crystallize!

Two Coots in a Canoe: An Unusual Story of Friendship, by David E. Morine

The New North: An Account of a Woman's 1908 Journey through Canada to the Artic, by Agnes Deans Cameron

Two recent favorite reads, forming an interesting study in contrasts:

• The new North: an account of a woman’s 1908 journey through Canada to the Arctic, by Agnes Deans Cameron
• Two coots in a canoe: an unusual story of friendship, by David E. Morine

Cameron was a remarkable character. After a 20-year career as a schoolteacher in Vancouver, ended abruptly as a result of her flouting a rule she deemed unfair — she allowed a student to use a straight-edge to draw a straight line, in order that his otherwise promising academic career not be jeopardized by such a trivial requirement, and her superiors could not condone such misbehavior — she moved to Chicago, became a journalist, and thence undertook her impressive voyage, with her niece as traveling companion. She documents her nearly-six-month trip in crisp and vivid language, providing enough detail to paint an interesting story without ever becoming bogged down in minutiae. Her descriptions of the people who host her, the towns she passes through and their agricultural outputs, the culture of the Hudson’s Bay Company, the local flora and fauna, the river, the scenery, her fellow travelers — all are engagingly presented. Her discussion of the Eskimos she meets, especially, is a fascinating study, since they are quite unlike what she had expected: a tall, regal people, for whom she expresses great admiration.

Morine’s book documents a modern adventure, a trip down the Connecticut River from source to sea. Before he retired, Morine served as head of land acquisition for the Nature Conservancy; his traveling companion was an old friend from grad school whom he hadn’t seen in years. The gimmick for the trip was that instead of camping, they stayed each night with different hosts, “relying on the kindness of strangers.” Since I live right next to the Connecticut myself, midway along their route, many of the places he describes are familiar to me, so it was especially interesting to read about who he met along the way.

I wonder what Cameron’s journey would be like in this century, or what Morine’s would have been like in hers.

Pleased by this pair of recent articles, both about how to bring the experience of travel closer to home.

5 Ways To Travel More With Less at zenhabits suggests looking for nearby adventures, specific ideas traveling frugally (all tactics I can personally recommend as well), and remembering to relax (I’m still working on that one).

Rolf Potts writes at Tim Ferris’s blog about 5 Travel Lessons You Can Use at Home, “key ways in which the lessons you learn on the road can be used to enrich the life you lead when you return home.” These ring deeply true for me, and indeed reminded me that a large part of what I love about travel is that it really enforces living in the moment and stretching outside your comfort zone.

These are good challenges for me for right now.

Recently I’ve been struck anew by the fact that often my relationship with all my travel plans and ideas has been to relegate them to the maybe-someday queue. Someday I’ll go to New Zealand, someday I’ll go to Australia,… Bali, Ireland, Bhutan, Uzbekistan, Japan,… I’ve been adding new places to the list for decades, and not crossing them off anywhere near as fast. Some of them have been on the list for over 20 years, which in other circumstances might merit the label of “stuck.” So it’s occurring to me that now would be a good time to change the way I think about planning travel, at a basic level. This realization has been helped along by an inspiring meeting with a new friend who spent 10 months traveling around the world a few years ago, and also by the somewhat alarming number of my friends who have been contracting sudden fatal illnesses over the past few years. (Probably any number over zero would seem alarming.)

One of my several first steps: start reading more about the places I want to go. My library obligingly supplied a couple of books about travel in Australia; it also happened to have another with an amusing title nearby, so I pulled all three.

In a Sunburned Country, by Bill Bryson

Thumbs Up Australia, by Tom Parry

Travels with My Chicken, by Martin Gurdon


Quick reactions, in lieu of actual reviews: Bryson is hilarious, as always; Parry’s writing is less skillful but still amusing; both added substantially to my previously miniscule grasp of Australian geography and history. Which is to say, my mind is now full of vivid maps and images of lots of places I must go see for myself. I enjoyed Gurdon’s documentation of his travels-with-chicken publicity stunt, too (he is a writer in England who was on book tours in aid of his previous book, also about chickens).