Surprisingly, the biggest threat to Kate Harris and her cycling partner was traffic—not bad weather or bad people. (From the archive)
Growing up in small-town Ontario, Kate Harris was entranced by the exploits of long-ago explorers—Marco Polo was her idol—and crushed by the knowledge that just about every square inch of the planet had already been mapped. Unlike most starstruck kids, though, Harris decided she wouldn’t let that stop her: she would become a scientist and go to Mars. But events eventually conspired to change that ambition for Harris.
A: My sort-of mission when I set off down the Silk Road was to get to know the places in between, the unpeopled landscapes that connected the trading hubs. But those spaces are not really unpeopled at all, and certainly not empty of life. The highlights of our trip ended up beyond the natural beauty of the wild places and turned into encounters with people. The journey, and I hope the book, came alive with those encounters: brief glimpses into so many different lives and ways of living.
Q: The worries you express are practical and mundane, in the sense of, “Can we make it up this mountain, will my much-patched tire last until the next town, will the proper entry permits come through?” Did you ever feel in any other way unsafe or insecure? A: Oxford was an awakening to who I was and how I wanted to explore this world. I went there very fixated on science, and then began to wonder if I was really meant to be an astronaut or work in a lab. For two years I did nothing but read and write and wander in libraries. It was exhilarating and freeing and I loved it.A: Fallen heroes.
Q: There are always mixed motives. You had funding from various sources for your trips and you needed to deliver something for your funders, whether a Polo-esque pile of rubies or just some information. A: Sure, what we used to call places like wetlands, a lot of are still around because they were generally deemed useless. Spaces which were hard to build on, hard to develop. But that’s typical human blinkeredness, to look at a landscape like that and say it’s useless because it’s useless to our purposes and our ambitions, our greed. It’s not useless to the waters downstream that are filtered clean or to birds or frogs.
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