Cold and rainy throughout the day. And yet somehow it was, at times, bright. A bright gray, perhaps. And it wasn’t the coldest day you’ve ever experienced, no. It is May after all. On the other hand, it is May, and it was cold. The kind of cold that you know, right away, if you let it sink into your bones, you’ll have a difficult time shaking it.

So I stayed inside. And shivered.

Tomorrow, we might have some sun and a high of 64. This would be appropriate for the last full week of May.

We’ve not done it, so we must do it. And that thing which we must do is the contractually obligated weekly check-in with the cats. They remain the most popular feature of the site, they know it, and they remind me of it. They are especially adamant when they know they haven’t been featured in a while.

It has been nine days since they’ve graced this spot. So, believe me when I say this, I’m hearing about it.

Now that’s one sleepy kitty!

While Phoebe is trying to hold her head up, Poseidon is holding down his part of the arrangement, guarding the backyard. You can see we’ve upgraded their duty station somewhat, and they’ve started to figure it out.

From there, they can battle the birds, fight off fallen leaves and alert us to any larger critters that come by.

We don’t have a lot of larger critters coming up close to the house. Except in the winter time. Everyone comes around when it snows. I can see the tracks.

Here soon, though, Poe will be watching the deer munching the grass out by the treeline. I wonder if he’ll do that, comfortably from his box, or if he’ll climb on top of it for a more commanding view.

I started a new book last night, which means I should mention the one I just finished. Kate Harris’ debut is a travelogue, an adventure memoir. Published in 2018 to wide acclaim, it was a best seller in Canada, won the prestigious RBC Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction and a host of other awards. And if you like the genre, or just get into this, you can see why.

Harris was a Rhodes Scholar, an MIT grad student, but didn’t find that she was suited for the lab. She wanted to go to Mars. Or, really, to be an explorer. Or, more precisely, perhaps, to find herself alone, very much alone, at the top of things. Oh, she’s also a talented writer. She and a childhood friend set out for the old Silk Road and this book is about this 14-month adventure, crossing borders, fighting off thirst, meeting people from drastically different cultures, the sort of thing you’d expect from a travelogue. The kind many people think they would write. But it earns its keep in the little asides she takes throughout.

Besides, the historian William Cronon argues that there is nothing “natural” about wilderness, that it is a deeply human construct, “the creation of very particular human cultures at very particular moments in human history.” Though I might be appalled by Marco Polo’s failure to swoon at mountains and deserts along the Silk Road, wilderness in his day implied all that was dark and devilish beyond the garden walls. The fact that I’m charmed by the shifting sands of the Taklamakan Desert and the breathtaking expanse of the Tibetan Plateau doesn’t mean I’m more enlightened than Polo, more capable of wonder. It means I hail from a day and age—and a country and culture—so privileged, so assiduously comfortable, that risk and hardship hold rapturous appeal. It probably also means I read too much Thoreau as a teenager. “In wildness is the preservation of the world,” he wrote, priming me to pine after places as far away from Ballinafad as possible, like Tibet and Mars. Provoking such distant wanderlust was hardly Thoreau’s fault or intention—he himself never travelled beyond North America—but I enthusiastically misread him, conflating wildness with wilderness, substituting a type of place for a state of mind. Cronon finds the whole concept of wilderness troubling for how, among other things, it applies almost exclusively to remote, unpopulated landscapes, fetishizing the exotic at the expense of the everyday, as though nature exists only where humans are not. This language sets up a potentially insidious dualism, for if people see themselves as distinct and separate from the natural world, they believe they risk nothing in destroying it. What Thoreau was really saying was that he’d travelled wildly in Concord, that you can travel wildly just about anywhere. The wildness of a place or experience isn’t in the place or experience, necessarily, but in you—your capacity to see it, feel it. In that sense, biking the Silk Road is an exercise in calibration. Anyone can recognize wildness on the Tibetan Plateau; the challenge is perceiving it in a roadside picnic area in Azerbaijan.

Or, after easing their way into Tibet …

It was only late August, but the poplars were already flaring gold. Fallen leaves crunched beneath our wheels, and the paper prayer flags scattered on mountain passes made a similar noise when we biked over them. Tibetans threw the colourful squares into the sky in a bid for good fortune, and if nothing else, this had the immediate effect of collaging a dark road into something brighter. On one pass a bus drove past me just as its passengers threw the papers out the window, so that prayers stormed down all around me. One of them caught on the brim of my helmet without ever hitting the ground. I tucked the gritty, sage-coloured square into my journal for good luck. Depicted on it was a wind horse, or lung ta, a pre-Buddhist symbol for inner wind or positive energy shown as a horse lugging a jewel on its back. When someone’s lung ta decreases, the Tibetans say, they are grounded by negativity, and when lung ta increases they see things more positively and soar. “The very same thought can lead to a state of freedom or to a state of confusion,” wrote a Tibetan monk, “and the direction it takes depends upon lung ta.”

Or this, near the end of the journey …

The edge of winter, the edge of the Tibetan Plateau. Mel and I stood shivering in the spot we would’ve landed if we’d kept swimming east that first summer on the Silk Road, a faint slick of sunscreen in our wake. Then again, shortcuts never take you to the same place. Wearing down jackets and pants with the legs rolled up, we shuffled into water so calm and clear it was like wading through air. Ten seconds later we shuffled out again, numb from the shins down. That night we warmed up in the village of Spangmik over a dinner of dal-and-rice with two Indian tourists. All I remember from our conversation was that the men hailed from some massive city, Mumbai or Calcutta, and Pangong Lake was the first place they’d seen stars.

Or this bit, in the epilogue, which is a long way off from where she began, in literary, personal and geographical senses.

With that the woman disappeared into a back room, leaving me stunned at her refusal to take sides. She returned a minute later with some photographs of her own: A family snapshot featuring rows of solemn people wearing dark robes with sleeves so long they hid everyone’s hands. A monastery pearled among gritty mountains. Some kind of Buddhist painting, intricate curves and symbols and patterns rendered in yellow, green, red, white, and blue. “Sand,” the woman clarified. “This is sand.” I’d read about how Buddhist monks painstakingly arrange bits of coloured quartz into a geometric representation of the universe, or mandala, then scatter the art in a gesture of non-attachment. The photograph I held was the sole proof that the sand mandala had ever existed, only the real mandala wasn’t the completed work of art, but its attempt. That act of pure attention, the motion there and away.

And then, every so often, she drops in lines like this, stuff you know that just came to mind somewhere on a dusty mountain pass.

“Every heartbeat is a history of decisions, of certain roads taken and others forsaken until you end up exactly where you are.

It’s hopeful, it’s humble, it’s kind and, in parts, quite funny. For thoughtful wanderlust, pick up Kate Harris‘ Land of Lost Borders.