Contemporary Authors

• Lands of Lost Borders: Out of Bounds on the Silk Road Alfred A. Knopf Canada (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 2018

1. Lands of lost borders : out of bounds on the Silk Road LCCN 2017492768 Type of material Book Personal name Harris, Kate, 1982- author. Main title Lands of lost borders : out of bounds on the Silk Road / Kate Harris. Published/Produced Toronto : Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 2018. ©2018 Description 300 pages, 8 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations, plates, map ; 24 cm ISBN 9780345816771 9780345816795 (ebook) CALL NUMBER DS327.8 .H34 2018 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE

• Kate Harris website - http://kateharris.ca/home

  As a teenager, Kate Harris realized that the career she most craved—that of a generalist explorer, equal parts swashbuckler and metaphysician—had gone extinct. From her small-town home in Ontario, it seemed as if Marco Polo, Magellan and their like had long ago mapped the whole earth. So she vowed to become a scientist and go to Mars.
  Well along this path, Harris set off by bicycle down a short section of the fabled Silk Road with her childhood friend Mel Yule. This trip was just a simulacrum of exploration, she thought, not the thing itself—a little adventure to pass the time until she could launch for outer space. But somewhere in between sneaking illegally across Tibet, studying the history of science and exploration at Oxford, and staring down a microscope for a doctorate at MIT, she realized that an explorer, in any day and age, is by definition the kind of person who refuses to live between the lines. Forget charting maps, naming peaks, leaving footprints on another planet: what she yearned for was the feeling of soaring completely out of bounds. And where she'd felt that most intensely was on a bicycle, on a bygone trading route. So Harris quit the laboratory and hit the Silk Road again with Yule, this time determined to bike it from beginning to end.
  Weaving adventure and deep reflection with the history of science and exploration, Lands of Lost Borders explores the nature of limits and the wildness of a world that, like the self and like the stars, can never be fully mapped.

  Kate Harris is a writer with a grudge against borders and a knack for getting lost. Her essays, travel features, and poetry have appeared in The Walrus, Canadian Geographic, Sierra, CutBank, Arc Poetry Magazine, and The Georgia Review, among other publications, and cited in Best American Essays and Best American Travel Writing. A Rhodes scholar and Morehead-Cain scholar, she was named one of Canada’s top modern-day explorers and in 2012 won the Ellen Meloy Desert Writers Award. Her journeys edging the limits of nations, science, and sanity have taken her to all seven continents, often by ski or bike. She's been profiled in Guernica, The Globe and Mail, VOGUE Germany, and the short film The Art of Wild. When she isn't wandering the world for work and play, she lives off-grid with her wife and dog in a log cabin in Atlin, British Columbia. Lands of Lost Borders is her first book.

• Globe and Mail - https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/in-a-tiny-bc-cabin-kate-harris-penned-tales-of-travel-along-the-silkroad/article37990781/

  In a tiny B.C. cabin, Kate Harris penned tales of travel along the Silk Road
  Marsha Lederman joins the first-time Canadian author off the grid in Atlin, where she wrote the already acclaimed Lands of Lost Borders

  Kate Harris in her one-room log cabin outside Atlin, B.C., on Jan. 20, 2018.
  Photos by Crystal Schick/the globe and mail
  Marsha Lederman

  ATLIN, B.C.
  Published February 15, 2018
  Updated February 18, 2018

  E
  ven if the sky isn't pounding non-stop sparkling snow onto the winding highway in the dark, dark evening, Atlin, B.C., isn't the easiest place to reach.
  Not that a difficult road has ever stopped Kate Harris from getting anywhere. Growing up in small-town Ontario, she was enchanted with Marco Polo's travels along the fabled ancient network of trade routes known as the Silk Road, linking Asia with the Middle East and Europe. After completing her undergraduate degree in biology, Harris finally set out on her own adventure across the Silk Road – on a bicycle with a friend, their panniers loaded down with gear, supplies and Moleskine notebooks as they slogged through often punishing conditions.

  Harris's new book recounts those travels – first in western China, then their return in 2011 when they rode from Turkey to the Himalayas, over nearly 11 months.
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  So when I arrived in the northern B.C. village of Atlin, where Harris lives, to meet her, it seemed a little ridiculous to feel any sense of accomplishment about my slower-than-intended, white-knuckle drive south from Whitehorse in my Ford Focus rental. Still, she made me feel like a warrior for the achievement.
  "I was going to go out looking for you," she said, in her duct-taped ski jacket. After reading her extraordinary debut book, I believed her. That's the kind of thing she would do. We sat down to dinner and our first of two interviews.
  Lands of Lost Borders: Out of Bounds on the Silk Road is rich not only because of the adventures it recounts, but in the telling of them. It isn't so much a travelogue as it is a contemplation of what pushes us out the door and how we change out there in the world before we return to our own little corner of it.
  This is not the type of book you want to motor through. Instead, it slows you down, so you can appreciate what you're experiencing – almost like a trip on a bicycle across an astonishing landscape. You find yourself wanting to linger, rereading passages built of sentences so beautiful they demand to be read out loud – even if no one else is in the room.

  Lands of Lost Borders: Out of Bounds on the Silk Road contemplates what pushes us out the door and how we change out there in the world before we return to our own little corner of it.
  "Every tree branch was fisted with buds and the air smelled of freshly chopped pine, earthy and warm, all those rays of sunshine released," Harris writes. "Every time I got on my bicycle after a long hiatus it was like riding back to myself, the only way there."

  This book made me want to venture (!) to Atlin to meet Harris; it made me want to be a little like her, to go back and live my life differently – see different things but also see them differently. As she writes: "We're only here by fluke, and only for a little while, so why not run with life as far and wide as you can?"
  Harris, 35, has always wanted to be an explorer. But for many years, her obsession was Mars. She built her academic and planned career path on becoming an astronaut, even attending a simulated Mars mission in Utah during her undergrad. There, she discovered an aversion to seeing the world through the Plexiglas of a space helmet. It should have been her first clue.
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  Harris had planned to become an astronaut, but ended up switching from studying science to the history of science.
  While at Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship (an underachiever she is not), she switched from science – why spend your time in Oxford in a lab, she figured – to studying the history of science. This is where she found her groove, reading the journals of Charles Darwin and other explorers. When she returned to the lab, this time at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she couldn't wait to get out. Instead of pursuing her PhD, she and her friend Mel Yule left for Turkey with their bikes.
  They took videos, photos and mailed home their journals – snapping shots of each page for insurance – so they wouldn't have to lug them around. Years later, in her one-room cabin in Atlin, this reference material helped Harris get into the Silk Road headspace, looking out the window at endless trees from her desk, which is planted under a cathedral of built-in bookshelves; she calls it the skybrary.
  The cabin is outside of town and off the grid, powered by solar energy and a backup generator. There's a woodstove, a propane oven and, a short walk away through the snow, an outhouse. There's no shower, no cell service; she drew a map in my notebook after our dinner so I could find the place again the next morning; a moose-hunting sign was one of the landmarks.
  "It's nothing fancy," she said, not apologetically, ahead of my arrival.

  Harris looks up at her ‘skybrary.’
  So how does someone who has travelled all over the world choose Atlin, population approximately 400?
  During her undergraduate years at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Harris could access summer travel grants. This was in part how she became a writer: She realized that words had the power to launch her anywhere.

  In summer, 2004, she took part in a glaciology field program, skiing across the Juneau Icefield for six glorious weeks. The trip ended in Atlin. Harris fell in love with the place and never forgot. In 2012, she moved here with her partner, now wife, Kate Neville, who teaches at the University of Toronto, specializing in global environmental politics.
  "I could pretty happily never go anywhere again. Atlin is situated in such a way that radiating out from this little community is wilderness … where nature is still just doing its thing and wildlife is doing its thing," Harris says.

