The St. Lawrence River near my hometown I have given up on Canada. We’re leaving Berlin next year for Japan, and I’ve accepted that it’s probably permanent. I never gave my future much conscious thought. I went abroad for curiosity — to see the world beyond the 4,500 person town I grew up in — and to find my subject as a writer. If I thought about it at all, I...
First glimpse of the Greenland ice sheet I flew over Greenland last November on the way to Seattle from Reykjavik. Despite a lifetime of staring at maps — okay, obsessing over maps — I didn’t understand the enormity of the Greenland ice sheet. It took nearly an hour to cross it at 800 km/h. Signs of life on the edge of Greenland Leaving Greenland We flew towards the setting sun. On the left...
Richard Grant I’ll always love the American Southwest because it’s where I first encountered the desert. Arid places are my personal landscape — and this one contains more stories than most. Arizona’s defining social characteristic is transience. According to today’s guest, outsiders move there “to make a fresh start and reinvent themselves, or to find a refuge where they can be their...
Richard Grant The road is America’s preeminent symbol of freedom. Richard Grant hitchhiked, walked, and drove those roads in a series of travels he described as “memories strung out on a single cord of highway, fourteen years long and headed nowhere in particular.” He discovered “a roadside culture of wandering rootlessness.” Not a pastoral herding community, but “an aggregation of loosely knit...
The earliest books I remember borrowing from the public library — over and over again — as a child were on astronomy and World War Two aircraft. I loved anything about the solar system, especially images from the early Viking landers that went to Mars, and the Voyager probes that ventured to the gas giants and beyond. And I probably knew more about World War Two fighters and bombers...
My friend Lawrence Millman believes stories are essential to our survival. He’s spent his writing life tracking them down and preserving them, from East Greenland to the forgotten corners of the Canadian North. This obsession was present from his first book, Our Like Will Not Be There Again, in which he sets out to record the “wonder tales, jokes, violent opinions, and self-contained monologues”...
David Thompson, the explorer who mapped western Canada David Thompson has been called “greatest practical land geographer that the world has produced”. He travelled some 90,000 kilometres across North America as a fur trader and surveyor, mapping 4.9 million square kilometres of wilderness — one-fifth of the continent. His work was so accurate that it remained the...
Happy #CanadaDay2020 to all my friends and family back home. One of the greatest lessons I’ve learned in two decades of travel — having lived in 3 other countries, and traveled and written about close to 80 more — is that we’ve got it very good back home. I feel incredibly lucky to have grown up in such a wonderful country. July 1st is a day to stop and remember that, and to show a...
I had an unexpected glimpse of a friend from the distant past last week. I was staying up late watching a French Canadian film called The Decline of the American Empire. Around thirty minutes in, just as I’m taking a sip of Crown Royal on ice, a telephone rings. The character in the shot stiffens in his chair, and then the camera pans to a side table, where we see… I had to stop and grab a screen...
After a childhood of river dreams inspired by readings of Huckleberry Finn, Jonathan Raban set out to travel the length of the Mississippi River from north to south in a 16-foot open aluminum boat. His journey took place in 1979. The waters he drifted down were much more dangerous than the river of his childhood imagination, but Huck’s urge to escape, to light out for the Territory before someone...