I am a diligent traveller, a no-nonsense tourist! I study and devour the guides and maps. I read books about where I am going – fiction, history, often memoir from people who live in my destination.
So when we went to Turkey I read Istanbul: Memoires and the city by Orhan Pamuk. Berlin, a couple of years ago got me rereading Christopher Isherwood and political books all about the time of the fall of the wall.
Newfoundland and Labrador were a great feast with Wayne Johnson’s The Colony of Unrequited Dreams and then the feisty Don’t have your baby in the dory by Gordon Green about nurse Myra Bennett.
Last week I set out with a friend for a trip. She called our expedition: “Canoeing in the foothills”, which was romanticizing our camping trip to a Provincial Park just east of Jasper National Park, though a canoe was involved! In my planning, I did not think this local jaunt west needed a reading task. However, once on the road I realize I had left my current read at home. This situation caused me quite acute stress. Oh dear, oh shucks!
Our first stop along the road was at the tourist office in Edson along the Yellowhead highway in Alberta. We were looking for a better map of our destination. We were greeted by two gracious women, including the resident historian who told us all about how Edson was chosen as a railway headquarters. Though the land was marshy, all the other suitable land had been bought up by speculators. The railway company in the early 1900s was not going to pay their prices so made the bogland work – hence Edson, Alberta.
As I was looking around, I saw a display of local authors. I perked up my eyes! Help on the horizon! A local author Dave Hugelschaffer has published three books, fiction, inspired by this work as a forest ranger. His first-person narrator-hero is a wildfire investigator. So, I am reading Whiskey Creek, it takes place in Fort Chipewyan which is way up in northern Alberta on Lake Athabasca. Far away, but close enough for being in the north and out in the woods! It is an exciting tale, with fires and murder and dark commercial interests and contrary characters.
Great read, especially the night I lay in my sleeping bag with the rain coming down on my tent and my headlight flashlight/torch around my head.
Thanks, Edson tourist office!