It’s tempting to envy Paul Salopek. While the rest of us were dealing with Donald Trump, he was walking across Central Asia.
“I came to accept that this project, fragile as it is, provides readers at least one small outlet to a wider horizon,” Salopek wrote, “and maybe even empathy for The Other.”
“I’ve never viewed my storytelling through a political prism,” he said. “The questions that confront, say, a Saudi fire healer or a Djiboutian shipping agent, or a Georgian mother, are what power my work. I reckon other folks have got the kings and presidents covered. On this journey, which has a 60,000-year backstory, very few people I’ve met along the walking route have been following the US election. Many weren’t even aware of it.”
Salopek won two Pulitzer Prizes during his 13 years at theTribune, few of which he spent in Chicago. And in 2006, on leave from the Tribune to write a story for National Geographic on drought in the Sahel, he flew into Sudan’s North Darfur state—then on the brink of civil war—and was immediately arrested and accused of entering Sudan without a visa (true), of writing “false news,” and of espionage (false). He was a prisoner more than a month.
He went on:
Yet to Salopek the trek “is a kind of calling,” Schulte wrote, and Schulte could hear the call. “Paul and others like him walk the earth to bear witness, record and interpret,” Schulte concluded. “Through their work we all walk along, together.”
