I’ve always delighted in the reading of old geographers and explorers.You feel in their texts the first tentative steps, see the earliest visions, register the initial astonishment at the appearance of the world in all its phenomenal strangeness. (Kenneth White – ‘Along the Atlantic Coast’ – The Wanderer and his Charts – 2004) In the morning, I’m standing at the … Continue reading →
Herman Melville came North to Canada on his honeymoon trip, when he was twenty-nine years old. In Montreal, he met Captain Coffin, about to leave on a whaling expedition up the norh Coast to Labrador. Maybe that was when the idea of the White Whale started germinating. A few months back, at Stromness, a little port in the … Continue reading →
We’ve been lapping up mile after mile in the clear blue light of an October afternoon. There were a few passengers when we left Chicoutimi, but the bus emptied at Tadoussac (…) Walt Whitman visited the ‘savage Saguenay country’ around 1880. Wrote a little piece about it, saying that the Saguenay is different from all other rivers; ‘a more vehement … Continue reading →