Travelers Never Come Home

Portland, OR -
The photograph that graces the header to this blog is called "Earthrise" by astronaut William Anders during NASA's Apollo 8 mission. That mission was the first to orbit the moon. My late camera-colleague Galen Rowell spoke my sentiments best, "the most influential environmental photograph ever taken."

In my satchel-like wallet I carry a folded copy of "Earthrise", I have always thought of it as a picture of  "home." It has become my most influential photograph ever taken. It travels in there aside my U.S.Passport, a folded copy of the 20 things to remember from All I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten, and the quote, "If you don't know how to fix it, please stop breaking it." from the speech at the Rio Summit by 13 year old Severne Susuki. Collectively these are my home.

I have spent much of the past 12 months on the road from, Indo-malaysia to East and Central Africa, and more recently in India and Sri Lanka. Some of the time I spent alone, some together with my Great Ape Diaries film partner Skye and most recently guiding a collection of tourists. All surrendered different thoughts on this thing I do, travel, observe, reflect.

Reflecting on recent wandering I am certain it is impossible for travel to occur in groups - only tourism. Groups reinforce living in the past. A constant comparison to what was. Someone said to me to travel "they need to step out of their comfort zone" - agreed, but they cannot while always reinforcing their comfort zone with one another. Stepping out of one's comfort zone one does alone. Or at best with a kindred spirit. Three in a space capsule may be the limit of oneness.

The latter, guiding tourists, is something I am self-limited in doing. It has it's teaching moments, or should I say reminder moments. A reminder that touring is not traveling, despite the desire of the tourist to travel. They never come fully prepared to travel, fully committed to accept never returning. Traveling is what the crew of Apollo 8 did on that first circumnavigation of earth's moon in late December 1968. They left their earthly limits. They accepted on some level the opportunity of never coming home.

When I first started traveling I was still living at my parent's home. As my father backed out of the driveway the first time to take me to the airport my mother stood and wept. She later told me it was because she was afraid I would never come home, to that home I never returned. I accepted the opportunity of never coming home, she knew that. She had seen me run away as a child and knew I had insatiable gypsy-feet. Home was where they took me, were they stood.

True traveling assumes a new tomorrow without a comparison to today, or even more critically, all one's yesterdays. That is where the road forks between travelers and tourists...

"And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back."

Traveling in turn trusts everywhere is home. But therein lies the danger. Home becomes everywhere, every place, and everybody and thing your neighbor. Eventually there is no "there" only here. A war in Congo is here, in me, it's faces my neighbors. There is no international news, only neighborhood affairs. I step into the kitchen and turn the tap and see refugees filling plastic yellow jugs, a family of women and their children bathing at a broken corner hydrant in Kolkata, a rancher in South Dakota looking desperately skyward for rain, and an elephant raiding a community well in Namibia. We share the same roof.

In the past couple years I have turned to Al Jazeera news when in Portland, my only way of seeing the comings and going of my neighborhood. I am at once homesick and lost. The heartache is daily. I think, it's my home, "If you don't know how to fix it, please stop breaking it." Then I'm reminded, they are only tourists, they think when it's all over they will go home.

Travelers never come home, they close their eyes and see the Earthrise.

Time To Perambulate

No I haven't fallen off the edge of the world - although those ancient mariners may not have been too far off - the world has assumed a few straight edges it seems. And not for the better. Worlds need roundness - nature has few straight-edges; they tend to be inflexible. Back to point, my world has been consumed with a new project - Great Ape Diaries - which does and doesn't fit here. It certainly is full of perambulations - just not here.

Like most things in life I plunge in 100% or flop about on the edge like a fish on the shore. I'm at a point in life where flopping doesn't suit me physically or, most importantly, mentally. Meaning is the water in which this fish needs to swim.

I'm coming back here because Great Ape Diaries has thrust me back into the world - traveling and thinking - and all those impressions don't fit quietly into a GAD box. They are most at home perambulating on a blank slate of no pre-intentions.

On Our Better Nature...

"Sherwin Nuland, the clinical professor of surgery at Yale who wrote How We Die, writes in The Art of Aging, "Man is the only animal to have been granted the ability to continue developing during the later periods of life, and much of this depends on seeing oneself as the kind of person who can overcome the tendency to do otherwise." 

"I look at what I write so I can see what I think."

I read this article on writing and found much of myself in the paragraph from Jonathan Safran Foer:

"I begin with nothing and I unfortunately usually end with nothing, in terms of the day-to-day process," says Jonathan Safran Foer. "I’ve never had characters before I started writing.  I’ve never had a moral.  I’ve never had a story to tell.  I’ve never had some voice that I found and wanted to share.  Auden, the poet, said, 'I look at what I write so I can see what I think.'  And that’s been very true for me in my process.  I don’t have a thought that I then try to articulate.  It’s only through the act of writing that I try to find my own thoughts.  So, it can be quite scary because you know, it’s... there’s a kind of faith, I guess, that you have to have either in yourself or in the process that something good will come from filling blank pages." 

