Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin The beauty and serenity of the Northwest Territories is easy to capture, even while wildfire smoke ...
[+] blots out a bit of the sky. Wendy Altschuler In the late 1920s, R.M.
Patterson went on a canoeing romp in Canada’s Northwest Territories, a land full of tales of murder, starvation, and death from grizzly bears and exposure, to search for the buttery lost gold he read about in books on the Yukon Territory and the Mackenzie River valley. In his book, Dangerous River, he says, “The attempt failed, so this must also be the story of a failure—but it was a failure that succeeded in so many other ways that, if life could be entirely filled with such defeats, I for one would never ask for any victory.” Patterson chronicles his journey on the South Nahanni River where he hunted, prospected, camped, and lived life intentionally and fully.
There’s a passage where he talks about needing to get back on the river after a busy morning skinning a sheep, but he was battling indecisiveness. “There is such a thing as making jobs to avoid making an unpleasant decision, and that can be prolonged indefinitely until one loses heart,” he writes. A pair of red chairs can be seen at the edge of mountain overlooking Virginia Falls.
Wendy Altschuler Of course, many folks—professionals, athletes, students—today can relate to feelings of procrastination, and the weight of making important decisions. Patterson goes on to write, �.