A Great Love of Desolate Places

Lena Pillars, via Wikimedia Commons

During our stuffy and enervated time in lockdown, I have enjoyed making virtual trips to the chilly vastnesses of Siberia and northern Canada. A few days ago I took a “road trip” up the Mackenzie Highway from Alberta’s northern border to the southern shore of Great Slave Lake, gateway to the high Canadian Arctic. I’ve also discovered the Ultima Thule blog, whose author provided travelogues of (inter alia) a virtual excursion down the Lena River, from the Baikal Mountains, past the frigid city of Yakutsk, to the Arctic Ocean. My desire to travel into the subarctic I have probably inherited from my mother, who found names like “Yellowknife” and descriptions of such remote places as the vast Lena Delta peculiarly evocative. (She was also a fan of Glenn Gould, who wrote about this boreal longing in his documentary “The Idea of North.”) I suspect that if I tried to make such a journey in person I would be devoured by mosquitoes or mauled by musk oxen, so I will leave the Great North to hardier tourists and enjoy its austere beauties from afar.