As Robert Capa, one of the founders of the agency Magnum Photos, once put it: Arnold's work "falls metaphorically between Marlene Dietrich's legs and the bitter lives of migratory potato pickers."

Photojournalist Eve Arnold Dies At 99

Pondering 7 Billion

(Maybe too many blogs? Today 12.19.11 I opened here to post a blog about journalism [coming shortly] and realized the below never was posted - still needs to be shared - maybe even more.)

Two years ago I took leave from GLOBIO, the children's education nonprofit I founded and was running (proving I don't hate kids - just kids having kids as well as people having them as some spasmodic knee-jerk reaction to wanting to be an adult.) I took leave to catch my breath, renew my love affair with creating images and rekindle my misplaced passion for writing. That was working I thought, but today I also wonder what it's worth divided by 7 billion.

I haven't looked up much since starting down the new road.

Great Ape Diaries is all consuming - writing, photography, thinking, traveling, and reflecting back and forward.

I'm only at the doorstep of the project, I'm convinced it will become The project of my life, (thus far.) It has every element I search for in a potentially great project, in fact it has them in spades: charismatic animals that look and act like us, orphans, threatened habitats, illegal trafficing, corporate greed, modern technologies, war, refuges, poaching, disease, the list goes on and on.

Journalistically I'm trying to remain open, open-minded, open-opinioned, as to where Great Ape Diaries will venture and what it will discover, and then this news:

U.N. Says 7 Billion Now Share the World

Today, because of that baby 7 Billion, I have been thinking endlessly about what that means for us, but especially about the implication for our other Hominidaes; those consuming my daily Google searches. Implication = resource use and abuse.

My thinking has had a reoccurring visual, a street scene from Goma: a squallered, muddy, human poverty-choked wannabe-town on the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) border of Rwanda filmed this past summer, and featured in an online video report by VICE, regarding the technology addicted precious mineral coltan. In short Coltan (Columbite-tantalite) is a metallic ore comprising Niobium and Tantalum, found mainly in the U.N. acknowledged semi-lawless eastern frontier region of DRC. In fact, 80% of the world's known reserve resides there - so do most of the eastern lowland (Grauer's) gorillas. The mineral magic happens upon refinement. It's there that coltan is transformed into a heat resistant power which has the unique capacity for storing electrical charge. Exactly the kind of charge every cell phone and similar digital device requires.

(Coltan is one of several minerals being mined legally and illegally in DRC called 'conflict minerals' - more from this NPR radio story and from theWorld.)

Population, over-population actually, isn't about a cute little baby softly wrapped in the fluffy cotton of pink or blue, it's about that scene in Goma. It's about millions of people on the fringe of the wilds where great apes hope to survive; people fighting and killing for their own survival. Most struggle themselves to survive on a dollar-a-day -- seven to ten times less than mining coltan -- so the alternative seems clear. It's about a place where coltan mixes with hopeless dreams, and tattered refugee camps that throb painfully from a savage civil war hang-over, and nearby forests that are being blacked into illegal charcoal for cooking fuel. In not so many months I will be standing on one of those far-away muddy street, filming and interviewing those struggling survivors - I'm going to ask them about coltan and great apes. I'm also going to ask them about baby 7 Billion. Reality is that baby 7B was probably born in a similar village, hut, or back alley; I'll likely hear 7B crying in the dirty distance.

Chances are baby 7B will never know the word coltan. When its wireless day arrives it will communicate on a device future-formed, and coltan will be a historical footnote in the evolution of that device. My fear is so will wild great apes; in DRC that will equal bonobos, chimps and gorillas. On that fact it is difficult to remain journalistic, to remain open-minded.

Pondering baby 7B and her or his impact - specifically on the other Hominids - carries a flood of emotions that I'm certain will flow time and time again over these next few years - I'll work to remain journalistic - please excuse the occasional hint of anger, frustration and even a tear that may creep in.

GeoTracking – Canon’s New EOS 1Dx

Overview from Canon:

“Canon has brought the best of the EOS-1D Series of digital cameras into one phenomenal model: the new flagship of the EOS line, the EOS-1D X*. Its full-frame 18.1 Megapixel CMOS sensor and all-new Dual DIGIC 5+ Image Processors deliver high quality image capture at up to 12 fps (14 fps in Super High Speed Mode) and a powerful ISO range of 100 – 51200 (up to 204800 in H2 mode) provides sharp, low-noise images even in the dimmest low-light conditions. An all-new, 61-Point High-Density Reticular AF and 100,000-pixel RGB Metering Sensor that uses a dedicated DIGIC 4 Image Processor, makes the EOS-1D X reach new levels of focus speed and accuracy delivering advanced tracking even for the most challenging shooting situations. Taken all together, the EOS-1D X’s improved HD video capture, numerous connectivity options, combination of processing power and durable construction, including shutter durability tested to 400,000 cycles, make it the ultimate EOS.”

Ya, just another camera body you say – but here might be the kicker (I’m hoping to get a system to test ASAP – then will report here as well as our Great Apes Diaries “the making of” blog.) Canon is also introducing the Wireless File Transmitter WFT-E6A and the all-new Canon GPS Receiver GP-E1.