What does a journey mean to you?
I think the pandemic really heightened the sense of a journey being a state of mind. It can be traversing a mountain range or wandering a desert, but it can also be finding a pocket of wildness at the edgelands of a city, revisiting the memory of a place with a notebook or even simply taking a new route on a walk or run. A journey is anything that jolts you out of your default mode network.
Which country or location most inspires you?
In my twenties I cut my travel teeth working for the National Science Foundation on resupply expeditions in northern Greenland. The landscape is unforgivingly brutal yet hauntingly fragile. It’s a place that remains with you.
Where would you go back to, and why?
I always find myself drifting back towards my home state of Maine in New England. The coast and particularly downeast Maine – the stretch between Rockland and New Brunswick, Canada – is one of America’s unsung frontiers: a magnificent confluence of forest, mountain, sea and sky.
Top insider tip for London?
I spend a lot of time running in Epping Forest. It’s incredible that it’s so close to a major metropolis, and how the sounds of man and machine quickly dissolve into birdsong and woodland susurrus. It also has a fascinating history – from Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth to the Greenwich Meridian Line and highwayman Dick Turpin.
What journey would you most like to go on?
I’d love to go on a self-propelled exped in Antarctica.
