Yellowknife

"At the sound of the loons, she automatically pressed record and stood listening to birds that mated for life, their beautiful mad laughter. What held her eye, however, was the look of her hand on the microphone. So weathered and chapped compared to the silver-metallic stem she was holding carefully, no rings on her fingers to click against the metal and transfer to the dark spool of her tape, her equipment solid and unchanging and Japanese, her veins purply under the roughened, reddish-brown skin." -Elizabeth Hay, Late Nights on Air

Gwen Symon lives for the day when she can produce a radio drama like "Death in the Barren Ground," a story she'd heard as a young girl about the Englishman John Hornby who starved to death in the Barrens in arctic Canada in 1927. After learning that Yellowknife's "one-thousand-watt station" doesn't do drama, Gwen must adjust to station manager Harry Boyd's decision to put her on the air as a newsreader. Gwen joins a station of eccentric personalities: a sultry Dutch beauty named Dido Paris who fancies herself the apex of the radio world; Eleanor Dew, the sensitive receptionist; temperamental Eddy; middle-aged photographer Ralph; and Harry, who fell in love with Dido the first time he heard her voice over the airwaves and whose devotion to his station is bested only by his dream for more. In the wake of a series of tragedies, unsure of their futures in Yellowknife and on the radio, Gwen, Eleanor, Ralph, and Harry embark on a canoe trip to trace the path of Hornby's fated trek through the vast, frozen Canadian wilderness.

In the 1970s, when Hay's novel is set, the town of Yellowknife in Canada's Northwest Territories (NWT) was a relic of premodern vanity, of the time before highrises and shopping malls and four-lane arterials when you could stroll up the hill and see nothing but rivers and lakes and undeveloped frozen tundra in all directions. Yellowknife lies just 250 miles south of the Arctic Circle, and though it averages a brisk -16 degrees Fahrenheit every January, there is something ethereal in the sky's perpetual glow, the "constant light [that is] like endless caffeine."

Ten thousand people inhabited the rocky enclave on the shore of the Great Slave Lake, the deepest of its kind (2,010 feet) in North America. By 2006, the population had nearly doubled. As the NWT's capital city, Yellowknife now accounts for approximately half the population of the entire territory.

The tundra surrounding the capital is entirely stippled with miniature lakes and an aerial view in winter shows the landscape as 440,000 miles of white with frozen blue pinpricks so close and infinite that it seems you could hop from one to another for all eternity without ever setting foot on solid ground. Yellowknife is isolated but not desolate. It has bars and cafes, hair salons and heritage museums. It hosts music festival and ice sculpting contests and dogsled races. It has modern automobiles and magazine offices. It is an arctic sentinel, guarding its caribou and polar bears, its musk oxen and snow owls, from the gritty fingertips of those who seek to exploit.

But most of all, most of all it is a place of solitude and redemption, where second chances come in the unexpected form of a job playing music and reading poetry on late-night radio.

Manaus and the Amazon

"But Marina had already left him, and she understood that in life a person was only allowed one trip down to hell. There was no going back to that place, not for anyone." -Ann Patchett, State of Wonder

Her colleague is dead in the Amazon. Marina Singh has the letter in her hand. Fever and delirium, the macabre gift of mosquito-borne malaria. Dr. Eckman's death is a tragedy, the letter says. A tragedy but only a minor setback for Vogel, a pharmaceutical company conducting fertility research on the Lakashi tribe along the Rio Negro in Brazil. Begged by Dr. Eckman's wife to prove her husband's death and ordered by her boss to monitor the progress of the company's research, Marina boards a flight bound for Manaus, Brazil and finds herself, weeks later, on a pontoon gliding deep into the heart of the Amazon.

Manaus, or "Mother of the Gods," is the capital of the Amazonas and the largest city in northern Brazil. It's hard to imagine a city located squarely within the boundaries of the Amazon Basin having multiple-lane roads and bars with outdoor stages, but such is the way of life in Manaus. Equally incongruous with its rainforest setting is Teatro Amazonas, the city's 115-year-old opera house that was built with roofing tiles from Alsace, furniture from Paris, steel walls shipped in from England, marble tiles and columns from Italy, and water for its drinking fountains airlifted north from Antarctica. (Just kidding about that last one. I hope.) If the opera house is too much of a cultural experience for those wondering how the heck there's an opera house in the Amazon, the Parque do Mindu might be just the perfect pre-jungle tour nature experience. The park covers 33 hectares near the city's center and is home to Manaus's own endemic species of tamarin - the sanguinus bicolor. Just downriver, the black water of the Rio Negro meets the white water of the Rio Solimoes and the two flow, magnetically parallel, for several kilometers before mixing.

Manaus rests at the mouth of the Rio Negro, one of many rivers that curls its way deep into the jungle fog and foliage. For many, the city exists as a glorified way station - its supply stores and cheap hotels essential stops for tourists awaiting their pontoon ride into the heaving soul of the Amazon.

And oh, the Amazon. Rivers so deep and murky there's no telling what lurks in their waters. Bullet ants the size of a child's thumb have a sting as powerful and debilitating as a gunshot. Though nonvenomous, 20-foot anacondas can make quick work of wringing the life out of a healthy, unsuspecting tourist on the worst day of his life. Contracting malaria is as easy as letting a mosquito land on your bicep. The native tribes are often hostile, swiftly answering the tourist problem with a deluge of razor-sharp arrows. At its worst, the jungle is something south of hospitable and somewhere south of hell.

So what would possess a person to trek beneath its deadly green veil? Its size, for starters. The Amazon covers 1.7 billion acres (roughly the size of the contiguous United States) and dips into nine countries, containing more than half of the world's remaining rainforests. The Amazon River is discharges more water than any other river in the world and is bested in length, at 4,080 miles, by only the Nile. Tributaries traverse the basin like bloodlines, each feeding its own delicate and complex ecosystem. Here, in the flooded forests and savannas of the largest rainforest on the planet, indigenous tribes have created entire civilizations that are invisible to the rest of the world, protected by the green canopy of Kapok and Brazil nut trees.

And just as a quick editorial note, allow me to suggest that you not set out on your own in a paddle boat down a river filled with piranhas and freshwater bull sharks. Marina Singh's mission may have been motivated by science and the death of her colleague, but unless you're equipped to handle a month-long stay with a remote Amazonian tribe whose women can give birth into their seventies, I'd urge you to book flights to, say, Jamaica instead.