For the past 13 years, while trekking across the Earth for a storytelling project dreamed of and written about in English, I’ve grappled with the usual dilemma of language-strapped idiots abroad: reading the polyglot signage of humankind.
I speak and read Spanish. I fake French. I can order ponchiki (steroidally unhealthy donuts) in Russian. In convincing Dari, Serbo-Croatian, Swahili, and Arabic, I can shout, Don’t shoot, I’m a journalist! But what to make of Ethiopia’s beautiful and prehistoric-looking alphabet of Amharic? (Restaurants in the Horn of Africa, thankfully, also advertise their menus with wall paintings—principally depicting live goats and bottles of St. George’s beer.) Or what can be teased from the mysterious Bronze Age petroglyphs of horsemen, ibexes, and strange sun-headed beings one finds pecked onto the rocky passes of northern Afghanistan? Alternately, China’s roadsides are so clogged with government slogans in Hanzi (“Sweep away dark societies and eradicate evil forces,” “Protect your wallet and keep your home happy,” “Listen to the party, appreciate the party, follow the party”) that I soon asked my Chinese walking partners to stop translating them.
Imagine my anticipation, then, as I stepped back into the geography of my birth language.
At long last, having set out last summer from Alaska to walk to the tip of South America, I could finally assess the dimwittedness of billboard advertising on my own. I could follow written instructions at coin laundromats and ATM machines. I could tell where highway off-ramps went. I relished the newfound clarity. And the agency: The simple utilitarian power of comprehending public signs in a text-plastered world.
Except, dishearteningly, for the first English message I spotted at trailside: AT + AT ♡
Some vandal had sprayed this cryptic graffiti onto a beach boulder at my starting line in the Americas, the glittering brown Pacific inlet called Turnagain Arm. The symmetry of the initials was ambiguous. Surely, there was more to it? Who or what was “AT”? And why did AT so ardently love him or herself? (Was this an artifact of America’s bloated wellness industry?) Or was it irony: a sour crack at the era of peak American narcissism? It was impossible to know.
Urban hunter. Walking partner Phil Norris outside the Museum of Science and Nature in Anchorage, Alaska.
Photograph by Paul Salopek
I might have asked Phil Norris about it. But we’d already set off—briskly hoofing 22 kilometers of busy coastal highway into Anchorage.
Norris was my first Alaskan walking partner. He looked like Yosemite Sam in Bermuda shorts. He lagged far behind on the highway shoulder by design. His strategy: If police collared us for invading the sanctity of America’s car space, I would plead ignorance as an expatriate naif—the barbarian with an expired driver’s license. Phil planned to intervene only if needed, lobbying for clemency as a responsible citizen. This was rich, coming from a guy who joined the walk carrying a rifle and a chainsaw.
Half a century ago, the writer John McPhee had this to say about Alaska’s largest city:
“Anchorage is sometimes excused in the name of pioneering. Build now, civilize later. But Anchorage is not a frontier town. It is virtually unrelated to its environment. It has come in on the wind, an American spore. A large cookie cutter brought down on El Paso could lift something like Anchorage into the air. Anchorage is the northern rim of Trenton, the center of Oxnard, the ocean-blind precincts of Daytona Beach. It is condensed, instant Albuquerque.”
Dislocation. Anchorage, Alaska.
Photograph by Paul Salopek
Even today, many an outdoor-loving Alaskans continue to hate on the Frontier State’s sprawling metropolis of 289,000 souls. Relentlessly ugly, they sneer. A vast and characterless grid of strip malls, they huff. A place so “un-Alaskan” in its urbanness—concrete pooled at the foot of the wild and beautiful Chugach Mountains—that I should consider walking around it.
Such bigotry is absurd. As if any human culture were inauthentic. Moreover, Anchorage had its parks and coffee houses and suburban lanes that, during the brief subarctic summers, offered green corridors of leaves. Not bad for a city all but leveled in 1964 by a 9.2-scale earthquake. True enough, the downtown was carved by boulevards wide enough to accommodate Soviet military parades or 787s on final approach. Crossing these obstacles on foot, in rush hour, was like going over the top at the Somme. But such was the cost of car supremacy anywhere. And yes, Norris and I were often the only Homo sapiens out walking the city’s ghostly downtown sidewalks. Still, what few Anchoragites we did encounter on foot—some strung out, others unhoused—were friendly and warm. “Nice hat, sweety,” an old woman grinned, reeling off on tangents unknown.
As for strip malls, I could at least read their blunt hoardings. I began to admire their gritty honesty.
Kilometers of cubbyhole shops addressed human needs and yearnings without the tiresome deceits of web marketing. What you saw was, for better or worse, what you got. The roadside signage could even alchemize Whitmanesque poetry.
Yaari Walker, Yupik healer and community leader. Anchorage, Alaska.
Photograph by Paul Salopek
Korean diners embraced halal markets. Massage parlors rubbed up against gun and knife shops. We passed an open Samoan church and a shuttered Nepalese restaurant. There were cocktail lounges for gramps and head shops for grandkids. (The last chronically self-medicating economy I’d traversed was South Korea.) We stomped past a two-story mural of Siberians plodding the land bridge to Alaska—the Stone Age pioneers I was following across the world—and glancing up, I could read that it was the Museum of Science and Nature.
“Not such a great guy,” said Yaari Walker, a Yupiq healer and Anchorage resident who joined us for a stroll near the bronze Captain Cook monument at Ship Creek. “Didn’t even land here.”
There was a plaque. I read it. Cook, it declared, had sailed past what is today Anchorage in the late 1770s. He was “the greatest explorer-navigator the world has ever known.” A British oil company had paid for the statue.
Near Cook’s green oxidized feet, facing the sea, new information placards named the peaks across Cook Sound in the Athapaskan language of the Dena’Ina people, who had lived in the environs of Anchorage for at least a thousand years. I tried out the words: Te’tniya, Dghelishla, Dilhi Tunch‘del’usht Beydegh.
So it goes with signs. You can still be misinformed without the hidden language of time.
Antique signage along Salopek's global walking trail: an ibex chiseled into rock in Kyrgyzstan. The petroglyph likely dates from the Bronze Age.
Photograph by Paul Salopek
We backpacked 35 kilometers through Anchorage.
One day north of the city, a yellow highway sign warned drivers of a dangerous moose crash zone: 220 of the beasts had been killed on the six-laner since the previous summer. (Alaska maintains a roadkill database alerting citizens who wish to salvage the meat for personal consumption.)
On the third day out of Anchorage, in the small town of Palmer, the hotel I’d booked online barred entry. It was an automated facility. The front door’s electronic lock wouldn't accept my code. The hotel phone rang and rang. It was far past midnight. A gibbous moon had set. The streets around were black and dead. I circled the block tiredly. I’m not sure what I was looking for. There were no signs to read for assistance.
What else can I tell you?
The fresh pugmarks of a snow leopard, pressed into the mud and spaced impossibly far apart along high yak trails in the Hindu Kush, suggest that you’re likely far from human settlement. And that tense downward arc of a young sergeant’s inverted smile in the trenches of Nagorno Karabagh? Keep low. Follow the flights of black larks that rocket over the dusk steppes of western Kazakhstan. They will lead you to water.
