Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast. I'm Emanuel Von Lee, executive editor of Emergence

Magazine. Our podcast features in-depth interviews, narrated essays, and stories, exploring the threads,

connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality. Craig Childs writes about adventure, wilderness, and science.

His books include Atlas of a Lost World, Apocalyptic Planet,

Finders Keepers, and the Animal Dialogues.

In this essay, Craig takes a solo canoe trip down the Green River, paddling through the

canyon lands of southeast Utah, reflecting on what it means to be alone in the wild.

Encountering risk, isolation, and joy, and entering into conversation with the land and

waters around him, Craig explores what happens when we choose to be in

solitude.

Something about the way a river trip starts. Gear is thrown in, and when the current picks up and carries you

downstream, your sense of time and distance changes. Connection to the other seven billion or so

people on the planet loosens, while contact with something bigger, and in ways smaller and more

intimate, takes hold.

I was putting onto the Green River, where it flows through the canyon lands of southeast Utah.

For five days, I'd paddle a canoe, which I prefer as a craft, a simple vessel, no frame or pump, no cockpit into which you must burrow the lower half of your body truncated at the hips.

It's a flatwater river from here out, no rapids for 50 miles to where I will meet the Colorado River

and hitch a ride upstream with friends who run a jetboat to the potash landing, the nearest paved road.

Quick gear, no stove, feels like my bones are being... the potash landing, the nearest paved road.

Quick gear, no stove, feels like my bones are being lightened, like taking flight.

I push in swiftly, getting ahead of a group of many canoes and ice chest that will pass me later that day, and I'll never see again.

I try to get in a trip like this, once every

...