In my journeys North, I collect stories, and when I return home, I try to coax those stories onto paper. This coaxing may take a day, a week, or a month, but eventually the story agrees to be written down.
Not so a particular tragedy that occurred in a remote area of Canada’s Hudson Bay in 1941: it was elusive, recalcitrant, and perhaps even hostile to my efforts to put it onto paper. I want to remain obscure, it seemed to be telling me.
Meanwhile, the present kept intruding on the past. “Hey,” it would announce, “there’s been another terrorist attack.” Or it would say, “Isn’t it time for another google or two?” It would follow me from place to place like a predator in pursuit of its prey. “Download me!” it would demand.
I was in a quandary. Not even my old pals Charles Darwin, John Muir, Aldo Leopold, and Henry David Thoreau, hard as they tried, could provide me with any help. Nor was the unsurpassing strangeness of the Hudson Bay tragedy itself capable of assisting me.
At last a so-called lightbulb went on in my head, and I realized I couldn’t write about the past without also writing about the world immediately around me. In other words, the present. With this realization, I gave birth to the notes you’re now holding in your hand.…