I liked how the sign with the arrow supplemented the “God” message.
But I don’t trust people who are up all night.
(Photographed in Carlisle towards the end of Hadrian’s Wall Path.)
Ever since I went on my first long-distance walk, the Hadrian’s Wall Path in England, I have been wondering: “Why am I only bumping into other white folks?” In most British cities, there was a vibrant and colorful diversity of ethnicities and origins, yet out on the famous trail, everyone was Anglo-Saxon (and me German).
I have since had similar experiences on other long-distance paths or in national parks in the UK, the US and in Europe.
This could be put down to coincidence, if there weren’t many other hikers asking the same question. I was reminded of my own observations when I listened to an interview with Rahawa Haile on NPR. She had hiked the Appalachian Trail – and encountered a disproportionately low number of fellow African-Americans.
But her explanations didn’t satisfy me. I don’t think that memories of slavery and Jim Crow laws plague many people when they have to make a decision about where and how to vacation in 2017. In any case, this wouldn’t explain the absence of Turkish hikers in Germany or of Indian hikers in Scotland compared to their share of the population. Not all global phenomena can be explained by US-American history.
Nor can most things be explained by one cause alone.
Economic disparity certainly plays a role. Although hiking itself is free and the equipment costs less than a mobile phone, people struggling with several minimum-wage jobs and living in constant worry about being evicted won’t take off a few months to wander through the wilderness. Ethnic minorities are over-represented among the poor, so this may account for some of the lack of Latino and African hikers. But I am not even talking about these long hikes of the Pacific Crest Trail or such, I am more concerned with shorter adventures of one or a few days.
Although I am generally big on economic factors, I wouldn’t discount cultural factors either. Olaleye Akintola, a Nigerian journalist who moved to Germany in 2014, recently wrote that he doesn’t understand why Germans go camping and hiking. “Why do people leave their clean and safe houses and sleep in their cars, in tents or in drafty mountain huts as if they were vagabonds?” For him, sleeping outside is a step down, not something to aspire to.
This goes hand in hand with the economic situation. Maybe one needs the secure middle-class background to find a lack of comfort exciting and not perceive it as a threatening memory of the past, whether it is one’s own or one’s family’s. Also, if you already live in a leafy suburb, you are emotionally closer to the outdoors than if you live in an inner city. Just as suburbans would be afraid of going to downtown, inner-city kids may be more afraid of bears.
Speaking of bears, I remember an anecdote that perfectly illustrates different perceptions of danger. As any hiker knows, bears are no real danger and definitely less of a danger than humans. It is rather rare that you see them. I have tried and I only managed it once, in Romania. Also in Romania, I met a refugee from Syria who hosted me on Couchsurfing. When I asked him if he had been out to explore the beautiful mountains and forests of Romania, he replied: “No way! There are bears.” Here was a guy who had escaped war, bombings, oppression and dictatorship, but he associated the peaceful forests of Europe with danger and death.
Particularly with first-generation immigrants, I often sense that they feel under pressure to lead a life that they can show off to those left in their home country, thus justifying the emigration. Apparently, photos of fancy apartments, big TVs and cars or huge weddings are more impressive in India or Turkey than a photo of the son freezing in a sleeping bag. (“If all you wanted to do was freeze your ass off, you could have stayed outside in the garden,” you can hear the nasty grandmother bitching.)
Maybe cultural heritage plays a role, too. White Americans have cowboys and trappers as role models, Australians worship escaped bandits living in the wilderness and Germans have read the books by Karl May. Latinos on the other hand, and overly stereotyping, have telenovelas, Indians have Bollywood and Persians have wine-drinking poets. (I don’t know anything about Asian cultures, but I have repeatedly read that they are the second-largest group on hiking trails in the US.) And maybe some non-white groups are not quite as big on individualism and value family, friends and community higher than proving to oneself the ability to walk 1,000 miles through the desert?
Another contributing factor may be advertisement. In almost all ads for outdoor equipment, everybody is white. There is even more advertisement directed at seniors, children and dogs than at ethnic minorities.
Actually, come to think of it, the only TV ads showing black people with outdoor equipment are those asking them to sign up to die “for their country”.
Now, I don’t think that everybody should go hiking. But I do think that hiking is such a wonderful, uncomplicated and affordable way to escape one’s daily routine, to get away from the stress, to build confidence that it’s sad if certain parts of the population were excluded, felt excluded or were to exclude their children from it based on race or class.
Particularly for recent immigrants and refugees, many of them with traumatic experiences, I would think that spending a week or two in nature will help to foster calm and confidence better than staying in overcrowded shelters. US military veterans are using hiking to overcome post-deployment stress. I think it would do some good to someone who escaped war and survived a boat ride through the Mediterranean, too.
Hiking through the wonderful nature of one’s new home may even lead to a greater sense of belonging than an integration course in which people have to learn all 50 state capitals. (As always when I have a good idea, some research reveals that it has already been done: two Afghan refugees walked 1,000 km through Switzerland.)
