The World in Half Read Online Free PDF Page A

don’t know.” I do know. The first time I heard it on the radio, I almost couldn’t believe my ears. But I don’t feel like indulging him.
    “That’s where they have the canal, right? And the hats, too. Panama hats, Panama Jack.” He nods approvingly.
    “The hats are from Ecuador,” I say.
    “Come again?”
    “The hats are actually from Ecuador.”
    “Ecuador hats? No”—he frowns—“that doesn’t sound right. I’m pretty sure you’ve got that mixed up. They’re Panama hats.”
    “I know that’s what they’re called, but they’re made in Ecuador. They got popular when Theodore Roosevelt toured the canal, when it was being built, and he wore one. People started calling them Panama hats and the name stuck.” I don’t know why I’m telling him. As if he cares. I just want to prove that I know what I’m talking about. I always feel I have something to prove when it comes to the topic of Panama.
    “If you say so.” He raises his plastic cup and lets an ice cube slide into his mouth. “So why are you going? You visiting someone?”
    “I’m not sure.”
    “What do you mean you’re not sure? Either you’re visiting someone or you’re not.”
    “I don’t exactly know my plans yet.”
    “How long are you staying?”
    “Three weeks.”
    “Have you ever been there before?”
    I shake my head. Maybe if I stop talking, he’ll return the favor. I peek around him, to a perfectly normal-looking passenger across the aisle, and wish I’d been assigned a different seat.
    “Three weeks without plans in a place you’ve never been before?” He widens his eyes. “Good luck.”
     
     
     
    Ordinarily, I am not a brave person. Not that I walk around all the time afraid of things, just that I almost never do anything that requires considerable courage or abandon. I do what’s asked and what’s expected and what I’m supposed to do.
    I don’t jaywalk. I wait in line at a register to ask questions that other people simply walk to the front with and shout at the cashier as she handles another transaction: Where’s the escalator? Can I make a return in this line? Which way to the shoe department? I pack up my things in the library and take them with me when I need to use the bathroom. I put money in the meter even if I’m running in for something I know will take only a minute. I sample lotions only from the labeled tester. I give back the extra change if someone gives me too much. I turn in my school assignments on time.
    The first geologic exploration of the South Pole was in 1911, in the midst of the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration. Roald Amundsen, the man who completed it, was an adventurer to the marrow of his bones. As a young boy, he used to sleep with his bedroom windows open in the winter to get his body accustomed to the cold he would one day endure as the explorer he knew he wanted to be. The second person to reach the South Pole was Robert Falcon Scott. He died trying to get back to his base, and I have often imagined that he did not particularly want to go on the trip in the first place. All he had to look forward to, after all, was ice and bitter cold and the great occupying space of the unknown. He may have acted with bravado and been brimming with confidence, but what if he was simply a man caught up in a race, a man leaving his family behind, a man who felt he had something he needed to prove?
    Some people are true adventurers. But many more are adventurers by circumstance, adventurous only because their goal requires them to be. They pull on the mask of daring because doing so is the only way to get where they’re going. And sometimes the mask becomes them, and by the end of their journey, the true adventurer who has lain dormant in their soul ignites and takes hold. And sometimes the mask is still just that, an outer shell, and the inner person remains unchanged. It’s hard to know all the time which is which and who you are. It’s hard to know until the end.
    I don’t know