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Paul Salopek received two Pulitzer Prizes, first in 1998 for explanatory journalism, and then in 2001 for international reporting. He began was born in California and raised in Mexico, and had a series of colorful adventures before graduating from the University of California-Santa Barbara in 1984. He started as a journalist in 1985 when his motorcycle broke down in New Mexico, and he took a police-reporting job at the local newspaper to early money for his repairs.
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PS: This is still a good time. I just wanted to make sure I could help you. I got your email back and I'm more than happy to chat with you, but again, my only qualm is that I'm not exactly - what I have to say or share that would fit under the rubric of your book -
PH: No, and I appreciate it. First of all, before we get started, do you mind if I tape this interview?
PS: No, that's fine. Go right ahead.
PH: So, I definitely understood the tenor of what you were saying in your mail, but as I mentioned, seeing the diversity of the experiences and having a more colorful story like yours is very interesting for people who're pondering, who may want to see that it's not just one clear-cut formula to doing big things. So actually, to get started, one thing that I think would be very helpful is if you could give me a sense of how things went when you took that first full-time job, or when you exited school, I guess, because it sounded like you had some pretty diverse experiences. You mentioned Mexico, and so forth.
PS: Right. Are you talking, and only interested in the jobs that led me to where I am now, because I'm trying to think of my first full-time job after school. My god, I started working at 16, doing odd jobs.
PH: It'd be most interesting to understand what you were thinking, what your frame of mind was, and what you did, regardless of whether or not it had a direct link to your current work.
PS: Okay. As I mentioned, I ahd no training or intention of going into journalism. That was an accident. My interest since childhood has been in the natural world and science and biology, archaeology, things that deal with going out and finding trends in nature, asking questions. I always loved the out of doors. So school for me was not my favorite place, for that reason, just being indoors, but also coming from a foreign culture. I went through a primary school in Mexico and came to the States, returned at the age of 13, with an accent and with a far better formal education than my cohorts, my American cohorts. So I found American school not just dull and unchallenging, but also somewhat socially stifling. So I didn't enjoy it, and I did not have a burning desire even to go onto university.
I didn't have a gameplan. I knew what I liked, what made me happy, and that was being outside and often doing physical types of things. And so I dropped out of high school at 16 in California, once I'd been back in the States for, I guess that would've been 4 years. And did not return until about, did not return to school until about a year and a half later, after getting a GED and then going to back to junior college. In the interim, I knocked almonds on farms around central California. I traveled to Australia, went, doing everything. Picking fruit, working as a landscaper, laborer, working in a goldmine. Working on shrimp boats, installing walk-in freezers, I mean, just a panopoly of jobs.
PH: And what was going through your mind at this time? Were you feeling any pressure to quote-unquote get a career, or were you happily going along from thing to thing?
PS: Yeah, it was a fairly rootless period. My main passion in my life was getting out into the world, in as unfettered, unplanned way as possible. Basically, reading a little too much Conrad, influenced by literature, travel literature and whatnot. So I guess I need to step back - I'd always been an avid reader. Sort of perhaps without thinking about it, in subconsciously, words from a very early time began giving what little structure there was to my life when I was a young man, through stories and storytelling. So I went out, after dropping out of school and tried to have these adventures and tried to kind of experience the raw edge of the world. And to make myself vulnerable and not to be able to fall back on comfortable resources. So during this time I was broke sometimes. I was dumpster diving behind supermarkets.
PH: Is that something you - gloried in would be too strong of a term - but was that something you were fine with, or did you feel, you know, unhappy about that kind of thing?
PS: I felt fine with it because I was smart enough not to fall into, I think, even at the age of 17-18, when this was happening, fall into the trap of over-romanticizing sort of a Jack Kerouac-ian experience. I mean, I read Kerouac, I read all of his stuff, but I did not connect with that. Again, a part of it - what's going to be complicated to explain is that a part of me is not linked in with the zeitgeist, even literarily, in America. Because a part of me always will be Mexican, in a strange way. So as I came to American literature, as I came to books, it was always from a perspective of being somewhat of an outsider. Even the sort of paradigm of the classic American outsider that was glorified in youthful literature, I never really quite rang a bell.
So I could go do things like take odd jobs and dumpster dive and live in Salvation Armys, knowing I wasn't living in some ready-made fantasy. Because I was also smart enough to know that I was smart, and I was young, and I was a commodity. And the guys I was bunking with in these Salvation Armys weren't. There was a huge difference between me and them, and I didn't have any illusions about that.
