![]() Weaving adventure and deep reflection with the history of science and exploration, Kate Harris offers a travel narrative at once exuberant and meditative, wry and rapturous, about the nature of limits and the wildness of a world that, like the stars and like our selves, can never be fully mapped. ![]() So she quit the laboratory and hit the Silk Road again with Mel, this time determined to bike it from the beginning to end. ![]() And Harris had soared most fully out of bounds right here on Earth, travelling a bygone trading route on her bicycle. Eventually the truth dawned on her: an explorer, in any day and age, is by definition the kind of person who refuses to live between the lines. ![]() To pass the time before she could launch into outer space, Kate set off by bicycle down a short section of the fabled Silk Road with her childhood friend Mel Yule, then settled down to study at Oxford and MIT. So she vowed to become a scientist and go to Mars. From her small-town home in Ontario, it seemed as if Marco Polo, Magellan and their like had long ago mapped the whole Earth. "Every day on a bike trip is like the one before-but it is also completely different, or perhaps you are different, woken up in new ways by the mile."Īs a teenager, Kate Harris realized that the career she most craved-that of a generalist explorer, equal parts swashbuckler and philosopher-had gone extinct. ![]()
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