The Lonely Land
Updated: Aug 8
A love letter to the old North and to the voyageurs old, Sigurd F. Olson’s The Lonely Land is good medicine for anyone who longs for adventure, craves the simple pleasures of wilderness, and finds rest and rejuvenation in the peace and solitude of nature. Olson captured the feeling perfectly and with his characteristic lyrical simplicity when, at the conclusion of their 500-mile canoe trip from Île-à-la-Cross to the Hudson’s Bay Company’s Cumberland House across central Saskatchewan—Churchill River country—,reporters were waiting, hoping to get a newsworthy story from him and his companions, “We tried to satisfy them all but somehow our answers sounded flat and innocuous. There was really nothing we had done that was very exciting or that would make a good story, no hairbreadth escapes or great dangers, nothing but a daily succession of adventures of the spirit, the sort of thing that could not make headlines.” A daily succession of adventures of the spirit, whether for an hour, a day, a week, a month, or a lifetime … who wouldn’t want that?
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