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...
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...
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...
We talked about ‘spirit of place’ in my last blog — locations and landscapes that hold an almost mystical resonance for each of us. We connect to such places on a deep level. They feel intimately familiar even when visiting for the first time. But we also carry the landscape of our childhood with us, and that shapes how we experience other places. My life was oriented around the St. Lawrence...