Marco Werman: And do you eat meals on the water, or do you pull into a cove to sit down for a more leisurely protein hit, or is that also decided by the tides?

Paul Salopek: That’s also decided by the tides. And generally what we try to do is: I’m with two paddling partners, Justine Bright and Kevin Danielson, two expert sea kayakers, thank heavens, because I’m a total neophyte at this stuff. Um, it depends on sort of how much we wanna make that day. Do we wanna make 20 kilometers? Do we wanna make 25? Do we wanna make 15, up to 30, 35? Basically looking for places to put in. So it is interesting. It’s a very new way to travel for me, and I’m much more at the mercy of the elements than I am on land.

Yeah, so this is an introduction. You’d never been in a sea kayak before. How did you come up with the idea of kayaking?

The whole Out of Eden Walk project, the journey for the last 13 years is premised kind of on a scientific map. Following the pathways of the first ancestors who roamed out of Africa. So I’m kind of walking from the Horn of Africa to the tip of South America. But when I reached the northwestern coast of North America, archaeologists started telling me, ‘Paul, why don’t you think about taking a sea kayak?’ Because there’s growing archaeological evidence that we didn’t just walk across the old, vanished Bering Land Bridge, as everything we learned about in high school or secondary school. There’s growing evidence that, perhaps even earlier, people took watercraft inshore down the coast of the Americas while the inland part was still frozen in the deep freeze of glaciers. So I said, okay, I’ll try this. I’ll step into a sea kayak and try to honor the ancestors … the first kind of mariners, if you will.

You mentioned two kayaking partners, Justine Bright and Kevin Danielson. From your dispatch, they sound like no-nonsense folks. Tell us about them and how you found them.

Yeah. Well, I found Kevin through recommendations. This is one of the crazy, wonderful things about this walk across the world: it’s often — people think there’s a control center with flashing lights and maps, and there’s like a staff kind of finding things — if only there were, right? It’s a one-man band kind of a thing, kind of a seat of the pants of the highest order. And what’s wonderful about that is it’s word of mouth. So kind of a friend of a friend of a friend recommended Kevin, who’s a very experienced sea kayaker. He’s done this whole Inside Passage alone twice in a sea kayak. And so he is like a master at sea. I was very lucky to be able to connect with him and kind of get him interested in the project. And he brought along another friend, Justine, who was a sea kayak instructor up in Alaska and also kind of a wilderness medicine expert. So God, with this troika — the three of us for safety — uh, I couldn’t get better companions to paddle through these northern waters.

Yeah, really. That’s the A-team. I mean, typically, your walking partners serve as local guides and translators. You’re in an Anglophone part of the world now, so you don’t need translation. I did notice Justine’s quote, ‘I got tired of yelling at clients,’ she says, from her old job, ‘just trying to keep them alive.’ So what were Justine and Kevin’s roles on this kayaking part of the trip?

Well, extending that mandate, keeping Paul alive, basically. Because, you know, not to put too fine a point on it, but I was basically a piece of luggage. And so, I can hardly swim, Marco. Here, the waves are at your elbows. You’re actually sitting on top of the waves in a kayak separated by just a few millimeters of fiberglass from the sea. And this is a stormy coast. You know, we very carefully picked the kind of quietest part of the season, but we did come across some heavy waters. And once the wind picks up, once you start seeing whitecaps on the waves, you run for shore. And so Kevin and Justine’s job was basically making sure that everything was safe and that we followed kind of good maritime protocol.

Most of your walk, Paul, has been centered around the organic human interactions that just happen: conversations you strike up with ordinary people as you pass them on the road or walk through their neighborhoods. I don’t imagine you brush shoulders with a lot of strangers when you’re in a kayak, but I don’t know; maybe you did.

This stretch of the journey, there’s just no getting around it, is pretty empty of people. But we are running into people. We’re running into First Nations communities along the way who are still going strong here, harvesting the sea mostly. And it’s an unusual community. Think about this: It’s an island community. These are villages and, in some cases, really small towns that are not connected by road to the main grids of the continent. They are very self-sufficient. And that creates an interesting mindset of independence and a sense of place that’s pretty rare in the rest of North America.

So, did you have conversations with some of those community members when you would row ashore?

You know, the pattern would be kind of like this: We would kind of pick a place to resupply. We would pick a tiny village, you know, say a Tlingit village, and say there’s a grocery store there, there’s a post office box; let’s paddle to that. And then we would meet people.

This Out of Eden Walk dispatch about this kayak journey is titled Engage Your Core. Explain the title. Is that literal or figurative?

It’s a little bit of both. You have to know how to sea kayak, of course, in order to do these long expeditions. This isn’t just a day trip right out on the lake. And what my two friends, my two very able teachers, kept drilling into me from day one is: ‘It’s not about your arms, Paul. You’ve got a paddle.’ And you’re paddling. And boy, we displace a lot of seawater on an average day, Marco. So it’s a workout. But unless you engage your abdominal muscles, kind of the girdle, right? That you kind of, you’re like doing micro crunches thousands of times a day. You’re going to burn your arms out and possibly even get kind of cuff injuries, rotator injuries. And so engaging your core became kind of a joke among us. You know, are you engaging your core? For me, that took on a kind of metaphorical meaning as well. About being alert and being awake on the water and kind of engaging with your environment in a very hunter-gatherer way.

How are your arms feeling?

I’m like Popeye now, man. It’s like after a can of spinach. Now, my legs, on the other hand, that’s another story.