disseminated, passed along. And so it went for
dreary millennia: discovery, loss, reinvention.
Call it a long rut. Only when human popula-
tions grew large and stable enough to retain
and build on breakthroughs did we at last unlock
the planet’s door. We remembered each other’s
memories. We won the battle against forgetting.
We advanced.
I am nearing the middle of my absurd 24,000-
mile walk eastward to sunrise. It is only natural,
I suppose, to recall the thousands of faces I’ve
encountered along my route. Who among them
seemed best equipped to survive—if not master—
the challenges of our uncertain age? Who could
walk out of this century with their faculties intact?
As the crackdowns grew bloody, a strange
amnesia settled over Yangon. It was the disap-
pearing messages.
Burmese friends—pro-democracy activists,
artists, students, youths in hard hats manning
the barricades—had switched to encrypted apps.
Soldiers were nosing through civilian phones at
checkpoints. You set a timer on your texts for
security reasons (six hours, one hour, a minute)
and watched your life in digital conversations fade
forever. My mom said i don’t want to see both of my
daughters in prison ... they’re shooting people in
Tamwe ... Be safe ... I am trying to apply for polit-
ical refugee status in third country ... I’m so sorry
for my late reply. I had a bit of a breakdown ...
Defiant screeds, pleas for help, bitter jokes,
an endless cascade of rumors. These anxious
records of fear, anger, and reassurance were gone
each time I opened my eyes to another yellow
dawn. I was walking through a revolution in a
state of aphasia. It was the closest I’ve come, I
imagine, to the days of our birth.
REMEMBER A STROLL
IN NEW YORK
WITH TONY HISS.
Hiss, a writer and public intellectual, is a book-
ish man in glasses who deployed pessimism so
humane, so erudite, that it often recurved back
to solutions, to a bruised sort of optimism. He
had recently published a book called In Motion,
in which he expounded on a condition he has
called deep travel, a feeling of “waking up while
already awake,” which bewitches human beings
in their natural state, that is to say, when they
are on the move.
What new trends should I keep an eye on, I
asked Hiss, as I inch through an accelerating 21st
century? It was 2011, the year of the Arab Spring.
A tsunami had wiped out coastal Japan. Goaded
by bigots, America’s first Black president had
released his birth certificate to prove citizenship.
“Anticipatory loss,” Hiss replied without
hesitation.
By this he meant the growing anxiety of a priv-
ileged minority who by accident of race, gender,
or nationality had inherited an inordinate share
of power on Earth—wealth, jobs, property, social
status rooted in settled hierarchies—and who now
sensed their advantages inexorably ebbing away.
Hiss must have sensed my skepticism. He
squinted up to the shimmering steel ziggurats of
Manhattan. “Remember,” he grinned, removing
and wiping his glasses matter-of-factly. “All this
is temporary.”REMEMBER
KADER YARRI’S FEET.
Thick with calluses, flat as slabs of beef, they
swung from Yarri’s high, girlish hips the way
weights do on a pendulum: smoothly, tirelessly—
I am tempted to say eternally—across the Great
Rift Valley of Ethiopia. As if the desert surface
consisted not of gravel and dust but of ball bear-
ings. We covered about 150 miles of freakishly
beautiful desert together, Yarri and I, walking
with two cargo camels through panes of burn-
ing light toward the Gulf of Aden. Yarri’s rubber
sandals seemed to clear the ground by a micron.
They slid over the Earth like skates. It was a gait
of superhuman efficiency: transcontinental,
very old, designed for swallowing endless miles
of geography in the pursuit of rain.
Yarri was an Afar pastoralist.
Early on, I mistook his silences for aloofness:
To herders, all sedentary people without live-
stock are inferior beings. But it wasn’t that. It
was his watchful steadiness. “What will the cam-
els eat?” he asked me one day, worried about a
poorly chosen camp. I shrugged. I picked up a
stone, held it out. It was the only time in a month
that I saw him laugh.
Yarri was the alert man. He swept his eyes
across the horizons, back and forth, like Dopp-
ler radar. He said he was looking for clouds.
Clouds meant moisture. Moisture meant grass.
Lately, the climate had gone berserk in his par-
adise of white thorns. Rains vanished. Water
holes were drying up. The grasses never came132 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC