OUT OF EDEN WALK

The inaugural story of the Out of Eden Walk was logged before I took my first step out of Africa: On a hot, muzzy day in January 2013, I stood atop a large mound of goat dung in the village of Herto Bouri, in Ethiopia, and proceeded to snap a 360-degree panorama photo of the surrounding landscape, shoot a minute of video, tape a minute of ambient sound, and query the nearest human being—in this case, an ethnic Afar camel pastoralist named Idoli Mohamed—with three stock questions: Who are you? Where do you come from? Where are you going? (Idoli’s answer to the third question, back in those innocent times: “Maybe, after we become educated we can all go . . . Anyplace. All over the world. America.”)

In my nearly 13 years of vagabonding since, I’ve paused every hundred direct-line miles along my global trail to replicate this exact same exercise. I call these narrative waypoints “Milestones” and, so far, I’ve accumulated more than 160 of them.

The walk’s Milestones will eventually form a systematic gallery of faces and landscapes across the foot-spanned planet. They are by far the hardest part of my reporting job. My “slow journalism” approach typically involves spending time with people before I break out the notebook. Buttonholing random passersby while slogging past them with a backpack can elicit some challenging reactions. Asking women to participate has sometimes been impossible in the Muslim world and in conservative rural communities generally. (A testament to the power of gender iniquity in public spaces.) One elderly woman in the Tibetan highlands of Sichuan, China, sicced her mastiff on me. At a Milestone on a lonesome highway in Pakistan, the nearest human being turned out to be a cop who drove up to detain me. (His answer to Where are you going: “I’m going back to Chelas”—a police post—“with you.”)

And then there’s the conundrum of what to do when I hit a sea or ocean.

In the past, on relatively short water crossings along my continental walking routes, I simply continued to dutifully record Milestones aboard various cargo vessels, even though these segments of the journey were motorized. I logged six Milestones crossing the Red Sea, for example, on a boat hauling thousands of goats and camels between Djibouti and Saudi Arabia. While crossing the Caspian Sea on a rusting ferry crammed with hard-partying Turkish truck drivers, I chronicled two.

But now, I’ve faced the novel and daunting prospect of documenting Milestones on my passage across a vast body of saltwater—nearly 10,000 kilometers of the Pacific Ocean—on a container ship bound from Japan to Canada. (My walk’s ultimate destination is the tip of South America.) This immense watery interregnum between continents adds up to a whopping 54 Milestones. The ship I hitched a ride on, the gigantic Maersk San Vicente, would make this oceanic traverse in a lightning (by walking standards) 11 days. I did the math. Applying my usual hundred-mile metric, I would need to interrupt my work and sleep roughly every five to six hours to manually collect all the usual media for my storytelling waypoints. It was simply too heavy a reportorial lift—an impossible burden of insomnia.

The first saltwater Milestone recorded aboard ship on the Pacific crossing (number 109) was logged just off the coast of Japan, near the port of Yokohama. The last oceanic Milestone popped up within eyeshot of Prince Rupert, an isolated port in British Columbia (number 163). As it turns out, despite my best efforts at dead-reckoning waypoints using ye olde chronometer and ship’s speedometer, I miscalculated the precise number and placement of Milestones on the ocean crossing. Even aboard an industrial container vessel, there were too many variables: currents, wind, and a couple of failures in camera programming. The sea always wins.

We will resume our usual land-based “walking” Milestones in Alaska, where I’ll begin the final phase of the Out of Eden Walk trek down to Tierra del Fuego.