The latter was thrown in Ithaca, New York by a former housemate of mine, one who'd moved out of the co-op (maybe because of the vegetarians!) but still lived in town. Oh yeah, he was also the one who gave the seminar on Jupiter's moons. He was from California, so he was exotic already, but this "holiday celebration," which I had never ever heard of, just increased the effect. At the party, a mutual friend of ours appeared, somebody who'd graduated already and got a job in New Jersey but just loved coming back to upstate New York most weekends. This weekend, at this party, he recruited me for a great enterprise: a canoe trip, in the Northwest Territories. He'd buy canoes and put them on the roof of his 1975 Honda Civic. Then he'd drive here to pick me up, and we'd motor nonstop to the Mackenzie River, where we'd meet two other people he'd already enlisted and put the canoes in and paddle to the Arctic Ocean.

Forty years ago this month, we did...both less and more. My friend had four weeks of vacation, which is a lot of time, but would not be enough to reach Tuktoyaktuk. So somebody in Fort Good Hope got a really good deal on canoes and we flew back to Fort Simpson. Since we'd stopped well short of our goal, my friend suggested he and I (the other two had returned home by air) occupy the rest of his vacation driving down to the Grand Canyon. We did this, via Banff, and Highway 101 on the California coast, and the Mojave Desert. Then we drove, again nonstop, back east. You can, I now know, be in a car in New Mexico the morning of one day and in the same car in New York the evening of the next day.

This trip was absolutely formative. Words like "decisive" and "pivotal" are inadequate. Before it, I had never taken such a trip, or even a tenth of such a trip, and I never would have thought of doing so. After it, I knew that this would be pretty much all I'd ever think of, and do.

And yet, as much as I have described my many, many trips on these pages, I have said next to nothing about the Northwest Territories. Nor can I think of much to say. The trip was never boring but it was hardly ever exciting either. It was superlatively steady. That's what driving, and canoeing, are – and they aren't much of anything else.

Ten years (and many, rather smaller projects) later, I decided to live in Brazil. On these pages I have written much about that country, but said not too much about my actual residence there. And I don't think I've said anything at all about what I did there. Well, what I did was write. Once I found an apartment, I'd get up every morning, and write. One project was a Portuguese-language account of my 1986 bicycle ride. The other was an English-language, book-length account of other trips – but not exactly about them. Instead, what happened just before or after them, as I shared my ideas with friends. I wanted them to be the stars of the story; I wanted their wit to come through. In point of fact, they had exercised little influence over my travels, but they'd been generous and indulgent enough. Or so I imagined – from the reactions of such friends as I showed excerpts to, they didn't remember things as I did. Anyway, wherever the manuscript is now – in a drawer somewhere, or maybe I threw it out – words are totally replaceable – it was meant as a long gesture of thanks: to the guy who the Cinco de Mayo party, the guy who at it invited me on an enormous voyage, and many other people.

What I strive for now is to convey the generosity and indulgence of all sorts of people. That is hardly obvious, and I am acutely aware that most of my posts begin with "I"; but if other people didn't make it go, they let it go, and that counts. I flat-out do not understand people who fear travel, who doubt its humor, who think it is dangerous. It is not. This is not to postulate the friendliness of all sorts of people – although many do show that – and it is emphatically not to say that nations, which are made of people, are the same as people – they are not. In any kind of multipersonal, semiselfless endeavor such as, oh, government, or business, the incompetence of Africans and Moslems is what I consider settled science: not because causation has been illustrated, but because surely by now every possible test has been run and the test-takers flunked; yet individually, in my not tiny experience, Africans and Moslems are lively and lucid, responsive and unhostile. Even those polities with an evident compulsion to rudeness – Russians, Belizeans, Puerto Ricans – showed less than 100% commitment to national nastiness. Travel is not hard but it is effortful; much of the effort is in distinguishing large-scale political tractability and small-scale human warmth; you can do it! Because people will let you do it!

As for the Northwest Territories: the experience of it has not grown with time. It still feels as it felt, featureless and nearly unpopulated, and those who did live there seemed pointedly ordinary. Not much showboating up there. We heard from a Mountie that villages on the Mackenzie might vote to go dry or wet depending totally on whether women outnumbered men; and I suspect that is a timeless summing-up of local life. Since what Canada really seems to be is a place where fast-food franchises, c-stores, laundromats, and motels are all staffed by white people, it just gets harder and harder for me to connect the 1978 experience to anything that came after it. (Like, for example, what I perceived in 2006, on a bicycle ride from New Hampshire to Montreal. Nothing connects with French Canada.) It's a foreign country. I am always ready to generously and indulgently concede that.

(7/26/18)