OUT OF EDEN WALK

Last month marked the 13th anniversary of the Out of Eden Walk.

Late on a January morning in 2013, the ethnic Afar fossil hunter Ahmed Alema Hessan, two skinny cargo camels, and I shambled away from the clay banks of Awash River in Ethiopia—an antique landscape once trod by the earliest Homo sapiens—and began making for the frontier of neighboring Djibouti.

I say late morning because our paid-for camels were never delivered, and we resorted to mooching about villages for last-minute replacements. Nor is shamble a colorful verb. Rare rains had turned the desert dust to glue. For kilometers, Alema and I tottered, slipping and skidding, after our disheveled little caravan, picking up a breadcrumb trail of equipment fallen from our poorly rigged saddles. I recall wondering at the time how a journey so carefully planned for more than a year could end up launching like a Chaplin film.

Four thousand six hundred and seventy-one days later, after having plodded through Eurasia and steamed across the Pacific Ocean aboard a container ship to North

“Where you been all week?” a café barista asked a regular customer at my Americas landfall, the isolated port of Prince Rupert, British Columbia. “Down south?”

“No way!” the woman huffed. She bared her teeth in loathing. “Last time, the Border Patrol interrogated me like a criminal. F__ them, eh?”

“They’re going through some things down there,” the barista nodded grimly.

“Loonie. Can you imagine? Never again with those freaks.”

For several years now, I’ve sensed the geopolitics of the planet trembling underfoot. The old, rules-based international order seemed to be unraveling at the edges. The once unquestioned power of the United States, a global colossus dominating the past century, appeared to be in eclipse, poised at the threshold of a new and still hazy era of emerging multipolarity. The domestic headlines, which I absorbed via my cracked-screen phone while parked in teahouses and capsule hotels in Asia, were even more bewildering. Canceled climate treaties. Neo-colonial land grabs. And lately, masked federal agents stalking American cities, rounding up migrants and shooting citizens. Bread-and-circuses cruelty seemed to be the new brand.

Restarting my walk in Alaska, from where I’ll ramble 12,000 miles south to Tierra del Fuego, I’m naturally getting an earful of this.

“Is it really over?” wondered an Alaskan writer friend. “Are we in decline?”

We were hiking a wild beach. His question seemed posed to nobody in particular, maybe just to the icy wind. He stared out to sea as if the answer lay somewhere out among the grey waves of the Pacific.

These certainly weren’t the lines of questioning I expected to hear in my homeland when I first set out from Ethiopia. Slouching back into a United States I no longer know, during a news cycle fraught with unprecedented crisis, polarization, and uncertainty, I’m not sure how to reply. Who are “we” to begin with? And what is “decline”? I could recall, I suppose, getting lost inside the vast and growing solar farms of China. Or lecture about the costs of an incuriosity that comes with great power. Or more prosaically, share the micro-truth that among all the Turkish farmers, Kazakh geologists, South Korean teachers, Kyrgyz yak herders, and Indian sadhus I’ve interviewed on 28,000 kilometers of trail, very few devoted much thought at all to the United States. Which is to say, welcome to the club. There are no indispensable countries.

All of which brings me back to those early slapstick days of our Great Rift Valley traverse. Plan by all means. (You must.) But count on facing the geography of chance—losing half your vital food supply, say, on a police-impounded camel.

And, finally, remember what the Afar pastoralists say about survival: When you’re lost and thirsty in the desert, don't stop. Don’t give in to the strong temptation to lie down in the filigreed shade of a thornbush. You’ll finish your days there. Keep walking, no matter what. That’s the only chance that somebody looking, even by accident, will see you.