Pepper Trail | Essays | Miles From Nowhere

MILES FROM NOWHERE

When I was growing up, nourishing my imagination on a diet of National Geographic magazines and the narratives of real and fictional explorers, I had a special affection for anyplace that was described in those pages as “remote”. The word itself stirred up a wind in my dreaming head. A wind was always blowing through the remote places of this earth, I felt sure, and it made no difference to me if the site in question was a cliff-top lamasery in Tibet, a sweltering rubber town along the Rio Negro, or an atoll in the Christmas Islands. Wind; a fierce sun to set a narrow-eyed look on my weather-beaten face; and some hard haggling with impassive headmen, while children gazed big-eyed from the shadows. Such was remoteness, in my 12-year old imagination.

As I grew older, it was a shock to realize that my own little home town, surrounded by an utterly domesticated landscape of dairy farms and hedgerows, was considered remote by those city people who saw freeways and airports as necessary for civilization. My first trip across the country was a disillusioning journey through western towns where remoteness was measured in distance to the next gas station, and truckstops clustered around the interstate off-ramps like flies. In late-20^th-century America, I learned, a “remote” place was one that it took awhile to drive to.

I became a scientist, not an adventurer, and I have never made a trip anywhere simply because it was far away. Still, it gives me great satisfaction whenever my travels lead me somewhere that lives up to my childhood standards of remoteness. For years I carried out research at a place in South America where I could climb a vine-covered ridge and look out over a primeval landscape of unbroken rainforest. I once spent a week there completely alone. At the end of that week, when I heard the sound of human speech as I approached my campsite, my hair bristled like the pelt of a wild animal.

Probably the most remote place I have ever been, both in fact and in correspondence to my romantic imaginings, was an uninhabited atoll on the fringes of Polynesia. I will never forget my feelings as the ship that had dropped me there disappeared over the horizon. The wind did indeed blow ceaselessly, and I did indeed squint out of a weather-beaten face as I carried on my studies of the seabirds that hung over the island like smoke. Every moment I was there, I was conscious of the infinite weight and wildness of the unimaginably huge Pacific Ocean pressing in on all sides.

		MILES FROM NOWHERE When I was growing up, nourishing my imagination on a diet of National Geographic magazines and the narratives of real and fictional explorers, I had a special affection for anyplace that was described in those pages as “remote”. The word itself stirred up a wind in my dreaming head. A wind was always blowing through the remote places of this earth, I felt sure, and it made no difference to me if the site in question was a cliff-top lamasery in Tibet, a sweltering rubber town along the Rio Negro, or an atoll in the Christmas Islands. Wind; a fierce sun to set a narrow-eyed look on my weather-beaten face; and some hard haggling with impassive headmen, while children gazed big-eyed from the shadows. Such was remoteness, in my 12-year old imagination. As I grew older, it was a shock to realize that my own little home town, surrounded by an utterly domesticated landscape of dairy farms and hedgerows, was considered remote by those city people who saw freeways and airports as necessary for civilization. My first trip across the country was a disillusioning journey through western towns where remoteness was measured in distance to the next gas station, and truckstops clustered around the interstate off-ramps like flies. In late-20^th-century America, I learned, a “remote” place was one that it took awhile to drive to. I became a scientist, not an adventurer, and I have never made a trip anywhere simply because it was far away. Still, it gives me great satisfaction whenever my travels lead me somewhere that lives up to my childhood standards of remoteness. For years I carried out research at a place in South America where I could climb a vine-covered ridge and look out over a primeval landscape of unbroken rainforest. I once spent a week there completely alone. At the end of that week, when I heard the sound of human speech as I approached my campsite, my hair bristled like the pelt of a wild animal. Probably the most remote place I have ever been, both in fact and in correspondence to my romantic imaginings, was an uninhabited atoll on the fringes of Polynesia. I will never forget my feelings as the ship that had dropped me there disappeared over the horizon. The wind did indeed blow ceaselessly, and I did indeed squint out of a weather-beaten face as I carried on my studies of the seabirds that hung over the island like smoke. Every moment I was there, I was conscious of the infinite weight and wildness of the unimaginably huge Pacific Ocean pressing in on all sides.