National Geographic journalists follow footsteps of our human ancestors

December 29, 2013

OTIS — National Geographic journalists Paul Salopek and John Stanmeyer, an Otis resident, are developing their current stories at a rate of 3 mph.

Over the course of seven years, Salopek will stride 21,000 miles across the globe — from the Great Rift Valley in East Africa to Tierra Del Fuego — to follow the foot trails of our human ancestors. Stanmeyer, a photographer, will periodically walk and drive the surrounding paths to show readers the way through his lenses.

In a digital world where people are compelled to collectively share information via Twitter an average of 5,700 times a second, these men are taking what they find, absorbing it with their minds, their hearts and bodies, and letting the stories and lessons of it all come forth at a less pressing pace.

The first installment of what Salopek dubbed the “Out of Eden” project debuted on the December 2013 cover of National Geographic magazine.

In it, he writes: “If you ask, I will tell you that I have embarked on this project, which I’m calling the Out of Eden Walk, for many reasons: to relearn the contours of our planet at the human pace of three miles an hour. To slow down. To think. To write.”

In an email interview with The Eagle, Salopek said, “At a creative level, why is any work important to share? I think that the ideas we grapple with — as reporters, musicians, photographers, etc. — start as personal obsessions. They are only interesting to us. But as we mine those veins, we start to hope it might interest others, too.”

Interested readers, schools in the Berkshires, as well as others from around the world have been following the Eden walk though websites and social media.

Salopek and Stanmeyer currently are trekking from Haql, in northwest Saudi Arabia, toward Jordan and Israel. This leg of the journey likely will appear in the magazine next December.

This time, Stanmeyer has brought his wife, Anastasia, and their three school-aged children, Konstantin, Richard and Francesca, with him for part of the monthlong assignment so they could celebrate Christmas together at the crossroads of such holy civilizations.

Stanmeyer will drive back and forth between the locations he’ll be photographing and the places where his family will be staying.

“It’s really enjoyable to have family around,” he told The Eagle prior to his trip.

Working on assignments for National Geographic, and previously Time magazine — more than two decades combined — Stanmeyer says he’s “always preparing to leave.”

But there is something different about the Out of Eden project.

For example, when Stanmeyer left the Berkshires to join Salopek in Ethiopia last January, he was gone for more than 11 weeks; typically he only travels between four and six weeks at a time.

Salopek has not been home since the Eden walk began.

In the December National Geographic article, he writes about the reactions he got from the pastoralists in the Afar Triangle, a brutally arid cradle of the hominid species: “Are you crazy? Are you sick?”

The journey out of Africa brought scorching temperatures, little clean water, gritty towns, dusty roads and remains of the dead. In every day, there is terror and freedom, despair and joy. Through each stretch of salt land and mountain trail, comes new opportunities and experience.

“We did things slower, we interacted with people and places more,” Stanmeyer said. “We’ve seen the origins of our collective humanity. It’s expanded my appreciation for humanity and the love I have for people.”

Herto Bouri, located in the Ethiopian Rift, is a famous site where the 160,000-year-old bones of our ancestor, homo sapiens idaltu, have been found. But back then, unlike Stanmeyer and Salopek, those ancient explorers had no footsteps to follow — only the will to move on.

Salopek writes: “These pioneer nomads numbered, in total, as few as a couple of hundred people — also bequeathed us the subtlest qualities we now associate with being fully human: complex language, abstract thinking, a compulsion to make art, a genius for technological innovation, and the continuum of today’s many races.”

With each step, Salopek has been accompanied by either people (some which have become lifelong friends), or camel and the landscape beneath his feet.

Today, as people, we keep moving. Ever since the dawn of our existence, it seems to be an innate human desire and quality. We were born to seek, to ramble, to wander.

“We’re still nomadic,” Stanmeyer said. “Then, we were leaving and migrating for a better life. People still do this. But we have now a trail not only of our footprints but our human waste.”

“On a purely documentary level, I think we’re living at an extraordinary time in our species’ history,” Salopek told The Eagle. “We face a lot of challenges in the century ahead. Sociologists, environmental experts and technologists seem to agree that we’re in for a bumpy ride — a collision between our multiplying aspirations and the resources available to make them come true. A lot of what seems so permanent to us now — glass-sheathed skyscrapers, the turn of a car key — seems pretty fragile to me. (Maybe it’s my background covering conflict.) The walk is, at some levels, a long gaze at this question, a storytelling search for pathways ahead.”

