Self-Discovery in a Canoe

In a review of an account of the polar explorer Ernest Shackleton’s harrowing adventure in the Antarctic, Anthony Lane of the New Yorker attributed Shackleton’s lifelong passion for the vast white wastes of the South Pole to the explorer’s discovery of “the deep contentments of desolation.”

Jennifer Kingsley is a kindred spirit of Shackleton’s.

Kingsley is a naturalist and guide in Canada’s most remote North. She is also a writer and she has a story: a 54-day canoe journey she made in 2005 with five companions down the Back River to the Arctic Ocean.

Kingsley and her long-time paddling partner Tim Irvin trawled their community for four others, acquiring a third canoeing veteran they both knew well and three others, two women and a man, less experienced in white water and less known to them.

Prior to setting out, the six of them dealt creatively with these disparities by agreeing to shift tent partners and paddling pairs...