Out of Eden Walk: 13 years on the road and counting

Paul Salopek: Well, it’s as rambunctious and chaotic as a teenager would be. So, I’m just riding it out, Marco.

Well, I had been an international correspondent, working mainly for The Chicago Tribune for many years, based for almost a decade out of Africa. And as print began to implode, I decided to try to do something new, which was to get off the high-speed lifestyle of being a foreign correspondent, often a war correspondent, and to slow myself down. So, back in 2013, and as you mentioned, [the] anniversary [was] just last month, I set out walking from Ethiopia, the Rift Valley of Africa, and the idea was to use deep history as a mirror to reflect on unfolding current events and to do something I call slow journalism, which is to walk through the big headlines of our day at five kilometers an hour. That’s how it all started.

I was based in Johannesburg and was the one-man band, along with a South African colleague who was the administration and office manager of the Sub-Saharan African Bureau. So, I had this ridiculous beat of covering more than 40 countries. I was basically living like a fireman for a little while. You know, if there’s a war in the Congo, that war was going on for years, or an election in Kenya, if there was some kind of desertification issue going on in the Sahel, environmental stories, you name it, I would jump on a plane and go cover these stories. And I had great editors … they let me sink my teeth in. I could sometimes spend weeks, and on occasion even months, on a topic that was important enough to the African communities I had the privilege of covering. In a sense, Marco, what I try to remind my readers is that letting it all go and putting on my walking shoes to walk the Earth was not a midlife crisis. I mean, I was 50 when I started. It was just a refinement of a methodology, deep dives, grassroots reporting, passing the baton, passing the microphone … a procedure that I’ve already been doing for years.

You know, that’s really a good question because I sort of couldn’t … I mean, who kind of comes up with a concept to go walk the Earth? And I certainly didn’t have too many preconceived notions. I was just going to go with the flow. And what I told my colleagues at National Geographic, my editors for whom I’m writing, is that, “I’m going to do this kind of seat of the pants.” Just not looking at the destination, right? It’s really day-to-day. So one of the things that the walk has done personally for me has really put me in the moment, and kind of encouraged me, of course, to plan. I mean, planning is essential, you’d be foolish not to, but also to know when to relinquish plans and to be comfortable with pivoting, with sidestepping, even with stepping back because our ancestors did this as they were walking out of Africa.

Two answers: One kind of an intellectual answer, and then a more emotional one. On the intellectual level, I use a similar idea when I talk to readers about how strange it is to go out and walk [across] continents. Many, especially students — I talk to schools — say, “God, what you’re doing is really kind of lunatic. It’s kind of extreme. Isn’t it dangerous? Isn’t it unusual?” And I have to try to remind them that we have been doing this. We, Homo sapiens, have been nomadic, have been ramblers, right? For the vast majority of our time frame on the planet, we’ve been moving freely across landscapes that change every day. And so it’s natural. What I tell my readers is that what I’m doing is actually harkening back to our norm. And what you generally are doing when I’m talking to you is probably sitting down somewhere, that’s kind of unnatural. The second thing is, how do I look at time emotionally? I don’t know if I’ve spoken about this before, but imagine, Marco, waking up in my shoes, to a brand new horizon, every single morning of your life. What does that do to you? I mean, it could paralyze you with fear. It could inspire you. Often it does both. But you have to do something. So, all you do is take one unmitigated step, another unremediated step and that’s it. That’s the way you make progress: knowing that many of these steps are going to be blind.

You know, that’s a really good question. It’s a natural question, but you know, remember that I was 50 when I started this project. I was pretty much …  my ideas, the way I move through the world, which was also semi-nomadic even back then … I wasn’t like a standard, conventional foreign correspondent. So, on the one hand, I can’t say that I’m a totally different person. On the other hand, I think the walk has taught me certain things about my personality that have kind of smoothed out maybe a few wrinkles. I can be very type A, very competitive, very task-oriented. And I think the walk has been teaching me for years to be more patient with myself and, therefore with others. I think it’s made me a calmer person.

This is one of the things we’re talking about … this notion of this geography of chance. When I took a container ship from Japan, Eurasia, I was thinking that the Americas were gonna be a snap, the Americas, I mean, right, the continent. I would not be dealing with security issues, right? With political turmoil. … And look at the pen around my head. So there it is, another lesson that you can’t really plan too much ahead. It’s good to plan, but be ready to give up a plan. Be ready to pivot. And so, the three years ahead will be something novel that I had no conception of when I set out in 2013.