So it wasn't the classic go slumming after high school, or in this case, when I should've been in high school. I was basically trying to test my mettle and see what I could do with my hands and my head. And I found I was pretty much good at whatever I did. I could've become a mate on a fishing boat, if I'd stuck it out. I had an aptitude for navigation. I was a very good and hard worker on farms. Invariably, the farms I worked on, they wanted to keep me.
After doing that, though, and after traveling around and doing some hikes in fairly remote, strange places, I felt I did need at a certain point to go back and get a formal education. What for, I wasn't sure, although science was still drawing me. So I went back to the States after about a year and a half, in Oceania, down in Papua New Guinea and Australia, and went to a JC after taking a GED, and started taking courses in biology. So that was first kind of point that there was coherent structure towards what I wanted to do intellectually with my life. I was going into the sciences.
So I went to Aquesta College, a small but very fine JC in central California, and then from there, you know, I don't even remember how I applied to university. Frankly - I ended up at the University of California-Santa Barbara - but I don't have a clue why. I wasn't poring through the literature which had the best biology departments or lada lada. Maybe I sent out an application to the path of least resistance, as a California resident. Send it to the UC system, and 3 or 4 campuses answered back. For whatever reason, which I don't recall, I chose Santa Barbara.
PH: Do you remember whether you were becoming determined to make a career, and to make some sequential progress? Or were you just sort of going to college as another experience in this string of experiences you'd had?
PS: It was a combination. I think I was approaching university as the kind of intellectual challenge that I had up to then confronted physically, out in the physical world. So I thought, "Hey, I've done this, I've done that, I can use my hands, I can drive a big truck, I can mend net, do whatever - Let's just see how good I am at using my head." Part of it was another way to challenge myself, another way to throw myself at the world - strangely, by going at a more conventional route, by going to university.
Also, by the first, by the end of the first year of undergrad, maybe second year of undergrad, I had a fairly good notion, simply because of the atmosphere that I was immersed in, that I wanted to be a scientist. I was with very smart people doing very interesting things out in the natural world, and it would keep me outdoors, it would keep my brain engaged. At the same time, I would have an unconventional, unstructured lifestyle. If you're a field biologist, your life is ruled by the seasons. If you're in the tropical rain forest, you go down during X times of the year, whenever it is or is not raining. If you're working in marine biology, your life is ruled by the tides. By that point, by the time I got my degree from UC-Santa Barbara, which took 3 additional years, I still was then poking around, taking too many electives. You know, everything from poetry to philosophy. By the time I graduated, I had a strong notion of okay, I'm going to continue through grad school and go ahead and get a doctorate, probably something to do with rainforest ecosystems, because I had a very influential teacher who was pointing me in that direction.
But in between - what I have to throw as a caveat - is that in the summertimes, I didn't go out and scoop ice cream, though I (chuckles) actually did scoop ice cream a couple semesters in college. During summers I would go up to Alaska and again work in the fishing industry. I rode a beat-up old motorcycle, rode it 1500-2000 miles up the Alcan, and worked my guts out on the boats or on shore in a cannery, and with that money, that's what paid my way through school. So it was a fairly unconventional way to get through school, as well. My family was not a wealthy one, and basically, what got me my education - which again, was a very fine education in retrospect - was the Pell Grants and my own work ethic in between studying.
PH: So you went to school - Did things become more conventional thereafter - after you exited college?
PS: Yeah. I think there's a maturation process that goes on, and by my last semester at University of California, I was so plugged in, my head was so plugged in with research that I had pretty much chosen a major professor for master's degree, and pretty much, you know, I was a very good student. I was a very good student, so I had professors who were willing to put me on track to get a PhD.
What happened, though, which is indicative of the way things have gone on in my life, I jumped on another motorcycle and then the summer I graduated, I was going to go work in the shrimp fisheries in the Gulf, to earn some money and to go stretch my arms and legs a little bit before getting back into academia. And the motorcycle broke down, halfway across the country in the Southwest, in a small town in Roswell, New Mexico. At the time, I think it was about 40,000 people. I ended up, I had about $60 on me, and I thought, "Well, I'll just stay a week or two, doing odd jobs, enough to buy the parts that I need to repair the bike." Stayed at a real flophouse hotel and started working during the days at a meat market, cutting meat, and at nights, at a doughnut shop. So I pulled 16-hour days, just anxious to move on. I moved out of the hotel when I saw an ad in the local newspaper for a room for rent that was cheaper, and moved in with this old lady who was living alone in a house out among the tumbleweeds, who turned out to have worked as a young woman for the Saturday Evening Post. So we had - when I got home from the meat market, and in between that job and going out at night to work at the doughnut shop, turning in the graveyard shift, we would talk about stories. We'd talk about writing.
