STUDENT CLOSE-UP

Dangerous Landscapes

By Charles E. Reineke

Note: This story was published originally in the fall 2003 issue of Illumination, a magazine that showcases research, scholarship and creative achievement at the University of Missouri-Columbia.

She has traversed the jungles of Papua New Guinea, kayaked 600 miles up the Niger River, and been kidnapped by marauding Mozambican soldiers. But this May, less than a week before heading to the war- and famine-ravaged Democratic Republic of Congo on assignment for National Geographic Adventure magazine, Kira Salak, author of Four Corners: One Woman’s Solo Journey Into the Heart of Papua New Guinea and MU graduate student, told Illumination she’s playing it safe from now on. Sure she is.

A New York Times writer once described her as a “real-life Lara Croft,” but Kira Salak is having none of that. She is, she says, an introvert. Not particularly comfortable talking about herself. That’s why she took up traveling, or at least part of the reason. Salak crosses her legs and takes a long drink of water. Her blue eyes turn back on her interlocutor. She’s waiting for the next question, not with impatience exactly, but with the somewhat bemused, slightly annoyed, attitude of an adult speaking to an overly inquisitive 3-year-old.

How long will you be in Central Africa? “I don’t know, a few weeks,” Salak says. Will it be dangerous? “The way I’m going to do it will be pretty safe, I think.” When will the story run? “I don’t know. Can’t help you.”

Later in the summer, National Geographic Adventure features editor Stephen Byers fills in the details. Kira was in the Congo for just over a month, overcoming dangers and distractions before eventually meeting up with primatologists working with endangered mountain gorillas. The story was published in the December/January edition of the magazine. It’s brilliant: Just what the editors at Geographic Adventure were hoping for, Byers says.

“We really don’t assign conventional travel pieces; we’re looking for stories that have a real adventure component,” Byers says, adding that Salak has yet to disappoint in this regard. “She’s terrific. But you know what? I don’t know that we could use any more writers like her. She’s kind of our resident hot dog, put-a-Baby-Ruth-in-her-hip-pocket-and-go-to-the-dark-side-of-the-moon-for-you writer. If this magazine were full of her sort of stories, we’d scare everybody to death.”

Indeed, few trips can match the fearful rigors of visiting the mountain gorillas’ cloud forest home, a once pristine habitat that in recent years has harbored Hutu militiamen seeking to prolong civil strife in both Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The interlopers have repeatedly harassed the small community of scientists working to protect the gorillas, and in past years have attacked tourists seeking great ape encounters. In March 1999, for example, a group of Hutu guerrillas swarmed over a tourist camp at Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable Forest, kidnapping 16 visitors. Eight were hacked to death before the others were rescued.

Now it is mostly the gorillas that suffer. The twin scourges of war and poverty have pushed thousands of refugees into the great apes’ shrinking sanctuary. The hungry human arrivals waste little time before clearing forests, poaching game and illegally prospecting for coltan, a mineral used to manufacture components in computers, mobile phones, pagers and other high-tech gadgets. Some gorillas have been killed for eating refugees’ food crops; others have had their infants snatched away for sale in Asian markets. Many more go hungry because the forest can no longer sustain them. Some 17,000 mountain gorillas lived in the eastern Congo in 1999, scientists from the Diane Fossey Gorilla Fund told The Economist magazine in July. Only about 1,000 are left today.

Political mayhem, human misery and the heartbreaking destruction of one of Earth’s most magnificent mammals: A perfect vacation destination, right? Salak knew it wouldn’t be a holiday, but says her reasons for going were obvious. “How many Americans know about what’s happening in eastern Congo?” she says. “It’s important.”

Byers, on the other hand, admits he tried to talk Salak out of making the trip. “I have to say I resisted assigning her that story: We’re an adventure travel magazine, not Newsweek or Time,” Byers says. “I didn’t want her to do it, but she just kept after me, beating me into the ground. Finally, I weakened, and she got the assignment. But I didn’t have any hope for it at all. Notwithstanding that she is a terrific writer, I just thought, ‘This is never going to work. There is going to be too much gore, machetes ripping arms off and, you know, that kind of thing.’”

Norman Douglas, one of the previous century’s great adventure travelers, once remarked that “the reader of a good travel book is entitled not only to an exterior voyage, to descriptions of scenery and so forth, but to an interior, a sentimental or temperamental voyage, which takes place side by side with the outer one.” Literary critic Paul Fussell approvingly quotes Douglas in his own study of travel writing, Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars, a work that, among its many other virtues, expands on Douglas’ insight to provide a handy distinction between the work of writers such as Salak and those at Frommer’s and Fodor’s.