Lastly, I should caution that all my observations are unrepresentative. That’s why I am curious to hear about your experience. And of course there are always exceptions, and nothing can be generalized, as my Iranian hiking partner on the West Highland Way in Scotland demonstrated.
Links:
I wasn’t up that early, but my father took this photo yesterday:
I like Bill Bryson and have enjoyed some of his other books, but Neither Here nor There, his account of traveling through Europe from Norway to Istanbul, is disappointing.
The book is full of clichés that you already knew about and didn’t need another book to confirm. Italians are attractive and loud, German is a strange language, Scandinavia is expensive, Switzerland is expensive, Liechtenstein is expensive, and so on.
What is worse is that nothing much happens. Mr Bryson writes in great detail about purchasing a plane/train/bus ticket from each stop to the next and then about the hotels he stays at. That takes up half of the book. The rest is for restaurants, complaining about prices and service, getting drunk, and some pages are left for a walk around the park.
It seems like Mr Bryson didn’t set out to explore a continent, to get to know people, to have adventures, but was rather ticking off cities from a to-visit list. Very rarely does he talk to locals or allow himself to be surprised by wandering off into the unknown, even if it was just a less touristy part of town. At one point, he even takes pride in not learning any of the local language, confirming another cliché, this time about Americans. Mr Bryson can write with humor, but I got the impression that this was a sad and lonely journey.
If you want to prepare for a trip to Europe, you can do a hundred times better with Geert Mak’s In Europe.
At 16:00 there would be a basketball game, I had heard.
So I was there at 16:00 sharp. There, but alone. No players, no spectators, no ball, no ice-cream vendor whose presence would have been highly desirable in the heat. Not even a Coca-Cola machine.
I was surprised, for Chile had actually been the most punctual country in South America. But maybe it was different in Humberstone, this city deep in the desert? But then, the whole town was dominated by a clock tower which I could see from the stand. 15:58.
So I had the basketball court all to myself for another two minutes.
The lonelier the wait and the scorchier the heat, the slower time passes. I walked across the field a few times, threw a couple of imaginary three-pointers, cheekily sat down in the most expensive row and kept looking at the clock. 15:58.
Something was not quite right. I wasn’t wearing a watch, so I couldn’t prove to the clock tower exactly how wrong it was, but after I had waited long enough to gather dust and rust like the basketball court itself, I remembered the trick with the sun. And sun there was plenty of, I can tell you. Uff! From the shadows cast, I could discern that it couldn’t be any later than 13:00. No wonder my friends hadn’t showed up yet.
I went to the swimming pool instead.
I had an appointment at the Georgian Heritage Preservation Council to talk about cultural heritage in the country. But the entrance to the building told me everything I needed to know.
Zur deutschen Fassung dieses Artikels.
Reading the book Black Earth, I became aware of a village in Ukraine that was calculated and named as the geographical center of Europe in 1887: Dilove.
“Really?“ I wondered, not because I would begrudge Dilove the distinction, but because I had already visited the alleged center of Europe a few years ago, in the aptly named Europe Park in Lithuania.
The underlying calculation in this case dated from 1989.
Over a hundred years, it may be possible for a continent to grow a bit, shrink a bit or move around a bit. After all, the continental drift had been invented in the meantime. But from Ukraine to Lithuania, that’s a stretch – at least geographically. Different methods of calculation must have been used.
The first problem is to determine what Europe is. Do you do it politically? Then it would be the Habsburg Empire or the European Union. With or without candidates for accession? Will the United Kingdom suddenly be (even) less European in two years? And what is the effect of that Swiss hole in the middle of the European cheese? Do you include the islands which expand the territory of the EU all the way to Guadeloupe and New Caledonia? Aren’t French Guyana and Ceuta so obviously in South America or Africa, respectively, that they cannot be part of Europe? What about Northern Cyprus? Questions upon questions. Good that at least Germany lost everything from Samoa to the Bismarck Archipelago, for otherwise the map of the EU would be even more complicated.
But even leaving political interpretations aside, a mere geographical calculation of the center of the continent can be debated endlessly as well. Where to draw the Eastern boundary? What about Turkey? What about the Caucasus? Is Malta European or African? Do you simply connect the most outward points to determine the center? Or do you consider the boundaries of the landmasses? Possibly weighted for the product of surface times density, because an acre of Switzerland weighs more than an acre of Holland. Or do you pick the center of a circle drawn around Europe?
If you are playing around with methods and figures, you will always find some center of Europe situated in a small village hoping to benefit from Euro-centrist tourism. Because it is striking that all centers of Europe have so far been in villages in the pampas where nothing else is happening:
But I don’t think there is much to see at either of these places. Well, Mõnnuste at least is on the island of Saaremaa, which looks quite beautiful.
“If nights were as long as I love you, dawn would never come.”
(Photographed in Podgorica, Montenegro.)
It was the last day of October. It was foggy. It was cold. It was wet. It was gloomy.
But these sheep in Žabljak in Montenegro didn’t seem to mind.
The Happy Hermit 