  Harris moved to the less-than-200-square-foot cabin in 2012 with her partner, now wife, Kate Neville.
  "I can't see myself actually not travelling anywhere else," she clarifies. "But what interests me about Atlin is it's so easy to be dazzled when you go to a foreign land. Everything's dazzling; everything's new and odd and surprising. Every footstep's kind of like a new frontier. It's new territory. But there's a potential to be dazzled by a place where you live, day in, day out, that is so much deeper. … It's a much more profound acquaintance with a place than any sort of two-week flurry through a country on a bike can yield."
  Harris compares the less-than-200-square-foot cabin to a haiku – five by seven by five (though she's not sure those are the exact dimensions). She wrote at the desk while Neville sat on the bench behind her working on her own book, an academic text about community responses to environmental land use, including fracking. They spent mornings writing with their black lab Daniel between them, afternoons out in nature.
  "If you can't write a book here, you can't write a book anywhere," Harris says.
  Over five years, Harris wrote and rewrote. For instruction, she read other writing that floored her – by Annie Dillard, Pico Iyer, Barry Lopez, Anne Michaels, Wallace Stevens, Virginia Woolf and others.
  Their books and many others – including her mother's old copy of Marco Polo's Adventures in China – still line the cabin's ceiling-reaching shelves, the highest of which Harris can only reach by climbing onto her desk and standing on tiptoe (she plans to build a ladder).
  What she finally produced is a book so good it drew both Iyer and Lopez out of blurb-retirement.

  ‘If you can’t write a book here, you can’t write a book anywhere,’ Harris says.
  Iyer, who once wrote an anti-blurb essay, "Jacketeering," that Harris had been unaware of, nonetheless provided a glowing blurb, calling her book a modern classic. "Kate Harris packs more exuberant spirit, intrepid charm, wit, poetry and beauty into her every paragraph than most of us can manage in a lifetime," it begins.
  "He wrote this gobsmacking blurb that made my life," Harris says, practically glowing next to the wood she earlier chopped. "Anything could happen with the book from here and it doesn't matter. If Pico Iyer thought it was a meaningful read, yes, that's enough. My life is made."
  But what about Mars, I ask – is that still a dream?
  "It's hard to convey just how evangelical I was about Mars as a kid. My whole mission in life was qualifying myself to potentially go there some day," she says.
  But no more. "I think as the result of my travels I just have this deepening allegiance to the Earth. My loyalties are here," she continues. "It took a pretty naive version of me to prioritize space and Mars exploration above all else."
  She thinks her next projects may be book-worthy: learning to fly (there are brick-like flight manuals among the poetry volumes) and learning to build. This summer there are plans to construct a second cabin on the property – for guests, especially writers. It will be lined with shelves, insulated with wall-to-wall books. What better way to keep a writer warm and inspired in a northern British Columbia forest?

  Follow Marsha Lederman on Twitter @marshalederman

• Explore - https://www.explore-mag.com/The-Way-of-the-Wolf-Lands-of-Lost-Borders-With-Author-Kate-Harris

  The Way of the Wolf: Lands of Lost Borders, With Author Kate Harris
  Frank Wolf

  Feb 8, 2018
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  Combining autobiography, adventure, philosophy and history, Lands of Lost Borders chronicles a wild cycling journey along the fabled Silk Road.
  The yearlong odyssey of author Kate Harris and her cycling pal Mel Yule draws back the curtain on a little-travelled area of the planet, giving us an intimate peek at life in countries like Kyrgyzstan, Azerbaijan and Tajikistan.
  Inspired by explorers like Marco Polo and Fanny Bullock Workman, Harris grew up yearning to strike out on adventures of her own. Abandoning academia, she set her sights on intimately experiencing this formerly grand trade route now fallen silent behind restrictive borders.
  Negotiating bureaucratic red tape in these countries is harder at times than climbing and descending the rough mountain roads of the route. At one point, the pair even snuck around an armed border checkpoint at night in order to gain access to the Tibetan Plateau.

  Kate Harris
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  Obsessed in her early life with someday going to Mars, Harris’s travels take us instead to a place that to many is almost as foreign, right here on Earth. Despite language and cultural barriers, no matter where their bikes took them they were lent a hand by most everyone they met. Families and individuals from all walks of life fed and housed the pair—again and again exhibiting decency and respect to these dusty, road weary strangers.
  Fuelled by instant noodles and battling sickness, snowstorms, and endless flat tires Harris stays buoyant throughout. With outstanding insight, wit and humility, she reflects on borders and what they mean. Riding disguised in masks and with Chinese flags fluttering from their bikes to avoid detection by authorities in occupied Tibet, Harris muses that “Borders reinforce the idea of the alien, the Other, stories separate and distinct from ourselves.”
  Lands of Lost Borders looks beyond these imaginary political boundaries meant to divide us. The book shows us that no matter how far off the beaten path you travel, people have far more in common than they do differences. It’s an uplifting realization that gives hope for the future of humankind.

  Kate Harris
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  Q&A with Author Kate Harris
  What inspired you to cycle the Silk Road?
  As a kid, I idolized Marco Polo based on the storybook version I knew of his travels. He seemed the epitome of an explorer to me: part adventurer, part mystic, ever-drawn to distant horizons. When I grew older, though, I was crushed to discover he was really a merchant at heart, motivated by profit margins more than a sense of curiosity about the world. He complained about the parts of the Silk Road that most compelled me, namely the mountains and deserts in between the fabled trading hubs. Polo wasn’t the only “explorer” I worshipped as a kid that let me down in this way: so many, upon closer examination, turned out to be the witting or unwitting servants of conquest and commerce, with devastating consequences for the people and places they “discovered.” So, I took to the Silk Road by bicycle in a spirit of defiance, hoping to salvage the art of exploration from the fame- and fortune-driven enterprise it had become, or perhaps has always been.
  What was the hardest part of the journey?
  Coming home and writing about it. Mel and I spent over a year total biking the Silk Road on two different trips. Writing a book about the journey took me half-a-decade. And while I love the exposure to new places and new people that you get by travelling by bicycle, I find there’s as much (or even more) intensity and thrill and a sense of discovery when I’m sitting back at my desk, trying to put those experiences to words. Words and the world go very much hand-in-hand for me: I travelled vicariously through books long before I had the chance to travel anywhere myself, so I wanted to write something worthy, I hope, of the books that galvanized me out the door in the first place.

  Kate Harris
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  Was there a singular highlight moment along the way?
  Night-biking in Uzbekistan. Mel and I came to know stretches of that country more by its constellations than any terrestrial landmarks, because it was too hot and windy in the desert to bike by day, so we took to riding after dusk and before dawn, making out the road by the light of the moon. In a way, biking among the stars in Central Asia is the closest I’ve come to space travel—closer, even, than pretending to be on Mars during a simulated mission in Utah! Plus, I didn’t have to wear mock spacesuit on the Silk Road, meaning I could feel the wind on my face, breathe in the sage-scented air—I wouldn’t trade that for a new world any day.
  What was the most dangerous part of the adventure?
  Most people, upon hearing about our trip, think it was risky to sneak illegally across the Tibetan Plateau, or bike along the Afghan border for nearly a thousand kilometers. In truth, the greatest danger was far less glamorous: road traffic, particularly transport trucks, which have replaced the camel caravans of yore as means for shipping goods along the Silk Road.

  Which person you encountered along the route left the biggest impression on you?
  The pilgrims we caught up with while biking across the Tibetan Plateau. The man and woman had been prostrating themselves toward Lhasa for months, carrying nothing but the clothes they wore. We wobbled up to them on bikes loaded with a tent, food and clothes for all kinds of weather, and knew we’d met the real travellers, the real explorers. They took trust in the kindness and compassion of fellow humans, not to mention “travelling light,” to the most admirable extreme. We met them at a point in the trip when I was really despairing over the Chinese occupation of Tibet, and here they were, moving bravely through all the brokenness. Meeting was sort of like the final lines of Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo” poem: “There is no place that is not looking at you./ You will have to change your life.”