“A guide book is addressed to those who plan to follow the traveler, doing what he has done, only more selectively,” Fussell writes. “A travel book, at its purest, is addressed to those who do not plan to follow the traveler at all, but who require the exotic or comic anomalies, wonders and scandals of the literary form romance which their own place or time cannot entirely supply.”

Anomaly and wonder, if not scandal, are the stock-in-trade of Salak’s adventures; her voyages, even to the most exotic locales, always turn inward; her constant searching and self-fashioning are positively Byronic in both folly and grandeur. Take, for instance, Salak’s epic float trip in the fall of 2002. Armed with little more than a heavy backpack, a stack of notebooks, and a tiny red kayak, Salak set out to paddle from the Malian town of Old Ségou to Timbuktu, a journey of some 600 miles which had never been completed solo. The trip was financed by Geographic Adventure and inspired by the late 18th century journey of Scottish explorer Mungo Park. Her account of it, Mungo Made Me Do It, was included in Houghton-Mifflin’s Best American Travel Writing 2003 anthology.

“Park is my guarantee of sorts,” Salak wrote before embarking. “If he could travel down the Niger, then so can I. Of course, Park also died on the river, but so far I’'ve managed to overlook that.”

Rémi Bénali, the French photojournalist who documented Salak’s voyage for the magazine, provides firsthand confirmation of her confidence. Bénali has worked for many of Europe’s most respected newspapers and magazines. His assignments have included shooting four Olympic games.

He recalls a first, chance encounter with Salak that immediately put him in mind of his Olympic experience. “I could see from her face, and in her features, that this woman knew where she wanted to go. But she was very discreet, very reserved, almost shy,” Bénali says during a phone conversation from his Paris apartment. “The shyness surprised me a little bit, you know, because in this kind of country you have to be tough. But she had strength. You could see it in her face. She was like an Olympian before the race.”

Salak says her confidence was somewhat less than Olympian before attempting the trip that launched her professional writing career, her now-famous trek across Papua New Guinea. No national magazines were sending photographers to document that journey; there would be no paycheck for completing it. She financed the trip, in fact, by working for two years in a salad crouton packing plant. At the time she set out, no one except the heartbroken boyfriend she left behind even knew she was leaving.

But it was a trip she knew she had to make. For years the South Pacific backwater — known mostly for its tropical forests and head-shrinking inhabitants — had a hold on her imagination. She recalls as a girl gazing at its uncharted interior on a map from, who else, the National Geographic Society, transfixed by visions of man-eating crocodiles and “tribes of people who built huts in the trees.” To the painfully shy child growing up in suburban Chicago, Papua’s impenetrable midsection began to serve as a powerful metaphor for her well-concealed inner life, as well as a chance to transcend it.

“I’d been writing since I was 6 years old, and I saw in my writing my first chance to escape and become someone else, someone better,” Salak, now 31, writes in Four Corners, the introspective, wildly adventurous account of her sojourn. Salak completed the book while enrolled in MU’s creative writing doctoral program. Counterpoint Press published it in October 2001.

At age 9, she recalls composing descriptions of exotic places — some real, some invented — alongside accounts of the imaginary adventures she would have there. Each was duly filed away in a carefully concealed “special box,” which soon became an indispensable part of her girlhood. “At school, I carried around a notebook in which I wrote the scenes of my adventures so I could play-act them by myself at home. My summers were spent in heady excitement over where my make-believe would take me next. One day I might be in the Great Plains, the next day Mesopotamia, the Andes … New Guinea.”

Even as a fantasy destination, Papua New Guinea isn’t for the timid traveler. A peek at a recent consular information sheet from the U.S. State Department helps explain why. “Numerous U.S.- citizen residents and visitors have been victims of violent crime in recent years, and they have sometimes suffered severe injuries,” the bulletin reads. “Carjackings, armed robberies, and stoning of vehicles are problems in Port Moresby, Lae and Mount Hagen. Pickpockets and bag-snatchers frequent crowded public areas. Hiking in rural areas and visiting isolated public sites such as parks, golf courses, beaches, or cemeteries can be dangerous.”

Additional warnings continue for several paragraphs, including this sobering caution to drivers: “Crowds form quickly after an accident in Papua New Guinea and may attack those whom they hold responsible, stoning and/or burning their vehicles.”

Complicating matters was Salak’s mental health. By the time her Port Moresby-bound flight boarded in Cairns, Australia, she was laden with the sort of emotional baggage that reflected the turmoil of her destination.

