OUT OF EDEN WALK

Over the past 42 Milestones, I have attempted to query the first random person I encounter with a series of standard questions that hint at human identity and restlessness: Who are you? Where do you come from? Where are you going?

The results have proved revealing in ways I hadn’t imagined.

Almost two-thirds of the respondents so far have been men. (Twenty-seven encounters.) Nine Milestones were logged in areas so remote that I could find nobody to talk to. (I use 6 miles, or 10 kilometers, as my arbitrary radius for an interview.) One interview included comments from people of both sexes. And just nine meetings so far have involved women.

Why the gender imbalance? What’s going on?

As I walk across the planet, I must navigate many physical challenges: harsh climates, border fences, wars, large bodies of water. But often the most powerful obstacles to my progress involve human connection. And these hindrances are abstract, internal, cultural: in this case male-female barriers.

Many women walk away from interview requests. Often they even refuse to approach. Given societal restrictions on mixing with strange men—and my walking partners and I, on foot, scruffy, with loaded cargo animals, are most definitely strange—this is not surprising. Also, I have been trekking through many Islamic countries, often in rural areas: a double door of conservative values. Still, it is revealing that at the dawn of the new millennium, I cannot easily conduct a conversation with half the species.

In the past when a woman declined to talk at a Milestone, I simply walked on to find the first man to survey. I was going to do this again, in this old, old town of Romitan. (The first woman I asked, strolling by with an umbrella against the harsh sun, shook her head and accelerated her pace.) No more. That is artificial. It obscures a cultural truth. From now on, when the first person I encounter is female, and an interview proves impossible, I simply will alert readers of this wall of silence.