PH: So at that point your writing interests of your own had started to develop?
PS: Yeah, I'd never really given that up. I was always still just a fanatical reader, and was - I would inhale books. In a certain way, even by then, as much as I'd imbibed the subculture of academia and science, I think I still was structuring the way I looked at the world through words, and through stories, and did not realize how powerful that yen or yearning was, until this woman, this old woman said, "Look, you're making minimum wage at these two jobs. Why don't you go bump up and add two dollars an hour and take a job at the local newspaper?" which was then looking for a piece reporter. I had never worked at a newspaper before. She knew sort of of my plan to leave as soon as possible, but that didn't deter her from giving me a recommendation.
So I went there one day, and they hired me on the strength that I had a college degree and started reporting. And the idea then became, "Well, maybe I'll do this for a month or so. It's something new, another challenge, before moving onto the Gulf." I never looked back. At that point, I discovered the beauty of, and the power of storytelling. I was good at it, very good at it, and never took a second look back over my shoulder about going back into science.
PH: Good. So you started having these conversations with this woman who was a fellow journalist, or writer. From that point on, can you trace a pretty clear path to the work that you're doing now for the Chicago Tribune, or is still a jagged -
PS: No (chuckles), it was a lot of twists and turns, yeah. It was by no means a straight trajectory. It was very checkered. I found that as much as I loved and reporting and journalism and writing, I could never hold a job for very long. I got bored of them. So I stayed at that newspaper for I think 7 months, and then quit, after learning basically how newspapers work. And then I quit and went down to Mexico and lived in the mountains of the Sierra Madre and lived there for the better part of a year on a ranch, a friend's dry-land ranch, with the idea of doing some ranch work and also writing.
I went down and found a buddy, a kindred spirit, a photographer, and he and his wife and myself went down and produced a special project, a writing project, that we then took back and sold to that small newspaper, which came nowhere near to defraying our expenses, but got us a clip, a tearsheet. So it was a special section. And that in turn won them a prize, and then that got me a little bit of an in with a larger newspaper, the largest in the state, the Albuquerque Journal, they looked at my work and said, "Hey, you're good, why don't you string for us?" They weren't offering a job. They were just saying, "Write for us." So I went up there and met another very fine lover of words, and editor of their weekly magazine, and she fed me work for the next three years, while I was living in the weight room of a buddy in Albuquerque. So on that newspaper's dime, I traveled to Central America, covered all the conflicts down there, followed refugees on the refugee trail back north. Went, took another year off, and went down to Southeast Asia, and covered a conflict there, in a very obscure part of the world called Areangaia (?), or West Papua. Walked across that province in 23 days, alone, up over 16,000-ft mountains, down rivers in canoes. Came back to the States and spent 6 months crewing on a tourist yacht in Honolulu Harbor, while trying to write about what I'd just gone through, and experiencing my first episode of writer's block.
I mean, I can go on and on, but you see, there is no - Even into my twenties, I daresay even into my late twenties, I knew I loved words, I knew whatever I did, I would write about it. I knew I was out of science as a profession but would always use science, both as a way of moving out through the world, moving through a landscape, but also for writing, because in an odd way they're synergistic. You do the same thing in science as you do in reporting: you go out into the world with an open mind, a slightly skeptical mind, and gather a bunch of information, look at it, analyze it for trends. So I was still bouncing around - the ball was maybe bouncing around in a little narrower of a channel, it wasn't bouncing all over the place - but it was still bouncing.
I was - I think when I finally stopped - I guess I never really have. I'm trying to think when I finally stopped kind of erratically taking on odd jobs. The last time I worked on fishing boats was in the early '90s. That's not too long ago, and that was in my 30s, I guess.
PH: What was motivating your love of writing. You said you had this love of words. I get the sense it wasn't money. Was it acclaim? Was it the ability to express yourself? I mean, do you have any sense what it was about writing that interested you in particular?