In the years before her trip, the shy little girl had grown into a pathologically withdrawn young woman, a disappointment to her parents and an object of derision among her schoolmates. In Four Corners, Salak describes bouts of depression and self-loathing that added to her isolation. At times just the thought of speaking to another person caused her chest to tighten and waves of anxiety to wash over her.

Salak’s folks were alarmed. Thinking a change of venue might help, they enrolled their teenaged daughter in a Wisconsin boarding school. For a time, shipping her off seemed just the ticket. She discovered an aptitude for distance running. Her success sparked talk of college scholarships, even the Olympic trials.

But the attention, and the pressure to win that came with it, was too much. After completing a meet in which she set a Wisconsin high school record in the mile, Salak writes, “I went to my dormitory room, locked the door and tried desperately to break my legs with a piece of pipe.”

Her injuries weren’t serious. But Salak’s track career was over. She screwed up the courage to tell her astonished teammates and coaches she was quitting. Then she started seeing a psychologist.

The plan for Papua New Guinea was simple: By boat and on foot she would traverse the island from south to north, retracing the route followed by intrepid past explorers such as Ivan Champion. She would do it alone. “I would go way into that jungle and get myself out again. It would be hard,” she wrote. “It would be the ultimate test … I would be forced to have confidence in myself, and to trust in my capabilities. I would need to become someone new, altogether, an entirely different kind of person. A fighter.”

“When I wrote that book,” Salak says now, “I think it’s safe to say that my life didn’t matter that much to me. And, in that sense, if your life doesn’t matter you can do difficult things and not worry about them too much.”

Without worrying too much about the ultimate outcome, she means to say. Fact is, worry, in one form or another, is a constant companion when Salak hits the road.

She says she began traveling, for instance, to escape anxiety left over from her early exit from athletics. As a study abroad student in Norway, then later as a solo traveler in Egypt, Salak felt liberated from the “silence and solitude” of her previous life. But she wanted more: more confidence, more power to transcend what she saw as the limitations placed upon her gender. Subsequent attempts to transcend these constraints sometimes led to quixotic quests and questionable decisions: Sleeping, for example, in down-and-out Cairo hotels where “men’s eyes flickered behind peepholes and shadows crept under the door,” and, most disastrously, by insisting on traveling through Mozambique’s “Tete Corridore” — a blood-soaked ribbon of highway linking the nations of Malawi and Zimbabwe — during the height of Mozambique’s tragically brutal civil war.

That particular journey still haunts her. In July 1992, after talking her way into a transit visa and a place on a battered Zimbabwe-bound transport, the 20-year-old Salak found herself bouncing along a section of Tete Corridore ominously referred to as the “Bone Yard Stretch.”

Burned out vehicles lay strewn by the side of the road, towns were deserted, hungry bands of children appeared like ghosts from the bush. No sooner had she and the driver navigated this notorious killing ground than the truck’s engine began to falter. Worry, at this point, does not begin to describe Salak’s emotions.

Her anxieties were well founded. A ragtag mob of drunken government troops soon appeared, leering at her, touching her, eventually dragging her at gunpoint from the cab of the truck. The driver, a sympathetic man named Jerry, warns her of what is to come.

“Jerry’s eyes,” Salak writes in one of the more harrowing passages of her book, “are focused on some point down the road. ‘Listen,’ he says to me. ‘These soldiers, they want to do something with you, do you understand?’

“I don’t understand. I don’t want to understand.

“One of the soldiers, a boy scarcely older than 15, harshly reprimands Jerry for talking, but Jerry ignores him. ‘They say they will take you to the border, to a rest house. But this is a lie.’

“‘Just me? But where are they going to take me?’

“Jerry’s eyes are still locked on some point in the distance. ‘Listen to me — when it is dark, run. We are close to the border.’”

Salak is hauled off to a crumbling, urine-soaked building where, after hours of enduring pantomimed threats of rape and murder, she breaks away from her captors during a trip to the outhouse. Once free, she follows Jerry’s advice, sprinting toward shadowy hills rising up along the Zimbabwean border. Pumped full of adrenaline and fear, the former track star easily outpaces the booze-addled troops. She spends the night hiding in the jungle, and then manages to rejoin Jerry at a border checkpoint.

“I was pretty young when I wrote Four Corners,” Salak says. She pauses before continuing. “I did some things that were probably, in retrospect, things that I shouldn’t have done. It was dangerous doing the Mozambique trip. Dangerous for everybody involved.”

