Homelands: Kayaking the Inside Passage - Softcover

Byron Ricks

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0380809184 ISBN 13: 9780380809189

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 1999

Synopsis

Describes one couple's five-month journey by kayak from Alaska's Glacier Bay to the Puget Sound, chronicling the remarkable beauty and wonders of a fragile wilderness and their encounters with the wildlife and human inhabitants of an endangered world. Original.

About this title

Review:

In an era of testosterone-charged adventure tales, Byron Ricks's Homelands: Kayaking the Inside Passage is a wonderfully introspective adventure-travel memoir. In 1996 Ricks and his wife, Maren van Nostrand, came close to making an offer on their first house, but instead decided to undertake an adventure of a different kind together--kayaking from Alaska's Glacier Bay down the coast of Western Canada to southern Puget Sound, near their Seattle home. They had no set schedule to keep and for five months lived by nautical charts and the rhythms of the tides, wind, and weather. Their plan was to paddle from the glaciers to the city, exploring a coast in flux and the ways of native peoples such as the Tlinglit, Tsimshian, and Haida--whose ancestors paddled the passage for centuries. The driving question of Homelands is this: how does the act of making a very long journey home, in this case by paddle--at an average velocity of a mere three knots--affect one's concept of home? This ocean-size question is fed by smaller tributaries: Do overcoming peril and danger make the rewards of coming home greater? How do native inhabitants encountered along the way relate to their homeland? What do you do when you're camped in a bear's back yard? And what are the issues facing a husband and wife setting out across vast expanses of open water to confront--in the most literal sense--what lies beyond?

A journalist with a background in history and anthropology, Ricks is gifted with both a keen eye and a poetic ear. The tale is written in diary form, and its voice originates in the pace of the kayak: tranquil, steady, respectful. An easygoing and astute companion, Ricks is clearly an old soul--with questions well worth asking and some lovely observations to share. --Kimberly Brown

About the Author:

Byron Ricks is a native of the Midwest and a graduate of Grinnell College in Iowa.An outdoor leader, he has written for Outside magazine, Men's Journal and other publications.He lives with his wife, Maren Van Nostrand, an outdoor educator and environmental planner, near Seattle, Washington.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0380809184
• ISBN 13: 9780380809189
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384
• Illustrator: Maren Van Nostrand