Free The Best American Travel Writing 2013 by Elizabeth Gilbert Page B

disappeared.
    “A month ago,” one says.
    “No, a year,” another shouts.
    They talk about the ongoing police inquest, and debate what has become of him. Since people disappear all the time in the bush and there are lots of possible explanations, I don’t really expect an answer. On one thing, however, the men agree: the backpacker was last seen quarreling with his guides over their pay; afterward, the guides returned to Tekin without him.
    As I listen to the story, I wish I didn’t have to hire a guide.
    I’ve been a solo hiker for almost 40 years, ever since I was two. As an American missionary kid in Japan, I used to run away from home every few days just for the thrill of it. By the time I was three, my parents had grown used to policemen finding me and bringing me back. I remember clambering over our bamboo fence and whizzing through the college campus where my parents taught, heedless of which way I ran, nearly colliding with students with shaved heads and black uniforms, reaching the tall department stores of the business district 10 blocks away, then ducking into the mysterious maze of alleys behind them.
    After we moved to the States when I was nine, I felt so frightened by all the warnings about kidnappers and child molesters that I stopped running away. It wasn’t until I grew up and began backpacking alone in the North American wilderness that I reclaimed some of that old joy of running loose. Yet, two months ago, still haunted by a vague yearning for something lost, something missing from my life as an American lawyer, I quit my job and began island-hopping through Southeast Asia, an adventure that has brought me to Sandaun Province.
    What I haven’t reckoned on is the terrain. This morning, sitting next to an Australian missionary pilot in a little six-seater Cessna, I looked down and saw the Highland trails meander through wide valleys and over rolling hills until they vanished in the needle-sharp peaks that form the long spine of Papua New Guinea. We climbed up into the clouds, then swooped below them again, through passes so narrow I could almost reach out and graze my fingers along fern-covered mountainsides. From a small plane, you can see every thatched hut, every outhouse, every pathway leading to it. Here and there, peering into gaps too tight even for the Cessna, I glimpsed a deep, sunless valley. At the bottom a dim clump of little huts lay trapped, like children who’d fallen down an abandoned well.
    I shouted to the pilot, Nigel, “Do the people in those valleys ever get over to the next valley to visit their neighbors?”
    “No,” he yelled above the roar of the engine, “they live and die on that spot.”
    Unlike other expatriates I’d met, Nigel didn’t question my plans, just my choice of the word
walk
to describe them. “Have a look down there! Do you see anywhere to walk? Do you see any trails? You don’t
walk
in Sandaun. You skid on your butt. You throw up. It takes hours to slog up one little hill, and the slogging makes you sick to your stomach. Not to mention the sinkholes. Some mountains are so close that the bush on either side grows together and hides the gaps between them. People have stepped into those sinkholes and disappeared without a trace.”
    Then the nose of the Cessna dropped abruptly, zeroing in on Tekin, and we dived into the fog. Amazed he could land blind in such a narrow valley, I said it just didn’t seem possible.
    “True,” Nigel mused as we tilted into a curve, “according to the laws of science, it
isn’t
possible. An airplane isn’t supposed to be able to do this.” He turned to beam at me: “If it weren’t for the Lord, we’d probably crash.”
    I searched his face to see if he was joking, but he wasn’t. I stared at Nigel, at the neatly ironed pilot’s shirt-and-shorts with matching khaki knee-highs, at the ears jutting out at right angles from his head, and the long-toothed Bobby Kennedy grin. To look at him, I would have taken him for