Long Journeys: Tracks, About a Woman's Walk Across Western Australia

Robyn Davidson. Credits: Rick Smolen, National Geographic,

In the late 1970s, Robyn Davidson walked across west Australian deserts with camels and her dog. The trek was more than 1700 miles. 

She wrote a book, Tracks, and there is a recent movie by the same name. The movie is perhaps not as engrossing as the book might be (which I haven't read). I didn't feel the weight of what that lonely, long walk must have been.  

A loner extraordinaire, in the movie, she says: "I don't know why a desire for privacy has to be defined or defended. All I know is that when it's just me and my animals in the desert, I feel free." 

Robyn Davidson, with her resistance - or inability or lack of caring - to articulate her  drive to do this long journey, reminds me of another long walker, Sarah Marquis, a Swiss woman. From a New York Times profile on Ms. Marquis: 

As Francis Spufford writes in his history of British polar exploration, “I May Be Some Time,” for ages, men have wandered intentionally into extreme hardship, and they “are notoriously bad at saying why.” Marquis and her female peers — women who, say, walk across the Sahara alone with a camel or pull a 200-pound sled to the South Pole — don’t explain it much better. “People always ask, ‘Was it something in your childhood?’ ” says Felicity Aston, the first woman to ski solo across Antarctica. “I’ve thought about it endlessly: no.”

From this Dumbofeather interview, Ms. Davidson gives her view on the question of why one does this sort of thing: 

Interviewer:  Oh yes, people will all start chiming, ‘Oh that’s why.’ That’s why she walked across the desert, that’s why she’s like that or this.
Ms. Davidson: Yes, all that derivative determinist sort of thinking. Life is not like that. Life isn’t simple—it’s not just one thing causing another thing, and really to try and reduce things, this need to reduce everything, somehow to me, it makes more sense to keep it all moving.

There is a recent interview with Ms. Davidson, following the premier of this movie. Now in her early 60s, Ms. Davidson said something provocative: ''I'm less confident now. That arrogance of youth and that kind of ignorant confidence can get you through a whole lot of things, and then life does its stuff and you get smashed around and beaten up. You get full of doubts and you end up making a person out of those bits and pieces.'' 

You can listen to a 2012 interview with Ms. Davidson here with Phillip Adams. Don't be surprised to hear a man reading an excerpt from her book at the start. 

I am attracted to stories of long journeys. Sure, it's about the adventure. It's also about the overcoming of obstacles, of fear. 

Here is a compendium of journey posts.

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Rootless: Long Walk: "This Wild Call From Inside Me"

Sarah Marquis. Source: Femina

"After a year, year and a half, I get this urge to go. I get cranky. And my family says, ‘All right, it’s time to go.’"

Source: New York Times, 25 September 2014.

Sarah Marquis is one of National Geographic's Adventurers of the Year for 2014.

The New York Times has a long interview with her in The Woman Who Walked 10,000 Miles in Three Years.

I like reading about women who take long journeys. Some previous examples: 

Rootless Lit: Eighty Days - about Nelly Bly's and Elizabeth Bisland's competitive race around the world in 1889.

Janet Moreland's (a fellow Missourian of a certain age) solo kayak trek down the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers in 2013.

"One Thing That Scares You A Day Keeps Apathy at Bay" with references to Molly Langmuir's solo hike in the Grand Tetons and Cheryl Strayed's solo hike on the Pacific Crest Trail.

Sisters of Sinai: How Two Lady Adventurers Discovered the Hidden Gospels around the turn of the 20th century.

New Mexico: Bosque Redondo Memorial, Part 2: Luck

Bosque Redondo Memorial, Fort Sumner, New Mexico

What is luck? 

Yes, I know there are those who espouse the "everything happens for a reason" model. I'm not among them. Rather, I believe it is we who place meaning on what happens to us and the world around us. 

Does luck exist because we have created this idea of luck? Or is an event a function of a random throw of existential dice, and thus neutral, and therefore unremarkable? Might not one lucky event, if we pull back for a space-station view of a life over the course of its many years, result in not-luck down the road?

Well, anyway.

I was lucky. 

I was already feeling good when I walked into the Bosque Redondo Memorial building because of the enchanting experience here (with a respectful nod to the yang side of said enchantment as noted by a reader here).

The first good vibe came when, immediately upon walking into the memorial foyer, a smiling woman greeted me with a friendly welcome.

Then she informed me that a tour of the site had just begun and if I'd like to join it, I could tag along. And I did.

That friendly smile and invitation - and, I suppose, my acceptance of said invitation - bloomed into a sequence of lucky moments: 

• a tour given by a woman who clearly loves the place and what it represents, 
• a delicious lunch (!) catered by Fort Sumner community members, 
• tasty conversation tidbits with the bona fide members of the tour group, 
• an astounding video that I'll talk about later, and 
• the gift of a puzzle piece I'd been seeking while trying to process Edwin R. Sweeney's book, Mangas Coloradas, Chief of the Chiricahua Apaches. 

The group of people on tour this day at the memorial were members of the Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe.


Not really luck

My good luck wouldn't have happened if the folks at the memorial, which included staff, volunteers, and members of the local Chamber of Commerce, didn't have a generosity of spirit and an understanding of the bigger picture - to promote the memorial and their town.

They could have easily kept things exclusive, but instead they embraced the stranger walking through their door. Kudos.


And in case you're wondering .... yes, I'm sneaking up on the tangible and intangible of this place and what it commemorates. It's not an easy story.

New Mexico: Bosque Redondo Memorial, Part 1: How I Got There

The Long Walk, by C Ortiz. Bosque Redondo Memorial, Fort Sumner, New Mexico

What is the Bosque de Redondo Memorial?

Bosque de Redondo Memorial is a place that commemorates The Long Walk (and subsequent detention) of thousands of Navajo and Apache.

The Long Walk, circa 1864, occurred when the U.S. Army forced thousands of Navajo into what was, for all intents and purposes a concentration camp, in Bosque Redondo (later called Fort Sumner) in which the Navajo and Mescalero Apache remained until 1868.

How I got there

I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have visited the memorial, which is outside Fort Sumner, New Mexico, if I hadn't seen the documentary, Sun Kissed, which I wrote about here.

This documentary - about two children who died from a genetic disorder - brought home the interconnectedness of biology, history, culture, access to health care and information, science, and technology.

A traumatic event in Bosque Redondo more than 100 years ago contributed to the death of these two children today.

I had to go, and I did, in my final days in New Mexico.