate that basically to arouse curiosity to the degree I wish to have a deeper connection with the folks.

People generally ask the same sort of questions. I mean, you know, there might be farming cultures … when I’m moving through rural areas … people have more time, obviously, to talk. So, that’s nice. The questions can be more varied and go into questions about my country and my project. Whereas in urban areas, people tend to be busier and are moving between point A and point B on a sidewalk, so they could be more rushed. But, something I’ve learned to do is to share the geography of my trek, depending on where I want the conversation to go.

When people say, “Where do you come from?” I sometimes say just the last village or maybe the last town. And that’s kind of extraordinary enough. Walking any distance these days is kind of unusual. And that will create a certain, “Oh, wow, that’s far.” And, “Where are you going?” … “I’m going to the next village up ahead.”

I don’t often say “from Ethiopia.” I just walked here … because you can imagine that kind of question that would then open up, right? As storytellers, if I sense a story is unfolding with the people I’m meeting, then I will share, “Hey, I just walked here from Ethiopia.” And that sparks a sense of wonder and curiosity that leads to, again, the kind of conversations that we can have a back and forth about their lives, too. 

As I’ve gotten older as a reporter — and this is maybe not something that mainstream journalists do much — but I feel that if I’m going to be asking somebody about their story, they deserve to know something about my story. So, it becomes much more equal and not just this kind of harvesting other people’s stories. So, I answer as honestly as possible everything people ask of me.

Yeah, it does. It’s huge. Not having the language is an enormous filter. In fact, it is the biggest filter in my project. In which case, I have to rely on my walking partners, whose approaches to strangers, at the beginning at least, when we begin walking together for the first time, might be different. They might be a little bit more careful or more wary of approaching strangers; whereas I’m, by this stage in my life, quite open, you know, I’ll walk up to anybody. So, I try to encourage my walking partners to kind of not be too shy. And also gender issues, right? Imagine I’m a guy. I’m a man of a certain age. I have an identity. I am a white guy, right, which comes with all this privilege and also this kind of un-erred power. And you’re walking through communities where there are gender divides between sexes, culturally or even religiously. I have to be very careful in the way I approach women, if I can approach them at all. So, that’s when it’s useful to have a woman walking partner, right? Then you can address the entire horizon of humanity, not just half.

Oh, absolutely, yeah, actually quite frequently. If people ask me for my contacts, I generally give it to them, as a given. If I’m going to engage them in a conversation, where I’m actually gonna maybe include their voice in the braid of storytelling of the Out of Eden Walk, then I absolutely give them my contacts. It’s actually required, because I’m gonna ask for theirs, to be able to go back to them for fact-checking. I have emails and phone numbers in 21 countries worldwide. And these people often stay in touch. I met an ethnic Tibetan guy in a very remote part of Sichuan [province in China], and he’s still checking on me to see where I am, quite frequently, and I check on him. So, this kind of glancing, ricocheting off strangers as you’re walking across the world can lead to these very long, kind of, in the past it would have been letter writing, but now it’s so easy just with your thumb and your phone that we send these little notes back and forth to each other. It’s quite nice, I like it.

Yes, yes. I don’t want to exaggerate, but I would say that’s almost daily with me. I meet people who are often very kind and very curious about the world. You can tell they’re people who would make a good neighbor. As the years go by and I say “Hello, hello, hello” to more and more people, I’m also saying “Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye,” Carolyn, to many more people. And I must say it does not get easier.