  Kate Harris
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  What was your favourite country en route?
  I’d probably have to say Tajikistan. After biking across the Pamir Plateau there in the summertime during this Silk Road trip, I decided to go back in the winter for a ski trip. The goal was to ski after Marco Polo sheep in the borderlands, but my friends and I should’ve brought bikes, as there was hardly any snow that year! Ladakh in northern India is another region I’ll keep returning to again and again. Culturally, it’s more like Tibet than Tibet now, and it’s the sort of place that seems inexhaustible in terms of what it can teach you, or awaken in you.
  You talk a lot in the book about your desire to go to Mars someday—is that still on your list?
  Growing up in small-town Ontario exposed me to a pretty tamed, fenced, paved-over part of our planet, and it seemed a world diminished of possibilities compared to the one I read about in the accounts of early explorers. From what I could tell, Mars was the only place left in the solar system on which a person alive today could feasibly leave the first footprints. I was also entranced by the possibility that the red planet might harbour alien life, or at least ancient signs of it—incontrovertible proof that we’re not alone in the universe. “If it is just us,” as Carl Sagan notes, “seems like an awful waste of space.”
  But having seen a bit more of our home planet now, I’m so in love with it—and equally so heartbroken by it—that I never want to leave. My loyalties are here. This living, breathing world is the best thing we’ve got going in the universe, plus we can’t actually live without it: do we need any other reason to take better care of it, and each other?

  Kate Harris
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  Any golden tidbit of advice for someone wanting to cycle all or part of your route?
  Be equal parts bold and careful. Court wonder and absurdity with every pedal stroke. Above all, let yourself get sidetracked: straight lines are anathema to adventure.
  What's your next big adventure?
  I wouldn’t turn down chance to ski traverse Ellesmere Island or trek in Bhutan, but my wanderlust these days has gone pretty local. I’m keen to better get to know my neighbourhood in Atlin, a small community on the border of British Columbia, Alaska, and the Yukon, where my partner and dog and I live off-grid in a one-room log cabin. With the Juneau Icefield, Atlin Lake itself, and mountains and rivers in all directions, I could spend lifetimes learning this land, its many seasons and weathers, its plants and animals, not to mention its deep Indigenous and more recent Gold Rush history. To live in a place where adventure is right out the back door—or the only door, in our tiny cabin’s case—is a deep and daily joy.

• The Adventure Syndicate - http://theadventuresyndicate.com/kate-harris/

  Name: Kate Harris
  Age: 34
  Lives: Atlin, British Columbia, Canada
  Rides: Seven Expat S, October hardtail
  Website: www.kateharris.ca
  Twitter: @kateonmars
  Instagram: @kateoffmars
  What are you proud of?
  Exploring the world on a shoestring and a bike. Putting wildness to words, or the beautiful failure of trying. Living off-grid.
  What have you done?
  Wandered the Silk Road by bike and in sentences. Trespassed twice across Tibet. Suffered gloriously on all seven continents. Briefly lived on Mars (in Utah).
  What are you scared of?
  Forgetting for one second the wonder of being here, being anywhere, being at all. So-called progress and profit at the expense of life—whether biological, intellectual, or spiritual life. Heavy traffic, especially when I’m on a bike!
  What are you up to?
  Finishing a book, traveling widely in Atlin, and learning how to use a chainsaw.

• Hazlitt - https://hazlitt.net/feature/kind-faith-was-begging-be-shattered-complexity-interview-kate-harris

  ‘The Kind of Faith That Was Begging to be Shattered by Complexity’: An Interview with Kate Harris
  By Amanda Lewis
  The author of Lands of Lost Borders speaks with her editor about travel, Virginia Woolf, and deciding not to go to Mars.
  Related Books

  Author-Editor Interview
  January 30, 2018

  Amanda Lewis
  Amanda Lewis worked as an editor at Penguin Random House Canada for eight years before going...

