Wilderness Called Home: Dispatches From The Wild Heart Of Canada

Canadians connect with the wilderness in an endless number of subtle or impassioned ways: as sea captains, mountaineers, artists, eco-warriors, rafters, nudists, and industrialists—or simply as canoeists or cottage dwellers.

In April 2000, Charles Wilkins set off from his Lake Superior home on travels that took him coast to coast: aboard a working freighter on the Great Lakes, then overland to the west, at times on foot in the mountains and rainforests and along the sea coasts. His travels culminated in an intense two-week sojourn alone in the wilderness of northern Canada.

This compelling blend of travel narrative and portraiture, of unexpected exotica and humour, brings to life Wilkins's discoveries about the nature of our attachments to the land and waters. Come into the sauna with the nudist members of the Traditional Finnish Sauna Society of Thunder Bay. Meet Winston Books, an eccentric Toronto engineer with a bizarre lifestyle and infectious passion for the night sky. Share the tensions and energy of the captain and crew of the freighter MV Paterson. And encounter the Lawson family who, despite their 19th-century living habits, have fomented a 21st-century ecological revolution on Clayoquot Sound.

A Wilderness Called Home helps make sense of the wilds around us—the wilds that are our Canadian home, no matter how jaded and urban we become.