On the Yukon what had amazed me most was how people faced a landscape that was so utterly indifferent to them without bitterness and even with a lightness and gaiety about them, realizing that there was, finally, nothing to be done.

They had the lean, wild-eyed stare of men too long by themselves, and I wondered, My God, is that how I look?

One of the most human of fears, I think, must be of dying alone. After a close call, we want someone to share our relief; we want to matter, not in any general way, but to someone in particular. I was tired of being a floater.

I let the campfire burn itself out and sat watching the terns swoop overhead. Circumpolar travelers, they fly from Antarctica to nest in the Arctic, a migration even greater than the salmon’s but without the tragic overtones. Flying from summer to summer, they live in perpetual sunlight, like Hyperboreans. That the ultimate destination for such a long journey should be this patch of gravel filled me with affection for both the terns and this tiny island.

These days we’re encouraged to stay young, when the real trick is to grow old without becoming apologetic or defeated.

Two people in a canoe soon become a society; observations are filtered through the partner, and you end up learning more about the partner than about the landscape through which you’re passing.

Hitching a ride on the river, I could drift into other lives, people I might have become.

My own life had narrowed in all the predictable ways. But the essential problem remained: how to live decently and keep one’s head above the crapola. It was never easy. What came easy was everything else – career, house, a comfortable boredom.

Rivers give the illusion of outrunning time, at least the kind we’re all swimming against, which is no small part of their appeal. Or maybe it’s just that, being linear, they tend to connect things. Drifting down a familiar stretch of water we’re reminded of other trips and other rivers until memory and the present merge into one all-encompassing river that cuts through time and space and connects everything.

To stay or to go?—these are the alternating currents running through our lives. One the road, we’re in the enviable position of reinventing ourselves. “The soul of a journey,” William Hazlitt wrote, “is liberty, perfect liberty to think, feel, do just as one pleases.” Home, on the other hand, means being stuck with people who long ago got your number. Travel allows us to appreciate what we left behind by removing us from its daily grind until the journey itself becomes a drag, and we return to find home has become strange and new.