  On the scale of fun, writing a book is generally Type 3, in line with an arduous expedition where the stakes are preternaturally high and the participants bounce between excitement, dread, and terror. Live to tell the tale and glory surely awaits. But risk is essential when striding forth into the unknown and, once home, sharing your findings as truthfully as possible. As Colum McCann put it, “A writer is an explorer. She knows she wants to get somewhere, but she doesn’t know if the somewhere even exists yet. It is still to be created. A Galápagos of the imagination. A whole new theory of who we are.”
  This time, like a ship-board cat on a long expedition, I was along for the ride, an editor providing companionship as much as keeping the mice at bay. Metaphors aside, that writer-editor relationship can sometimes turn into the deepest friendship. Type 3 fun, after all—if you survive it—forges powerful connections. And the banter that comes during the voyage can reveal profound truths while keeping a sense of play and possibility in the undertaking.
  A shared love of adventure—particularly bike touring—initially brought Kate Harris and I together. Her new travel memoir, Lands of Lost Borders (Knopf Canada), is about biking the Silk Road from Istanbul to India, steering out of bounds and defying expectations as often as possible. Kate left behind her scientific studies and her hopes of becoming an astronaut and traveling to Mars in order to embrace the freedom she felt when exploring the Earth on her bike. I’m a long-time cycling activist and co-founder of The Reading Line, which offers annual literary Book Rides on two wheels. After completing the manuscript last summer, we hit the road, biking from Whitehorse, Yukon, to Atlin, British Columbia, where Kate lives.
  A week before Lands of Lost Borders hit bookstores, we sat down to discuss the writing process, the idea of truth in memoir, Martian evangelism, and the role of travel literature. Fittingly, our conversation began in an airport and continued over Skype a few days later.
  Amanda Lewis: So here we are, t-minus eleven days from publication.
  Kate Harris: In a rush, in an airport, consuming massive quantities of sushi as if we’ve been biking all day.
  But we haven’t. I’ve been driving and you’ve been sitting. That’s right, internet, I drive a car.
  Oh, how the mighty have fallen.
  Well, we had six months to prepare this piece but of course we’re doing it days before it’s due, between a visit to the vet for my cat and your flight to Atlin, because we’ve spent the last six months bantering about poetry and real estate, and going on adventures. It’s like this, Kate: sometimes when you’re under a magazine deadline, all you need is four wheels and the defogger, and the cat can’t come along.
  It is exactly like that.
  I’m a master of metaphor. I don’t know if you know this about me.
  Where did this marvellous gift come from?
  It’s probably an Irish thing. May you get to heaven a half-hour before the devil knows you’re dead. That’s an Irish blessing.
  You’re an Irish blessing.
  Thank you! Anyway, my metaphors don’t make sense but they’re soothing, and I feel like they help authors.
  They do. They break the ice. Whenever we had editorial phone calls, your metaphors would make me laugh so hard I’d forget to be worried about writing. I remember going home after first meeting you, and trying to describe you to my partner. “She’s an eccentric,” I think I told her admiringly.
  You were having this out-of-body experience when we first met. You were so over the moon because the book had been signed, but terrified because now you had to write it. You also thought we were punking you, because that’s a thing in Canadian publishing: we put all our money into punking authors. So, let’s talk about how this came about. The punking.
  I was browsing the magazine rack in a bookstore in New Brunswick, flipped through a Quill and Quire issue, and found an essay by this editor who was into bikes and books and saving the planet. And this editor had worked on books by so many authors I admire: J.B. MacKinnon, John Vaillant. And I was like, “There she is. That’s my editor.” So I followed you on Twitter.
  I checked out who you were when you followed me…
  But you didn’t follow back.
  [Laughs] Well, I’m verrrry choosy. That’s what the psychic told my mom. That her daughter is too picky.
  Both too picky, and oddly accepting on the romantic—
  Let’s not talk about that… Now I loved that you defied all the expectations you had set for yourself—to finish your PhD at MIT and become an astronaut on a one-way trip to Mars—in order to live more fully here on Earth, biking the Silk Road for a year with your childhood friend Mel Yule. Plus, I have such a fondness for that part of the world, and have been longing to visit Tibet, and your book transported me there in the interim. How do you see your book fitting into literature on that country, or the Tibetan freedom question? Do you see your book serving a political purpose?
  I certainly don’t write to offer political solutions, or solutions of any sort, but to provoke questions, to reveal ambiguities in realms where black-and-white thinking tends to prevail. What’s happening in Tibet now is what has happened and is happening to Indigenous peoples in Canada, and in colonized lands all over the world: the loss of autonomy and sovereignty and culture, the imposition of a foreign language and foreign laws.
  Throughout the book, but especially in Tibet, I wanted to examine the troubling repercussions of “exploration,” an enterprise with such strong imperial overtones, such strong associations with flags and maps and claims. The book doesn’t offer up any grand solutions, because frankly I don’t have any to offer other than, why can’t we all just be better to each other? Which isn’t exactly a policy you can just implement. So, the book shows what’s happening with the Chinese occupation of Tibet as far as I could see it—which, to be honest, wasn’t very far when we couldn’t really even talk to Tibetans.
  Right, because you and Mel were disguised as androgynous Chinese cyclists in order to sneak in without a guide or permits. You’re back in your off-grid cabin in Atlin now, where you live. But you split time between there and Toronto, where your partner, Kate Neville, is a professor of environmental politics at University of Toronto. How do you reconcile those two extremes? Being this wanderer who is happiest in wild places, and then living in downtown Toronto for months at a time?
  Well, most of my extended family lives in Ontario, and my brothers are in Toronto as well as Mel. So people-wise, it’s a joy to be there. I try to binge on what Toronto has to offer and Atlin lacks, namely easy access to libraries, museums, films, talks, cultural events. Poor Kate has to slog away at being a professor, she’s really busy, but as a freelancer I can take advantage of all the city’s marvels. Even so, it wears on me after a while. I feel my senses shutting down: there’s too much noise, too much input. I can read well in cities, but my writing feels cautious and closed-off. It’s so easy in Atlin to be inspired. If you can’t write something decent in this splendour, all this fresh air, there’s really no hope. As someone who spends a lot of time alone in a cabin in the woods, though, I can attest that Toronto is a much more solitary and anonymous place. I mean, you saw Atlin: it’s incredibly community-oriented, but at the same time, everyone’s an artist or adventurer. They understand the hermit impulse, the need for solitude and extremes, but everyone looks out for each other. You’ll be invited to dinner parties every week.
  I don’t know if you remember me saying this to you when I was staying with you in Atlin, but you can sense that everyone’s an artist there, it’s vital, it’s in the air. People are working for that above having a paycheque or a fancy house. Those aren’t the markers of success there. I was really struck by that.
  And in Toronto, the baseline for keeping life going is really high. Of course people are focused on careers: there are bills to pay, and they’re expensive. But you can dirtbag it in Atlin and lead an incredibly rich life so long as you’re willing not to make any money. Because what is money for if not living the life you want? That’s the attitude in Atlin.
  And ultimately, it doesn’t matter what it costs, because the cost of not being there is so high: you’re not doing your best work.
  That’s right. Creatively, there’s a cost to being away. It’s like I access the fullest, most elemental version of myself in Atlin. Everywhere else I’m only partially expressed.
  Can we talk about the epigraph to your book? It’s from The Waves by Virginia Woolf: “To speak of knowledge is futile. All is experiment and adventure. We are forever mixing ourselves with unknown quantities.” I know you’re a huge Woolf fan, so I wasn’t surprised to see this, but someone picking up a travel book might expect lines from another travel book, or something from T.S. Eliot. What does this epigraph have to say about the way you see the world, travel, writing?
  The Waves is my all-time favourite Woolf book, a gorgeous prose-poem of a novel that wrestles with life, the universe, everything. It’s probably the least-read or least-talked about of her books, so I was thrilled to stumble on an essay by Jeanette Winterson, in her collection Art Objects, that articulates some of why I loved it so much. Winterson writes, among other things:
  “The Waves…is a strong-honed edge through the cloudiness most of us call life. It is uncomfortable to have the thick padded stuff ripped away. There is no warm blanket to be had out of Virginia Woolf; there is wind and sun and you naked. It is not remoteness of feeling in Woolf, it is excess; the unbearable quiver of nerves and the heart pounding… To read The Waves is to collide violently with a discipline of emotion and language that heightens both to a point of painful beauty.”
  Yes. Exactly. All of that. What I found in The Waves is what I seek from travel: that rapture, that exposure, that sensation of having the thick padded stuff ripped away to reveal the truth of where and who we are, or less the truth so much as the mind-boggling mystery at the heart of everything.
  And the experiment part of that epigraph speaks to your scientist nature. You had this desire to go to Mars. It seems this is how you live life: you have this romantic, poetic side, but you’re also a hypothesis tester. You ask questions, you experiment, you deal in the tangible. You build sheds, for example, on your property in Atlin.
  I asked a lot of questions of YouTube during the building process this past summer. How do I lay a foundation? How do I square a subfloor? What is the meaning of life, YouTube?
  Right! You jest, but in fact you’re always asking yourself that, about the meaning of life, and your life. You’re always asking, is my life moving in the direction I want it to? And then coming up with an answer and acting on it. So you tried out this hypothesis of: I want to go to Mars because it will fulfill me in every way. And then you tested it during a Mars mission simulation in Utah, and then at MIT, and then said, nope, this experiment is flawed.
  Doomed, in fact. I was a disaster in the lab, far too distracted by whatever was out the window. But yeah, one of the things that blew my mind when I went off to Oxford to study the history and philosophy of science, instead of doing science myself, was how partial and incomplete and open to revision it is. For a time we understood gravity through Newton’s Laws, then Einstein came along and we saw the “truth” of gravity in a whole new way. Until Oxford, I’d always seen science as the ultimate tool for deducting truth, and I mean capital-T truth. Then I read Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, among other books on the philosophy of science, and came to understand how paradigm shifts can be prompted by a pretty irrational process.
