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Outside Magazine January 2005
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The Hard Way
Making It Real
A long-imagined journey to the spires of Africa marks the end of a dream—and the start of something new

By Mark Jenkins

uganda congo
(Illustration by Erik Sandberg)
WE ALL HAVE A PLACE WE DREAM OF. We've visited it many times without ever having set foot there. It's someplace far away, someplace exotic. Although we've never seen it, we know what it looks like, for we half-created it, using a book we read, or think we read, when we were nine or ten, something we overheard at a party in a villa in Italy, and the one unforgettable image from a slide show in Bozeman. This is enough. Like a child with a refrigerator box in the backyard, a bread knife, and crayons, we've fashioned the dream of a place to which we've never been but long to go.

We carry it with us in the backs of our minds. It's our private dream. The way a tomboy keeps a smooth stone in her pocket, we don't share it with just anybody. It's not a place anybody else would necessarily want to go anyway.

As we grow up, this enchanted outpost can disappear inside us, if we let it. Most of us don't. Instead, we hold on to our magical place, filling in the blank spaces with facts and images we pick up along the way. Then one day something happens. The trigger may be obvious or unconscious—no matter. The time has come to visit this place in the flesh.


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Outside columnist MARK JENKINS's latest book is The Hard Way.
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