Hi everyone. I'm Josh, and this is The Emerald,

currents and trends through a mythic lens.

The podcast where we explore an ever-changing world and our lives in it

through the lens of myth, story, and imagination.

The Emerald.

All that's happening on this green jewel in space. The summer I turned 16, I went to northern Canada for a two-week wilderness expedition into the vastness of the Cluani range near the Alaskan border.

A year earlier, I'd seen the film Never Cry Wolf, with its sweeping

Arctic landscapes and themes of solo immersion in nature, and decided that what I wanted to do with

my life more than anything else was to explore the wilds for extended periods of time.

I could say a lot about the endless bus ride up there, the vastness of northern British Columbia

stretching out on either side of the Alaskan Highway. I remember we saw a young black bear

by the side of the road, numerous bald eagles, spiky pine forests that seemed to go on for hundreds

of miles, and of course there were many high points on the trip itself, too, close-up views of

glaciers, panoramic vistas

of high peaks, but there's one memory that's different than all the others. Certain memories

are imbued with a particular light within the consciousness, a bright urgency that stays when

other memories fade. They mark us, and in that marking, they open up doors of possibility that had previously

remained shut. I can't tell you much about the hike up to the Quill Peak base camp at this point.

It was all uphill, and I remember by the time we got there, I was pretty beat. The wind was

whistling through shoulder-high alder scrub that we had just hiked through. All of a sudden,

there was a tremendous crashing noise,

a primal bellowing sound, and barreling through the alder scrub comes a creature that I never imagined.

...