Homelands: Kayaking the inside Passage Book

In an era of testosterone-charged adventure tales, Byron Ricks' 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--kayaking from Alaska's Glacier Bay, down the coast of Western Canada, to southern Puget Sound, near their Seattle home. They had no set schedules 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 had paddled the passage for centuries. The driving question of Homelands is this: how does the act of making a very long journey home--at an average velocity of a mere three knots--affect one's concept of home? This ocean-sized 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 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 comes from the pace of the kayak: tranquil, steady and respectful. An easygoing and astute companion, Ricks is clearly an old soul--with questions well worth asking and some lovely observations to share. --Kimberly BrownRead More