Navigations: One Man Explores the Americas and Discovers Himself
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Navigations: One Man Explores the Americas and Discovers Himself
Ever since two travelers met, knelt in the sand, and drew each other sketches of the way ahead, maps have guided our days. They lead us on the highway and in the backcountry. Often, they set the bounds of our imaginings. In Navigations, Ted Kerasote leaves the mapped territory of outdoor writing—the where-to-go’s and the how-to-do-it’s he regularly covers as camping editor for Sports Afield—and explores uncharted territory.
Navigations in a three-part chronicles of Kerasote’s 12-year odyssey: first South, then North, and finally Home. In the early 70s, Kerasote takes off for Central America. Early in the trip, he writes: I wandered around the jungle for another week and never got to Colombia, at least not overland. I blamed the rainy season, the washed out trails, the flooded rivers, but most of all those bloody maps with their blank spaces—no contour lines, no shaded relief, the villages not even on the right bends of rivers. I didn’t realize that it would take me ten more years to read maps well. In fact, I had no idea that I was navigating in country for which a good map had not yet been made.
Kerasote does make it through Central America, fishing and exploring along the way, and slowly travels southward—climbing peaks in Ecuador, Bolicia, and Chile, and at last climbing Argentina’s Aconcagua, the highest mountain in the hemisphere. What does he see and what does he learn from this sixteen-month-long experiment in using time differently?
“Each of us is given some seventy years,†writes Kerasote, “a decent amount of time and such a niggardly small gift when you have eyes to see the gifts you must leave. In that time, you shouldn’t be afraid to take a year or two or even more to do something not in the straight path you originally chose. You shouldn’t be afraid to watch the slow turnings of stars and clouds and strange peoples, for although family, country, and abiding loves will never afterwards be holy, they will become tender and subtle in unimagined ways.â€
But a year or two in South America is not enough to cure Kerasote’s wanderlust. Inspired by what he experienced on the trip south, Kerasote travels north in the early 80s to the North Slope, Arctic Circle, Brooks Range, Alaska. Hiking, kayaking, casting for Arctic char, photographing caribou, moose, bear, Dall sheep, Kerasote travels unencumbered—no newspaper headlines, no breakfast music to dull the sharpness of the northern tundra world. Here, too, as in the south he is alone and silent and at ease in creation.
Back Home, Colorado, a familiar place where, you’d think, a map wouldn’t be necessary, Kerasote finds he’s still navigating by feel—negotiating schedules and stress, cash flows and divorce, pain. These are challenges as difficult as those he’s found in more exotic places. Waiting for the hurry and the hurt to pass into wisdom. Kerasote goes fishing, kayaks the Dolores River, maps a trophy line.
As Kerasote shares his adventure, he comes to realize he’s in love with navigating itself—with the act of finding and re-finding the way, and not forgetting any of the paths that brought him to his present camp. Navigations is the story of those paths, the places, the companions, his nomad self he’s come to know.
