You’ve just subscribed to Hickman’s Hinterlands — "a ledger of obscure travels, backwoods rambles, rough bivouacs, and cackling cartographies" — and will now receive weekly email articles, travelogues, and dispatches from the some of the world’s most obscure and secluded backwaters. I’m A.M Hickman, proprietor of this publication, and I want to welcome you aboard. Allow me to shed some light on what I do here at Hinterlands.

I am from the hinterlands myself. Raised in the forlorn foothills of the Adirondack Mountains in northern Upstate New York, I have always had a keen awareness of how Siberian my corner of America is. Sunless overcast hangs over the fallow land for months on end; snowdrifts creep across the frozen, moon-like earth as a jarring testament to man’s smallness. Squalid settlements chortle with boozy moans as the soundless white fluff mounts on the roofs of rusting trailers — my home is a place of exile; an afterthought in the Capitol, overshadowed by the city bearing the State’s name.

When the Upstate man leaves his stead, he finds he must again and again explain himself — “I’m from New York… but not the city…” and “No, not even close to the city… I’ve never been there before… it’s more like Vermont or West Virginia.” The sons of Upstate can only explain their homeland with rough analogies, for the land is utterly unknown and forgotten, and where remembered — scorned.

Eventually, I’d depart for many years, hitchhiking across the United States many times. I slept out in the open, ate from dumpsters, and brushed elbows with provincials and rustics of every flavor in many of America’s boondocks and backvelds. On all my travels, I found myself gravitating to regions with a similar sense of seclusion and irrelevance: California’s Imperial Valley, Maine’s Aroostook County, West Virginia’s “hollers,” isolated villages on the Oregon coast, and more. And in experiencing them firsthand, I came to realize that these places — much like my native Upstate — all possessed a deeply human sense of character and “realness” that was largely absent in more relevant quarters.

In time, I became a sort of “Hinterland geographer”, developing a thesis that in an era of globalization and techno-industrial prowess, “relevance” is anathema to “durable human culture”. Indeed, in those lands not scorned by the metropole — where money flows, access is easy, national recognition of the place is strong, and jobs are plentiful — I found many listless voids of strip malls, strip clubs, and strip mines, where dark-eyed men who’d found “success” often confessed their profound loneliness to me. In spite of the bounty such locales had won in the 20th century’s mad dash for success, they’d had something “stripped” from them. Perhaps it was their humanity.

The inaccessible places, the exiled realms, the scorned and rejected and “uncool” places — it may be that their isolation protects them. In most, a strange mix of poverty, resentment, authenticity, and warmth seemed apparent to me. It was that warmth that stayed with me, and I have since gone to seek it out wherever I could. Now, after a stint in the military, I am traveling again — to test my thesis. Am I caught in a trap of romantic sentimentalism? Or does something worthwhile continue to exist in the world’s hinterlands? And in either case, what does the future hold for such places? I reckon they’re worth chronicling, and I hope you do too.

Travel with me as I go, from Massena to St. Pierre & Miquelon; to Newfoundland’s “outports” and “bays” onward to Nevada’s remote desert settlements and to windswept islands in the Faroes where the population decreases are measured in double-digit percentages. Distant offshore islands in Maine and Michigan, Adirondack towns with no connection to the road system, Monasteries in the wilderness, outposts in the Norwegian arctic — in each, a testament to something deeply human regarding place, geography, culture, and perhaps, if we are lucky: hope.

A Word on Patronage

This publication is my full-time job. Though initially begun as a hobby, after a season of strong interest from my readers, I am now making just enough to justify devoting the vast majority of my time and energy to my work at Hickman’s Hinterlands. While my basic expenses are mostly covered — owing largely to their cheapness, for a hinterland mortgage is a paltry expense — my future travels are not.

If you believe this work is worthwhile or even necessary, I invite you to consider becoming a paid subscriber or a founding member. The stronger the financial support I receive from you, the further afield I can go. Your subscription monies may allow me to travel to Greenland, the Falkland Islands, Arctic Russia and Kamchatka, Namibia, and Northern Canada. In time, I’ll be able to write whole books on these places, providing my founding members with book previews and advance copies, and to share paid-subscriber-access-only travelogues detailing my sojourns in truly far-flung locales.

I have no interest in getting rich — I merely want to venture out into the hinterlands. And I want to bring you with me.

God bless,

A.M. Hickman
Massena N.Y.
December 2023