Ripcord Adventure Journal 2.2

25
Why travel writers should be badgers
Dr Charles Foster
obvious way is to try to perceive that wood as the badger sees it.
The badger has a number of advantages over me. It’s nearer the
ground. It uses far more of its senses to perceive the wood. And it’s
far more local than I am: most of the molecules in its body come
from an area of 150 acres in and around that wood. Despite my best
endeavours, many of my molecules come from China and Thailand.
The badger lives in the wood in a way that no farmer whose family
say that they’ve ‘owned’ the wood for generations ever can. And (I
suppose), it does rather less cognitive processing than I do. The
information from the wood is relatively unprocessed. The badger
gets its wood neat – or at least neater: relatively undiluted by all the
synthetic neuronal slush with which I mix the wild, intoxicating
world.
So I tried to perceive a wood in the Black Mountains as badgers
perceive it; and the rivers of my beloved Exmoor as otters perceive
them; and the parks and dustbins of London’s East End as foxes
perceive them; and the north west highlands of Scotland and
Exmoor as red deer perceive them; and the sky between Oxford and
West Africa as swifts perceive it.
I failed, of course. But at least the failure was an attempt to do
something honest and accurate, and I had great fun trying.
Look around you. You’ll probably see people. You’ll certainly see,
if you look hard enough, lots of non-human species. Each head has
inside it a completely unique universe – a universe far less accessible
to you than the most distant galaxy. The exploration of those
universes has barely begun.
Why buy a plane ticket to somewhere exotic? There are far greater
challenges in parks, cafes and kitchens. Be the first to learn what
that table top is really like; be the first to draw an olfactory map of
that corner of the flower bed. Don’t bother with the course of that
Orinoco tributary; map the basic co-ordinates of the waitress’s
perspective of the washing-up room.
In all these things it’ll help if you’ve spent some time being a badger.