I first came to Great Slave Lake in July of 1977, when I was twenty-five. There were eight of us traveling in a twenty-five-foot-long North canoe, which we’d brought 225 miles up the Mackenzie River from Fort Simpson, before paddling to Reliance, at the eastern end of Great Slave Lake. Our final days on the […]

Why is it that we love the things that we love? And why is it that we sometimes recognize them immediately, as they call out to us with such insistence and power? What’s the alchemy? I’ve struggled with these questions for much of my adult life and this spring I’ve been hauling them around the Inyo Mountains, […]

Recently, I had occasion to spend some time at Vicksburg National Military Park in Mississippi. I visited mostly in the early mornings and evenings, to escape the press of sight-seers and the worst of the summer heat. In those quiet and (slightly) cooler hours, I tracked the park’s concrete roadways through the loess hills above the city, […]

In early May I heard Leslie Jamison read at Brockport’s Writers Forum. Jamison, who has struggled with intoxication, described her addiction as “an attempt to find luminosity in things that refused to yield much glow.”

During the Antarctic winter of 1911, Apsley Cherry-Garrard, Dr. “Bill” Wilson, and “Birdie” Bowers embarked on what Cherry-Garrard described—without hyperbole—as “The Worst Journey in the World.” For thirty-five days they traveled under horrific conditions, hauling their sleds across the Ross Ice Shelf, enduring almost complete darkness, temperatures that plunged to -60°C, and ferocious blizzards. It was so cold that […]