  One scientist will fiercely advocate for one theory, because she has a hunch that this is how the world works, it seems elegant and sensible to her, though she can’t definitively prove it. Another will argue with equal fervor that his totally different theory explains a given phenomenon best, though he can’t prove it either. And those different beliefs, different theories, battle it out over time until the facts fall more on one side than the other. This faith at the core of science really shook, well, my faith in science. I no longer saw it as the only way to genuine knowledge. There are so many ways of knowing the world. Woolf nailed it, as she nails most things: all is experiment and adventure.
  One of the most challenging aspects of writing a memoir is wrestling with that element of “truth.” Because your story, of course it’s “true,” but who you were when you biked the Silk Road the first time, before Oxford, versus who you were when you picked up your route where you left off, five years later, versus who you are now when you’re writing the book—I’m curious about how you wrestle with that idea of truth when you’re writing about different versions of yourself. In The Night of the Gun, David Carr writes about a pivotal night in his life. Here he was, as he believed himself to be at the time, a respectable journalist and doting father, and yet he found himself completely strung out and pulling a gun on someone. So he went back and started investigating his own life, and talking to people who were there, because he had a certain perception of who he was, and he wanted to test that, sort of triangulate towards truth. So I’m curious about what your process was like in writing the book. I know you kept a journal, and you had Mel as well to bounce the story off and fact check. But how did you go about balancing Kate as she was with Kate now, and the Kate that appears in this book?
  Hmm, different versions of myself. It’s interesting, looking back at my childhood…obviously I’m aware that I was into Mars as a kid. But when I went back and actually re-read the letter I wrote—
  Tell me about the letter.
  I wrote a sort of manifesto as a teenager calling for a mission to Mars as the highest priority of humankind. And I fervently, wholeheartedly believed every word of it, so much so that I sent it to twenty-two world leaders. I was an evangelist for Mars. In a way I admire that zealous younger me, who felt with such conviction that going to Mars was the one goal worth striving for, worth putting all the world’s passion and energy and resources into.
  Which gets at what you were saying about faith in science.
  Right. Faith is a tempting, comforting thing, if you can find it. I’m so glad I aimed for Mars when I was younger. I pretty much owe everything I’ve done and seen and learned to that singular focus. But it was the kind of faith that was begging to be shattered by the complexity of the world. A world I hadn’t seen much of as a kid, except through books. So, as unworldly as I was, it was easy to believe that the Earth was a write-off, a ruined planet, and that Mars was the great hope.
  Of course, once I finally had the chance to travel for myself, I saw that our world is both better and worse off than I thought. There’s so much beauty and wonder and hope still left here, as harsh as things are for many people, and many places. By any reckoning, this planet is the best thing we’ve got going in the universe. To not put all our energy into being good “earthlings” seems insane now to me.
  To be fair, though, I wasn’t just enchanted with Mars as an escape route: it struck me as the one place in our solar system where science and poetry and philosophy might meet, by yielding an answer to that age-old question, Are we alone? That was thrilling to me, and is still thrilling to me. I’m glad we’re asking that question, sending out probes and rovers in hopes of inklings or even answers. But Mars is no longer my messianic be-all and end-all. It’s one of many places that makes the universe interesting.
  Now by the end of the book—spoiler alert—you’re emaciated and exhausted and your friendship with Mel is momentarily strained if made stronger in the long run, and at this point you started to formulate a vision for life after the Silk Road. You’ve ended up at this spot in Atlin, bordering Alaska, the Yukon, and BC, borders that don’t really matter because you can’t see them and you cross them all the time when heading to Whitehorse to buy groceries, for example. And you’re writing in this tiny cabin, and you’re considering these grand questions: what is truth, what is the state of the world, how am I taking care of my postage-stamp piece of it. And as we’re talking now on Skype, I’m looking at that Judy Currelly painting over your shoulder on the cabin wall, watching it as the light changes, and it’s glowing: three ravens around an orb, circling it almost like spacecraft, and it’s called Ravens Discussing the Affairs of the World. I see your book as just that: a kind of probe or spacecraft you’ve sent into orbit from your base in Atlin, asking some of the biggest questions: Who are we? Are we alone? What are we doing here? Wait, why are we on this mission? Abort! ABORT!
  [Laughs]
  So that’s how I see it. In fact, one of the things I admire about you is your optimism. You don’t let the horror of the world crowd out the wonder. What I’m circling around here is the relentless quest for truth you seem to have, which is informed of course by your scientific training, and now comes through in your writing. And also in the writing you love and share, since we’re always flinging bits of essays and poetry and interesting articles back and forth. Though you tend to start your days reading things like the Paris Review or Granta, and I tend to start my days reading Apartment Therapy.
  You and I, we bring such different riches to each other! I’m less interested in truth, though—whatever that is—than in being aware, at all times if possible, of the wildness of being at all. Goethe said the highest goal humans can achieve is amazement, but when you think about it, amazement is a pretty low bar given the facts of the matter, namely that we live on a spinning hunk of rock in an undistinguished corner of a universe full of stars, and we haven’t the faintest idea where it all came from. How is it that we aren’t wonderstruck by existence every second of every day?
  You are, as your book shows. Now this is your debut book, and it’s a travel memoir. Are you worried about being pigeon-holed as a travel writer, a memoirist, the next Cheryl Strayed or Elizabeth Gilbert?
  I’m more concerned about being pigeon-holed as an adventurer who happens to write, when really I’m a writer who happens to enjoy grueling sufferfests from time to time. And I have nothing against Cheryl Strayed or Elizabeth Gilbert.
  Of course not! They’re amazing writers. People are quick to write them off due to their success, which is garbage. They are successful primarily because they are sublimely talented, and they continually hone their craft. Also, Dear Sugars for life.
  Yes, they’re gorgeous, engaging writers, and I suspect we’d all be best friends if they’d only give us the chance. In part because we’re hugely different. What made those two hit the road, so to speak, was an emotional crisis of some sort, and travel was its cure. This is a valid reason to travel, but there are so many other valid reasons! Including a basic curiosity about how billions of other beings on this planet are going about their lives right this second. So if I must be known as a travel writer or a memoirist, I hope such labels are less associated with inward self-discovery, and more associated with looking outward with longing.
  When men write about travel, the press and general public tend to focus on their derring-do and bravado, or on the nature and culture of the places they travel through. When a woman does the same trip, she’s expected to write about her feelings or her relationships. Your writing has been compared to Rebecca Solnit and Pico Iyer, and I feel like all three of you have this wide-eyed yet pragmatic take on the world. It’s not about “me, me, me.” It’s about us as a species, as members of a global community. You’re all satellites going forth into the universe and reporting back. Every time I finish reading your book, and I’ve read it many times at this stage, I don’t feel like I’m closing the story of your life. I close it and feel like my life is more expansive, things seem more possible. The world feels smaller yet larger at the same time. Now, I’m curious about the photos in the book. They’re not of you or the adventure so much as the people you met and places you saw along the way.
  All of that was really important to me. If there were going to be pictures at all in the book, I wanted them to be evocative, not illustrative. To enhance the text instead of just depicting it. The initial selection of photos by the publishing house tilted toward the adventure and Mel and me, but I didn’t want the places we travelled and the people we met to be consigned to the background. The point of including photos wasn’t to satisfy people’s curiosity about, say, what Mel and I look like, or what equipment we brought, you can Google all of that, and any other important details are included in the main text. No, the point of the photos is to spark more questions than they answer—much like the book as a whole, I hope.
  Anytime I can grab someone’s ear about your book, I highlight how it’s about defying the rules we have for ourselves, and crossing boundaries. In the narrative, you literally cross a border when you sneak illegally into Tibet. And you more metaphorically cross boundaries when you step off the scientist/Mars track you were on. How do you bring that same sense of risk-taking and border-breaching into your writing?
  In all my travels, I’ve never done anything nearly as perilous as facing a blank page on a daily basis for years on end after returning from the Silk Road. Writing means risking failure, courting it even. Setting off for territories that might not exist. Working away for half a decade on a project that might never find a publisher. And when you write, much as when you travel, you can’t be too conscious of the risks you’re taking. You can’t let prudence overrule a healthy sense of adventure. You sit as many risks as you run, isn’t that the saying? So you might as well run, or bike, or approach writing with a sense of play and trust and hope, despite the leering risk of failure, because it’s way more fun.
  On that note, I want to talk about vulnerability. There’s a lot of it involved in striking out on an adventure, or putting a pen to the page. Until now, only a handful of people have read your book. Soon you’ll have strangers giving it star ratings on Goodreads! How are you handling the imminent exposure?
  With total aplomb. Meaning I veer between ecstasy and terror from moment to moment, which is really fun for my partner. At the end of the day, I feel proud of the book, I gave it everything I had, and now it goes off to live its life, all grown-up. It kind of feels like giving a gift to the world, though of course this doesn’t guarantee it’ll be received as such. My hope is that it moves people, revives their sense of wonder, makes them fall in love with the Earth so that, like me, they never again want to abandon it for Mars. Above all, I hope it makes people want to explore—not the Silk Road, necessarily, but whatever territory is available to them. It’s scary and alluring, this promise and threat of feedback on the book after years and years without much of it. I grew up chasing gold stars, the highest grades, and that’s a hard impulse to kill. The actual writing of the book was a healthy exercise in ego extinguishment. But publishing a book threatens to put the ego back in play or kill it off forever. So I’m trying to detach myself from outcomes and focus on the next experiment, the next adventure. Godspeed, little book. You’re on your own now.
  I think it was Atwood who said that once a book is published, it doesn’t belong to the writer anymore. It belongs to the reader, it takes on its own velocity. And what was that Steven Heighton quote you shared with me that I can’t remember now but I love?
  Oh, it’s so good! And so true of both travel and writing. “Resign yourself to the road, there’s no arrival. There’s no map either, come to think of it, but the sun is rising and the radio is on.”