In his own words …

National Geographic journalist Paul Salopek responded via email to the following Eagle questions while traveling in Saudi Arabia as part of his “Out of Eden” project.

He will retrace 60,000 years of 21,000 miles of human migration over the course of seven years, beginning in the Great Rift Valley in Africa, looping through Asia to Alaska and ultimately trekking to Tierra Del Fuego, located off the tip of South America.

Below are excerpts from his responses:

Q: What piqued your interest in following the footsteps of mankind?

A: I’m educated as a biologist, not a journalist. I’m also interested in history. Using the original journey of our species’ spread across the globe seemed like a good template for designing a long-form storytelling project. Besides, we’re all interested in quest stories.

Q: How do you keep track of your journey? Do you take mental notes? Recordings? Write in a notebook?

A: I write as much down as possible in real time. I jot notes in a notepad even while I’m walking.

Q: How has your first leg of your journey influenced your going forward? What questions have you since developed in your mind?

A: It’s only reinforced my interest in this idea. So far at least, it’s been an interesting experiment to move across extremely long distances at a walking pace. It’s revealed some stories and connections that I wouldn’t have stumbled across otherwise. That’s my main metric of success.

I discovered women drivers in Saudi Arabia, for example, even though they are officially banned from driving in that country by religious edict. There were lots of them, though, tooling around in pickups out in the desert boondocks. I also discovered how the ravages of Somali piracy have torpedoed climate science. I don’t think I would have found these stories flying to — or over — them in a passenger jet.

Q: What are your biggest obstacles on the road?

A: The workload. I’ve been finding that one of the artifacts of walking is that I’m sometimes pouring so much energy into the physical journey that I have little left over to report and write.

While my walking companions in Ethiopia and Saudi Arabia were snoring blissfully around desert campfires after putting in a 25-mile day, I was often up writing dispatches until 2 or 3 a.m. Then I had to get up at dawn and walk another 25 miles.

That isn’t sustainable over the long term, obviously. So I eventually may have to slow down the pace of the reportage. This is supposed to be “slow journalism,” after all.

Q: How often do you communicate with loved ones while on the road for this project?

A: Every day if I can.

Q: You must get fatigued at times. What helps you refresh?

A: I take breaks in villages and towns. I’m not moving continuously. I stopped for six weeks in a Saudi city during Ramadan. I was able to deepen my knowledge of the place there.

Q: What items are essential for you to have while traveling?

A: Tools related to work — notepads, pens, camera, satellite phone, a MacBook Air. Everything else can be lost in a river with a tolerable degree of anguish. But not the tools.

Q: How has it been working with animals — the camels and donkeys — on your journey?

A: No donkeys yet. Camels only. I grew up in a semi-rural setting in Mexico among agrarian people who used animals as partners in work, not pets. I absorbed that ethos. I regard domestic animals with respect. But I never felt compelled to own one as an adult and I view the pet industry in some parts of the world as displacement behavior.

That said, I’ve got to admit that camels are a special case. They grow on you. At the risk of getting a bit squishy here I’d even vouch for their dry sense of humor. They are great fatalists. And they’re loyal. Hell, I may as well come clean: I miss my camels, Fares and Seema, a lot. They taught me to be a better traveler. I had to leave them in Saudi Arabia.

Q: Why is it important to you to practice slow journalism like this?

A: Because it’s the only kind I can practice with any competence. I never was fast as a reporter. Covering breaking news, I was always the last guy on the desk to turn in his copy. And I’ve always questioned the value of nano-headlines. I’m not interested in writing the first story anymore — I never really was. I’m interested in writing the best story. And that takes time. The Web in particular is a medium that destroys time: In the digital world, time is the enemy. Well, whatever the merits of that technology, time isn’t my enemy. Time is my friend. When you think about it, most of the good things in life are slow — food, conversation, sex, friendship. The most powerful ideas often take time to mature, to deepen. So do good stories.

— Compiled by Jenn Smith / Berkshire Eagle Staff