Boundless: Tracing Land and Dream
in a New Northwest Passage
By Kathleen Winter
House of Anansi
280 pages; $29.95
Reviewed by Jennifer Kingsley
I was suspicious of this book at first. I thought it was audacious to write an entire volume about the Northwest Passage after being there (and it’s a big place) for only two weeks.
Then I met Kathleen Winter, this fall, at Calgary’s Wordfest. She got up on stage and said, “How could I be so audacious as to write a whole book about the Northwest Passage after spending just two weeks there?” Her awareness of this simple fact won me over. She laughed, and we laughed with her. Also, I had already read the book, and it reinforced that a story is more than the substance of an experience; it’s what you make of it. The duration of a voyage can be secondary to its impact.
Boundless is a personal account of Winter’s time as a writer-in-residence aboard the Clipper Adventurer, a steel-hulled ship chartered by Adventure Canada to take 100 tourists at a time to the Arctic. On her voyage, in 2010, the objective was to travel one of several routes through the Northwest Passage–from Kangerlussuaq, on the west coast of Greenland, to Kugluktuk, in the western Canadian Arctic. She was a last minute addition. It was her first time so far north.
Winter sets the scene by emphasizing the spontaneity of the voyage and introducing us, right away, to some of the characters she will share the ship with, including Inuit guides to whom she feels drawn. After two brief chapters, Winter takes a sharp turn to recall the home-made “Viking funeral” she held after her first husband’s death. She and a friend towed all of his belongings into the middle of a lake, while others looked on, and torched the whole barge worth. The scene surprised and enthralled me. It revealed so much of Winter’s character and past that I was ready to go anywhere with her. This chapter demonstrates one of the books greatest strengths: Winter moves easily between ideas, experiences and eras of her life. She’s nimble. She can cover the foxtrot and aging in a single page. She leaps between disposable knickers, colonial history, mustard and poverty. She introduces us to Emily Carr’s milkman while icebergs float by.
Life on a ship is familiar to me. I am one of the T-shirted naturalists that Winter chides in this book, though I work with a different company. I mention this because I know how different life can be on ships; they have their own transformative landscape, and Winter recognizes it immediately. She details her own tendency toward independence that borders on isolation (she stands alone on deck, hides in her bunk, works on her crocheting) and then introduces musician Nathan Rogers, son of the beloved Stan Rogers. Nathan is an ambassador of ship life; he won’t stand for this Leave Me Alone stuff. She describes him, and his singing, this way:
“Somehow everything I’d learned about life pointed to an idea that to receive something you had to earn it. I’d never thought of myself as a tree, a graceful being visited by songbird, starlight, and rain, and which people love for itself, not for what it does or how smart it is, or how indispensable. I was used to making myself indispensable in one arena or another, but Nathan’s song turned me into that tree.”
At moments, Boundless, borders on the existential and Winter peppers the narrative with so many questions I longed for a few more answers. I questioned, at times, the connection the author describes between herself and the land. I wondered how that could really happen on a two-week cruise with more than a hundred shipmates. But then every adventure story is personal and unique. Transformative moments are not universal; it is not my place to doubt them, and many of us–myself included–have experienced similar realizations as a visitor to a new place.
What sets Boundless apart is Winter’s craft and imagination. I would love to sail with someone like her–either on a ship or through the pages of a book.
Jennifer Kingsley’s book Paddlenorth: Adventure, Resilience and Renewal in the Arctic Wild was published by Greystone Books and David Suzuki Foundation in 2014.