Why Ford is a wanderer

last updated 8 January 2015

Harrison Ford prefers not to know where he’s going, says Michael Roberts in Outside. The 66-year-old actor, a trained pilot, spends a lot of his free time exploring new places; he recently flew his single-engine plane up to Seattle, and then on to Juneau, Alaska, for a trip into the backcountry with his girlfriend, Calista Flockhart. “We’re going to, I don’t know, probably six different destinations,” he says. “But there’s nothing I can talk about except that I’ve never been there before.” Traveling, he says, is not about creature comforts, but about having “fresh feed for your eyes and your brain and a resolve to leave the other s--t behind you.” Ford has found that he can even leave his celebrity behind as long as he stays off the beaten track. “When you’re out of the expected context for famous people, the first reaction is, ‘Oh no, it’s not—what would he be doing here?’ If you’re just moving along, and not drawing attention to yourself or sitting around too long, you can pretty much go anywhere.” Wherever he does wind up, he tries to be as unobtrusive as possible. “It’s that first rule of anthropology: You change the dynamic of a place and a group of people simply by observing. I’m interested in just looking at things. And looking at them carefully enough to see things that I didn’t see at first. And just think about those things.”