• CBC - https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/the-current-for-april-25-2018-1.4633565/how-a-hunger-for-a-wider-world-led-kate-harris-to-cycle-the-silk-road-1.4631423

  From a very young age, Kate Harris always wanted to be an explorer.
  She grew up idolizing Marco Polo, who traveled long distances and wrote about his travels. Harris dreamt of doing the same.
  Polo's romanticized account of the Silk Road piqued Harris' interest in particular.
  "It's the world's oldest superhighway. It's where globalization first began to happen and is still happening today," Harris told The Current's Anna Maria Tremonti.
  "It really is a stretch of imagination more than anything. You know, people didn't even have a word for it as the Silk Road back when it was in its heyday; it was sort of a historical term applied in retrospect," she explained.

  Mel and Kate, still pals despite many months together in a small tent. 'We're almost like sisters at this point, and have just shared so many phases of life ... from elementary school to post high school to these grand adventures.' (Kate Harris)
  After graduating university in 2006, Harris and her childhood friend Mel Yule set out on a four-month summer vacation to retrace Marco Polo's travel through western China.
  "We loved that journey so much that we vowed that someday the two of us would finish the whole Silk Road," Harris said.
  In 2011, they did just that. They cycled thousands of kilometres along the ancient trading route from Turkey in the east, through Central Asia, China's Tibetan Autonomous Region and into the soaring heights of Nepal and northern India.
  Harris chronicles their travel in her book Lands of Lost Borders: Out of Bounds on the Silk Road.

  The Silk Road in Tibet looking roughly the same as when Marco Polo traveled it, says Kate Harris. (Kate Harris)
  How Mars led to the Silk Road
  Growing up in in small-town Ontario, surrounded by fences and subdivisions, Harris recalls feeling the exploration age was over — except in outer space.
  "I really seriously set my sights on Mars and emigrating there one day, colonizing our neighbouring planet," she said.
  The Rhodes scholar, now 35, spent an academic career mostly dedicated to studying science and space. But as it turns out laboratories and researching didn't really work well with the dreamer, so Harris found herself another adventure to pursue.

  Turquoise salt lake on the Tibetan Plateau. (Kate Harris)
  "For me what I got out of the Silk Road was so much of what I was seeking in going to Mars," she said.
  "You don't have to go to a new world to feel like you've entered a new world."
  The bike trip down the Silk Road with Yule began just an adventure, Harris said, who's been named one of Canada's top 10 adventurers by Canadian Geographic.
  "But in the process we snuck through Tibet without permission from the Chinese authorities, and that's really what sparked my interest in borders."
  The Current
  How travel has shaped the way Kate Harris looks at maps
  Listen
  00:00 00:37

  "Maps are really just stories, they're fictions that we all believe in and abide by the rules for a certain period of time." 0:37
  Harris said going back to Tibet five years later was devastating.
  "There weren't just checkpoints marking the boundaries of the autonomous region as a whole, but the boundaries of every single village we passed through," she explained.
  "It was really heartbreaking. I felt like I was a tourist in an oppressive regime and that felt terrible."

  Following the stars in Uzbekistan
  The blistering heat and wind of the desert in Uzbekistan forced Yule and Harris to bike at night.
  With very little infrastructure and villages few and far between as they cycled through the Ustyurt Plateau, the stars above magically enveloped them.
  "The horizon is so flat in all directions that they came right down to earth. It really felt like a form of space travel, like we were biking through the stars," Harris said.
  "I came to know Uzbekistan more by its constellation than any sort of landmarks lit up by day."

  Kate Harris with a dust facial after crossing the Taklamakan desert. The book cover is a picture of the stars above in western Uzbekistan. (Mel Yule/Penguin Random House Canada)
  The Current
  Author Kate Harris reads an excerpt about her time in Uzbekistan
  Listen
  00:00 00:28

  Author Kate Harris reads an excerpt from her book, Lands of Lost Borders: Out of Bounds on the Silk Road. (Pg. 182) 0:28

  Harris said Uzbekistan left a lasting impact on how landscapes can make a person see themselves in a vulnerable state.
  "When you're a very small being in a very large desert, you weirdly get insight not into the desert, but into what it means to be human. And I love that sense of smallness. I think that's what I really seek out."
  A recipe for travel
  Harris writes in her book that travel is one part geography, nine parts imagination.
  Even though she never traveled abroad as a child, Harris said she fed her wanderlust through reading.
  "I was just hungry for the wider world and I got there through books, which means I was traveling just in my mind — my imagination," Harris said, adding that in some ways it's the most vivid way to travel without the mundane logistics and transport.

  Mel Yule riding along the river on the road in the Pamir mountains. (Kate Harris)
  As a young fan of Marco Polo, she thought setting precedents — being the first to reach a location, or complete a long journey — mattered most. After her own travels, she concluded exploration should be more meaningful.
  "It's not that you need to be doing something novel or groundbreaking. It's really about expanding your consciousness and your sense of connection with the planet," she explained.
  "That's what I love reading, is getting to experience other lives and other worlds for a time and seeing how they're not so different from you and your own world."
  Harris added that there's one thing she loves maybe even more than travel: "Coming home and re-traveling the same places through words and trying to get the experience down on the page."
  Listen to the full conversation at the top of this page, where you can also share this article across email, Facebook, Twitter and other platforms.

  This segment was produced by The Current's Kristin Nelson.