PS: Yeah, well, I do now. I'm not sure that I did back then. It was this sort of inchoate, testosterone, youthful passion. A terrible yearning to make sense of the world - we all do it in different ways, and what I found was that stories -
When I processed my life through the present time, the way I look at it now, very clearly, is, is this - Peter, part of what we all do, we tell stories about ourselves to ourselves to make sense of our lives. The story I tell myself now is that storytelling was the spark that was always there, and it was there from the very beginning. And when I look back, when I was in Mexican schools, when I wasn't getting the shit kicked out of me, I was telling stories. Stories were the way I saved my skin, but also I felt the power of captivating an audience. These kids, down on the field, outside of the classroom, and just making things up. And by god, they listened. So it's taken me years to look back and see how things, strangely, as incoherent as my life seemed, always had this thread running through it. And that is the power of storytelling. That is what motivated me. That is what I think is important. You know, it's my religion.
I firmly believe if you can't write every day, then - if you feel you mustn't write every day, you shouldn't be in the business. I'm that fanatical about it. It's like breathing. It's got to be essential to who you are and what you do. So I've come to this understanding of my passion in a very roundabout way, but I'm delighted, because at least I've come about to it, and other people sometimes don't.
So it's not acclaim, it's not money - I'd love to have a book, a great book. I'd like to write a great book. I'd love to have it read and discussed. I'd love to have it enter the larger dialogue of stories that are moving around, defining who we are. But also just the act of moving through the world in the way a storyteller does, where the thing you're out there getting, what grabs you, what gets you, what grabs you in the gut, is saying, "Aha, there's a story unfolding in front of me, and I can tell it." It's almost a shamanistic sort of power. So that's what rings my bell. The accolades and everything else are great. I'm delighted, I'm honored, I'm humbled, I'm flattered, but I did not get into the business to win Pulitzers or be a global correspondent, or XYZ.
I sort of bumbled my way into finding a sort of lifestyle that crystallizes my passion. When I look back on it, I realize it wasn't bumbling. It was the way I had to go about doing it, in that to other people who would've seen me at the time as a rootless, nomadic person who had very few attachments to place, or in some cases, even to other people, that's not, that wasn't the case. The burning questions that I had in my head and heart are what kept me on track, regardless of whether I was setting dynamite under tunnels in XXX, Australia, or sitting in on biochemistry courses in California. The thing was, I was asking the right questions, and the questions are: What is the story? How do I fit in the story? What's important? And all of us as writers who are in the business and have different answers to that, and mine, especially as I get older, is compassion. I like to quote Barry Lopez, the guy from the state below you there, who writes, "All that holds us together are stories. Stories and compassion." That's sort of - that's a schtick that I can agree with.
PH: Okay. Okay, so I probably shouldn't go on too long given the long distance here. In summarizing this early stage of your career here, you have obviously had a fascinating chain of experiences, you know, to get to where you are. Do you have any closing thoughts, or any summary pieces of philosophy distilled from those early years? You've shared a pretty good number of insights, I think, during this interview. Any other summary observations?
PS: Yeah. I think - You know, it's - I had to make myself available to the possibilities that would move me along towards an honorable goal, whatever that is. Whether it's going to be your career, whether it's going to be your relationship or whatever, and the way that I did it was by, I tried to make myself vulnerable, intentionally vulnerable. Physically, and as much as possible, emotionally - because that leaves you open to the delight and the magic of possibility. If you fear not, if you're too comfortable, if you've made yourself invulnerable, you've built sort of, you know, a comfortable blockade or palisade around you, I think you're going to miss out on some of these possibilities that float by, that other people may attribute to serendipity, but may or may not be serendipitous. If you miss that, then I think that just constricts your horizons one notch further.
So my parting advice would be, make yourself vulnerable to change, to discomfort, to the unexpected. And in fact, embrace it. You'll find that that you may not always get what you're looking for, but in the end, you'll look back and see that everything eventually adds up to something, at least, if nothing else, in telling you what you don't want to do. So that's why I was only half joking when I told you in the email, go ahead and get your college career, you need it today, absolutely, but also don't dismiss the option of going out and doing some tests and doing some manual work somewhere, and then something that's completely, completely different than what you normally do. And that way, you bump into mentors, unexpectedly. Ones that you would never - you know, we think of mentors as people in the business, people in academia. Nonsense. My crucial mentors were barely literate 90-year-old farmer in northern Mexico, a foul-mouthed seaman on the Indian Ocean, whatever - a woman who rides a motorcycle alone across Australia. These are people who, unless you're open to meeting them and you're willing to meet them on their terms, you don't know what they'll do for you.
PH: Okay. Well, this has been very, very helpful, again. Thank you for taking the time to share your ideas, again. I know you were skeptical about sharing your ideas...
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