A journey across Papua New Guinea invited new tribulations. The terrain offered up not only steaming jungle, but also sucking-mud swamps, near-vertical slopes, and roaring rivers without bridge or ford. There were voracious leeches, clouds of mosquitoes and armies of cockroaches. There was a human cast of characters rich in both heroes and villains.

But most of all, there was Kira Salak. In Four Corners, as in her magazine stories, Salak uses the first person pronoun to hammer away at her readers with a metronomic insistence, dragging them, willing or not, into her intensely self-scrutinizing interior world. This journey into Salak’s psyche can, depending on one’s feelings about the narrator, be exhilarating or exhausting — sometimes both.

“She’s a really complex person, I’ve never worked with anybody like her,” says Rachel Cobb, a photographer who accompanied Salak on a Geographic Adventure assignment in rural Mexico. Cobb’s photos have appeared in many of the world’s most prominent periodicals, including Time, the New York Times Magazine, the London Sunday Times and Stern. She too has faced danger and difficulty in pursuit of stories, most notably in Bosnia and Iraq.

Cobb says there is plenty to admire in Salak’s writing. But when pressed she allows that Salak’s style can sometimes be, from a professional point of view, well, worrying.

“I think the important thing is that we don’t fall too much into having the reporter become the story,” Cobb says. “I think it’s a weakness in journalism in general — in the last 10 years there’s been a big turn towards that — and I’m not in agreement with it, I don’t think it’s the right direction.”

Byers, who, like Cobb, spoke to Illumination from New York City, is more inclined to celebrate Salak’s risk taking; particularly, he says, given that the adventure travel genre, by its nature, demands reporters willing to throw themselves into situations most sane people would never even consider. The best of these writers, and Byers counts Salak among them, force us not only to feel their pain but to find merit in their madness.

This is not to suggest that Byers doesn’t harbor his own concerns about Salak. He recently told a Book magazine reporter, for example, that he was afraid Salak might have a “death wish.”

“That was an accurate quote,” he says with a chuckle. “Actually, I didn’t say I was afraid she might have a death wish, I said ‘I thought she might have a death wish.’” Byers recalls discussing the “death-wish issue” with Salak before granting the Book interview. “I had talked to her endlessly about her life and how it related to stories we were doing ... Her response was that, not only did she not have a death wish, but she thought she might like to have children some day!”

After he stops laughing, Byers adds that Salak is a “an acquired taste. You could say she is a little bit of a polarizing writer. Some people love her and some don’t at all.” For Byers, it’s definitely love, and he’s convinced that millions of other readers are going to love her too. “She’s going to be absolutely huge — if she doesn’t die doing one of these stories,” he says.

For her part, Salak says she has never traveled to aggrandize herself, to scare people, or even to sell books. Yes, she says, “it’s probably fair to say I had a death wish when I did [the New Guinea] trip. I don’t now. And I, sort of, resent people who say that I do. I am very conscious of doing what I am doing now, and I’m very conscious of my motivations for doing those things.”

“I still do the, quote/unquote, difficult things,” she says later in the conversation, “but very consciously, with a different intention behind them.” Salak clears her throat before continuing. “A lot of it is just this idea that women are supposed to do certain things, and not other things. Adventure is such a male–dominated genre. That bothers me a lot. ... I try to do trips that even men wouldn’t want to do. Even the best, physically fit men would balk at some of the things I want to do.”

And have done already, she might have added.

Today, Salak insists she has made peace with herself. She credits maturity, study of Buddhist philosophy and, of course, the various forms of secular wisdom gained in places such as New Guinea.

“I took away from that trip this idea of not needing to struggle anymore about who I am,” Salak says. “I don’t feel like I need to go through that journey anymore, and my second book is not about that. It’s more about testing oneself in different ways, of embarking into the world and what that encompasses.”

The new book, an extended account of her arduous trip down the Niger River, is scheduled for publication by Bantam in July 2004.

At MU, Salak has moved in yet another direction, concentrating more and more on fiction. Here too she has found success. Her short story, “Beheadings,” was included in Wisdom Publications’ Anthology of Buddhist Fiction in 2002, and editors such as Byers are already saying fiction may be Salak’s true calling.

Salak herself won’t be pinned down, but acknowledges fiction is the focus of her creative writing studies — studies the utility of which, she adds, occasionally baffle her professional travel-writing pals. “A lot of them ask me what I’m doing in graduate school … and tell me to get out of graduate school,” she says, laughing.

How does she answer them? “I tell them I like to keep my options open. And to mind their own business.”

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