• Rhodes Project - http://rhodesproject.com/kate-harris-profile/

  Kate Harris (Ontario & Hertford 2006) is a writer with a grudge against borders and a knack for getting lost. Named one of Canada’s top ten adventurers by Explore magazine, she splits her time among expeditions, creative writing, and environmental policy reporting and analysis for the International Institute for Sustainable Development. She lives off-grid in a log cabin in northern British Columbia. Kate holds a Master’s in Geobiology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an MPhil in History and Philosophy of Science and Technology from the University of Oxford, and a BS in Biology and Geology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
  Rhodes Project: Where do you call home?
  Kate Harris: I grew up in southwestern Ontario, and most of my family still lives there, so that’ll always be a home of sorts. But my current and adopted home is the near-ghost town of Atlin in British Columbia, bordering the Yukon and Alaska. This region enchanted me as an undergraduate student, when I first visited it with the Juneau Icefield Research Program (or “JIRP” – a summer glaciology field school), and I vowed I’d move here someday. It took me nearly a decade but eventually it happened. It’s the end of the road, in all the best ways.
  Rhodes Project: When you were a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
  Kate Harris: An explorer. I was obsessed with the expedition narratives of Ernest Shackleton, Fridtjof Nansen, Thor Heyerdahl, and Alexandra David-Neel; with the poetry of Robert Service; with anything far away and wild. But I despaired being born too late. Everything had already been explored, as far as I could tell as a kid - the tallest peaks climbed, the remotest continents mapped. So I figured my only option was to become an astronaut – and not just any astronaut, I wanted to become a Martian colonist, a planetary immigrant. I’ve since realized there are so many ways to explore, not least through words, through a metaphorical exegesis of what it means to be alive. Plus I’ve fallen so in love with this world I’d never want to leave it (at least not on a permanent basis).
  Rhodes Project: What did you find most surprising about your time at Oxford?
  Kate Harris: I enrolled in a history of science program at Oxford, thinking I’d spend a couple of years studying the impact of scientific ideas on the world before becoming a scientist myself. I’d been on such a science-focused academic trajectory until then, so this program was a chance to do something a little different – and a grand excuse to read all the expedition diaries I hadn’t yet devoured (Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle, Fanny Bullock Workman’s Ice-Wilds of the Karakoram, and more). In the process, I discovered that I loved reading and writing about science much more than I loved doing it in a laboratory. Writing my Master’s thesis – on the history, science, and geopolitics of the Siachen glacier, a contested frontier in Kashmir – didn’t really feel like work, but a kind of deep play. I did continue on in science after Oxford, but the experience only confirmed my heart wasn’t in it. So Oxford was a pivotal time for me, the beginning of my writing life and my fascination with borders.
  Beyond that, though related to it, my time there made me less of a ruthless crusader for science. The courses I took – on imperial science and exploration, on the history of evolutionary theory – forced me to question my previously swerveless faith in science as the best, truest system for making sense of the world. The history of science is a history of dazzling ideas and impacts, but devastating impacts as well. From the discovery of nuclear fission, we got nuclear power (itself a debatable achievement), but also Hiroshima. From the theory of evolution by natural selection, we got the intellectual foundation for modern genetics and medicine and a “scientific” justification for eugenics, taken to the extreme by the Nazis. Meanwhile the history of exploration is riddled with atrocities, not least the systematic colonization of indigenous cultures. So any enterprise with the potential to do tremendous good can also do tremendous harm. My time at Oxford widened my eyes and mind to these ambiguities, the difficult borderlands between true and false, right and wrong.
  Rhodes Project: Given the great capacity science has to do both good and harm, what role do you think government policy and regulation should play in scientific discovery, if any?
  Kate Harris: I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the double-edged sword of science, and I don’t really have any good answers. Scientists require intellectual autonomy; they need to wander in whatever direction interests them, do research for the sake of research. Their job is to open Pandora’s box. But how do you allow the free development of scientific knowledge and then step in and control its applications? I guess we need strong government policies that aren’t strong-armed by corporate interests, that consider the long-term risks of scientific discoveries.
  Rhodes Project: What’s the most beautiful place you’ve visited?
  Kate Harris: Tibet. Especially the western part of the plateau. It’s illegal to travel there without permits and a Chinese-sanctioned “guide,” but I’ve snuck in twice on a bicycle with friends, trying to see the Tibet that China didn’t want us see. It’s so beautiful and sad it hurts to think about.
  Another place is the McMurdo Dry Valleys. This is a weirdly ice-free region of the Antarctica, bare dirt except for glaciers surging between mountains. A place as wide-open and beautiful as Mars, only it’s possible to breathe there without supplemental oxygen.
  Rhodes Project: Tell me about a challenge you’ve faced while on the road.
  Kate Harris: I often travel to places where young people don’t grow up with the opportunities for education and exploration that I’ve had, simply by fluke of the borders I was born into. I can bike into remote villages on the frontier of Tajikistan and Afghanistan, but more crucially, I can bike out of them. That basic mobility is a privilege inconceivable to so many. As a writer, the challenge is to go out there, bear witness, and bring those stories back. To use the privileges I’ve been granted to dismantle the inequities that created them in the first place.
  Rhodes Project: What’s something you’ve learned about yourself while traveling?
  Kate Harris: I have an unslakable desire for and terror of uncertainty. I dread routine, waking up and knowing exactly what every hour of every day will bring, a life dictated by to-do lists and bottom lines. What a waste of the sense of wonder we’re born with! So when traveling, and generally, I try to seek out the opposite – uncertainty. Of course once I find it I’m left shaken and unnerved, but that’s the point. If things are smooth and sure, if none of your old notions are upended, you’re not really traveling, you’re on holiday. There’s nothing wrong with holidays, but I mostly prefer adventures – until I’m having one, and all outcomes are uncertain, and I’d suddenly give anything to be at a ski resort. “Do I contradict myself?” asked Walt Whitman. “Very well then I contradict myself (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” Traveling has taught me that I, too, contain multitudes.
  Rhodes Project: What would an ideal day look like?
  Kate Harris: I’d wake up before dawn in my cabin, start a fire in the woodstove, brew some coffee, and sit down to write, my dog tucked at my feet. After five or six hours of churning out words that miraculously require no amendment (it’s my ideal day, after all), I’d head on a hike or a bike ride, maybe go fishing – basically get outside to reacquaint myself with the raw, physical world, the wildness words can barely beckon at. Eventually I’d head home, pan-fry the lake trout caught – if I was lucky - that afternoon, and eat it for dinner with friends. (And because it’s my ideal day, someone else would do the dishes!)
  Rhodes Project: If you had unlimited resources to devote to any one issue, global or local, what would it be and why?
  Kate Harris: Dissolving the borders that divide people. Which isn’t so much a matter of knocking down walls and dismantling barbed wire – though I wouldn’t mind some of that, especially for the sake of wildlife – but waking people up to the fact that this is one small planet and nothing, truly nothing on it, exists in isolation. What happens in a factory in Bangladesh matters in Canada, what happens to glaciers in Nepal matters in Fiji. We’re all complicit, we’re all connected. Political borders tend to fortify the opposite notion, and that kind of blinkered, biased perspective is at the root of so much heartache in the world, so much greed. I’d use unlimited resources to educate and inspire people – through art, literature, science – to recognize the complex interdependency of life on Earth, this pale blue dot we all call home.
  Rhodes Project: If you could go anywhere in the world right now, where would you go and why?
  Kate Harris: I would love to go to the far north, the high Arctic – Axel Heiberg, Ellesmere, Baffin Island, Greenland. Preferably by sailboat or skis. I’d love to see it as it exists now because, regrettably, I can’t see it as it was a century ago, and if I wait a few more decades it’ll be unrecognizable. The climate up there – everywhere, but especially there – is changing so rapidly. For better and worse, the world can never be fully mapped.

In Search of a World Done Differently

Elen Turner
Earth Island Journal. 33.2 (Summer 2018): p55.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Earth Island Institute
http://www.earthisland.org/
Full Text:
Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road
By Kate Harris
Dey Street Books, 2018, 299 pages
Like many a twenty-first century travelogue, Lands of Lost Borders is as much about the inner journey of the author as the outer, physical, map-plotted journey that she follows. However, there are no traces of pasta, yoga, or steamy Balinese love affairs here. Kate Harris and her travel companion, a childhood friend named Mel, push themselves far beyond the comfort zones of even the fairly intrepid traveler, including this reviewer, whose adventures bussing from Kathmandu, Nepal to Leh, India pale in comparison to Harris's experience cycling this same route.
Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road recounts Harris and Mel's cycle adventure from Istanbul, Turkey to Ladakh, India, passing through Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, China, Tibet, and Nepal on the way. But, as Harris sets out to demonstrate, the borders we are used to seeing on maps are artificial. Human-drawn borders disrupt but cannot entirely eliminate the natural flow of rivers, glaciers, forests, and even nomadic people, who continue to defy them. She writes: "Unlike political frontiers, so crisp and martial--precisely here is Tajikistan, exactly there is Afghanistan--ecological borders are more often murky, a mosaic of give-and-take: the thinning of greenery above the treeline at Zorkul, say, or the interlude of dusk that drew marmots from their dens."

