#edenwalk

Walking is falling forward.

Each step we take is an arrested plunge, a collapse averted, a disaster braked. In this way, to walk becomes an act of faith. We perform it daily: a two-beat miracle—an iambic teetering, a holding on and letting go. For the next seven years I will plummet across the world.

I am on a journey. I am in pursuit of an idea, a story, a chimera, perhaps a folly. I am chasing ghosts. Starting in humanity’s birthplace in the Great Rift Valley of East Africa, I am retracing, on foot, the pathways of the ancestors who first discovered the Earth at least 60,000 years ago. This remains by far our greatest voyage. Not because it delivered us the planet. No. But because the early Homo sapiens who first roamed beyond the mother continent—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. We know so little about them. They straddled the strait called Bab el Mandeb—the “gate of grief” that cleaves Africa from Arabia—and then exploded, in just 2,500 generations, a geological heartbeat, to the remotest habitable fringe of the globe.

Millennia behind, I follow.

–Paul Salopek

Paul Salopek is currently in year two of his seven year trek. He is following 60,000 years of human migration and at the end of seven years will have walked 21,000 miles. 

Join us during #PCWalkTalk—a Google Hangout with Paul and students from around the globe on January 22. We are looking for 10 strong questions. Think you have one? Tweet us (@PulitzerGateway), email us ([email protected]) or write on our Facebook wall (Pulitzer Gateway). Send us your questions by tomorrow.

Paul Salopek's #edenwalk Quick Facts:

– The camels' names are Seema and Fares—they eat grain and alfalfa (read more here: http://bit.ly/1ilTgof)

– Paul is following 60,000 years of human migration, covering 21,000 miles in 7 years (Read more here: http://bit.ly/1bm0lVt)

– Paul celebrated Thanksgiving in Jordan (Read more on Twitter: @PaulSalopek)

– A core goal of the walk is to slow readers down (Read more here: http://bit.ly/K8ziRr)

– Is Paul afraid of failure? "All the time—but I try to channel it into building ladders to scale the psychic barricades along the trail." (Read more here: http://bit.ly/1ajeIIO)

– Paul retired his first pair of shoes after about 1,000 miles of walking. (Read more here: http://bit.ly/1ajeIIO)

Read Paul's dispatches (and the comments!) from the road and ask your own questions.

Send those questions to Pulitzer Gateway via Facebook, Twitter (@PulitzerGateway) or email ([email protected]) by January 17.

Then join us on January 22 for a Google Hangout (#PCWalkTalk) with Paul and students across the globe. Want to know how to join us? Email [email protected].