But, as Harris finds, however artificial the lines on a map may be, they do contain potent meaning and have tangible effects on peoples and ecosystems. On traveling to South Korea (a trip that pre-dated the cycling adventure of this book), she visited the demilitarized zone (DMZ) between the Koreas and was amazed to find that this 160-mile long, 2.5-mile wide strip of land without human touch has returned to wilderness. Animals and plants that can no longer be found to the north or south, at least not to any large degree, thrive in the DMZ. It was this discovery that prompted her thinking about wilderness and nationalism, and how wilderness areas may serve to eliminate nationalism in the effort to conserve common resources.
Harris was drawn to her biking expedition through her disappointment with institutionalized education, which led her to drop out of her PhD program at MIT. Obsessed with Mars exploration from a young age, she sees all that is noble in the act of travel, exploration, and documentation in the name of science. But over the course of her travels, her naivete is replaced by the devastating realization that exploration, however good the intentions, is co-opted by nationalism and military control, and can lead to the destruction of that being explored. While astronauts famously pointed out that borders between countries cannot be seen from space, it was loyalty to arbitrary lines that sparked the Cold War and launched humans to the moon in the first place. As Harris writes:
I lay in my sleeping bag, aching all over, and fervently hoped humans never made it to Mars. We didn't deserve a new world; we'd just wreck it all over again. As a kid I'd genuinely believed that the discovery of alien life, whether sentient being or microbes, would change lives, incite a revolution near-holy in its repercussions. At the very least people would be kinder to each other, knowing we're all of a kind, earthlings every one ... Now I wasn't convinced. Discovering extraterrestrial life wouldn't change a thing, just as learning to fly didn't lift us higher as people.
Lands of Lost Borders concludes that it is the journey, rather than the destination, that counts. Harris does not--indeed, cannot--fully map the places she passes through, just as she does not find answers about how to turn the act of exploration into a noble rather than conquering cause. But her apparent drive to name and label gives way to a celebration of human connections with each other, and with the natural world. However much we may refuse to see our common humanity and continue to destroy the only place we can call home, our fates as humans on earth are inextricably tied.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Turner, Elen. "In Search of a World Done Differently." Earth Island Journal, Summer 2018, p. 55. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A543466221/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=5e57aa36. Accessed 27 July 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A543466221

Harris, Kate: LANDS OF LOST BORDERS

Kirkus Reviews. (June 1, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Harris, Kate LANDS OF LOST BORDERS Dey Street/HarperCollins (Adult Nonfiction) $24.99 8, 21 ISBN: 978-0-06-283934-3
A debut travelogue chronicling a modern explorer's bicycle ride along the ancient Silk Road, a journey that beautifully reveals much about the history and nature of exploration itself.
"Born centuries too late for the life I was meant to live," Harris cultivated an early love affair with wilderness, exploration, and the unknown. Due to a chance encounter with a children's book, the author became particularly intrigued by Marco Polo, and she "decided to be just like him when I grew up." Though she studied at such prestigious institutions as Oxford, where she was a Rhodes Scholar, and MIT, school was merely "a venue...for exploration." While the narrative is peppered with brief, entertaining vignettes about some of the author's early travels, the meat of her story is the nearly yearlong bike ride following the Silk Road with her pal Mel. With humor, deep sentiment, and often poetic prose, Harris takes the reader not only through "the stans" (Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, etc.) of Asia, but also through the history and current state of adventure travel. Along the way, the author provides insightful discussions of national borderlines, for which she clearly has little use. "The more I learned about the South Caucasus, with its closed borders and warring enclaves," she writes, "the more the place seemed like a playground game of capture-the-flag, all in the dubious name of nationalism." This is a tale of beautiful contrasts: broken landscapes and incomparable mountain vistas, repugnant sights and smells and euphoric baklava hangovers, geographic neighbors at war and the moving hospitality of total strangers. Harris explains the grueling and sublime nature of biking through descriptions of impoverished yet beautiful places as well as the fraught history and hopeful future of her kind. "Explorers might be extinct, in the historic sense of the vocation," she writes, "but exploring still exists, will always exist: In the basic longing to learn what in the universe we are doing here."
Exemplary travel writing: inspiring, moving, heartfelt, and often breathtaking.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Harris, Kate: LANDS OF LOST BORDERS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 June 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A540723162/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=fd4187d6. Accessed 27 July 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A540723162

Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road

Publishers Weekly. 265.15 (Apr. 9, 2018): p64.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road
Kate Harris. Dey Street, $24.99 (320p)
ISBN 978-0-06-283934-3
Nature writer and adventurer Harris details her bike journey along the Silk Road, in this beautifully rendered if sometimes slow-moving debut. Growing up, Harris wanted to be an explorer; when she got older, however, she went to Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship and later to MIT where she found the drudgery of the laboratory unbearable. As an escape, she and her best friend, Mel, planned their bike adventure and were soon pedaling along the Silk Road, starting on the pungent banks of the Black Sea ("The bottom waters are poor in oxygen but rich in hydrogen sulphide, a colourless, poisonous gas that reeks of rotten eggs"). They biked across often treacherous landscapes (and took planes or trains along routes inaccessible by bike) through Turkey, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, India, Nepal, and China; they ascended mountains and traversed river valleys. The trip concluded at the Siachen Glacier in the Himalayas at the edge of the Tibetan plateau, where "the wind was more alive than the branches it moved, and so big it could only be the mountains breathing." Harris's talent is in her prose, as she offers breathtaking descriptions of the Silk Road, shrouded in mystery and wonder. (Aug.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road." Publishers Weekly, 9 Apr. 2018, p. 64. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A535099986/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=d354c5d2. Accessed 27 July 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A535099986

Harris, Kate.: Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road

Katie Lawrence
Xpress Reviews. (July 13, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Library Journals, LLC
http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/reviews/xpress/884170-289/xpress_reviews-first_look_at_new.html.csp
Full Text:
Harris, Kate. Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road. Dey
Street: HarperCollins. Aug. 2018. 320p. bibliog. ISBN 9780062839343. $24.99; ebk. ISBN 9780062839312. TRAV
Canadian nature writer Harris had always dreamed of being an explorer like Marco Polo, or going to Mars, or both. Prior to attending graduate school at Oxford, she convinced her childhood friend Mel to bike part of the Silk Road with Harris for four months near the Tibetan Plateau. Through Oxford, then MIT, love found and lost, Harris hungered for the road, longing to bike the remainder. She quits her MIT PhD program, convinces Mel, again, to join her, and they continue their trek. During their lengthy (4,350-mile) journey, they face everything from icy puddles, lost bicycle parts, difficulties with visas, guard rails, countless instant noodle meals, and frequent stays with total strangers. Unfortunately, what could have been a deep exploration of cultures and people dissolves into an impersonal, distant view of a long expedition. Oddly disjointed history lessons are mixed in, at times with little transition or context for the jump in or out of the past. For a travel writer, Harris seemingly has little interest in the people or places she experienced along the way.
Verdict For fans of Harris's travel articles or cycling journey sagas.--Katie Lawrence, Grand Rapids, MI
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Lawrence, Katie. "Harris, Kate.: Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road." Xpress Reviews, 13 July 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A546502490/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=f7a397a7. Accessed 27 July 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A546502490

Turner, Elen. "In Search of a World Done Differently." Earth Island Journal, Summer 2018, p. 55. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A543466221/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=5e57aa36. Accessed 27 July 2018. "Harris, Kate: LANDS OF LOST BORDERS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 June 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A540723162/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=fd4187d6. Accessed 27 July 2018. "Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road." Publishers Weekly, 9 Apr. 2018, p. 64. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A535099986/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=d354c5d2. Accessed 27 July 2018. Lawrence, Katie. "Harris, Kate.: Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road." Xpress Reviews, 13 July 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A546502490/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=f7a397a7. Accessed 27 July 2018.

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