Arctic Solitaire. Paul Souders

made just enough money each month from royalties and the occasional magazine job to keep the lights on at home, fill up the gas tank, and keep moving. I saved enough for my first big plane ticket in 1998: a cheap round-trip steerage-class seat from Seattle through London and on to Cape Town, South Africa, where I rented a chartreuse VW subcompact and set off on safari. I didn’t know a damn thing about Africa I hadn’t seen on TV, but I wasn’t about to let that stand in the way. I subsisted on a steady diet of lemon cookies, Simba brand potato chips, and a canned curry that looked, smelled, and (I imagine) tasted a lot like cat food. I soon discovered a new world of large and dangerous animals whose forbearance I sorely tested.

      Back home, picture agencies were busy sending my images off to clients: magazine and book publishers, advertising agencies, and PR firms. I never had to personally meet or charm a single one of those editors and art directors. It seemed like the best kind of magic. All on their own, they paid perfectly good money to use my pictures, when they fit the bill, to illustrate stories and campaigns. Each month, royalty money flowed in, and I responded in the only way I knew how: I spent it, and fast.

      My trips grew longer, more ambitious, and more expensive. I bought a beat-up Land Cruiser in South Africa and drove from Johannesburg, through the safari lands of Tanzania and Kenya, all the way to Uganda. I spent months photographing the wildlife and landscapes I encountered while camping rough in the bush. The calendar didn’t have enough days for all the trips I wanted to do. Scouring the internet for cheap flights, I discovered Cathay Pacific offered a twenty-one-day air pass to anywhere they flew in Asia. I managed to visit twelve countries in those three weeks, touching down just long enough to get some local bhat, dong, or rupees at the airport ATM and race around to the most glaringly obvious highlights before catching a taxi back to the airport in time for my next flight.

      With every Americana road trip or African safari or Antarctic boat charter, I imagined that I was pushing the photographic bar a little higher. But for the most part, I was just one more crappy wedding singer belting out cover versions of somebody else’s greatest hits.

      It was in Greenland, of all places, that I had my epiphany. Cold and remote, and stupendously expensive, the place was not yet on anybody’s bucket list. I set off with no real notion of what I’d find. I traveled by boat and camped along the western coast, surrounded by dramatic fjords, glaciers, and icebergs like nothing I’d ever encountered. Hell, I hadn’t even seen pictures of these places. I had no visual framework, no pre-existing iconic images to “interpret.” Without other photographers’ work to fall back on, I finally had to wake up and create images that were, for once, truly my own.

      All of this was great fun, while it lasted. Making a living at photography, always a dubious proposition, has only grown harder in recent years. The advent of digital photography collapsed the distance between the professional photographer and the eager enthusiast. Advanced cameras made exposure and focus automatic. “Point and shoot” was once a pejorative for a crappy little camera; with the new digital equipment it became all the technical instruction anyone needed to call themselves a photographer.

      At the same time, there has been an explosion in global travel. Places that once required insider knowledge, a pile of cash, and a full-blown expedition to reach are now overrun by swarms of tourists. From Machu Picchu to the Serengeti, from Angkor Wat to Uluru, worlds that were first exposed on the pages of National Geographic are now trampled by hordes of smartphone-wielding, selfie-shooting vagabonds. Visiting America’s national parks often as not feels like a tour of the country’s most scenic and overcrowded parking lots. Even driving my old Land Cruiser through Africa was rarely the solitary affair I had hoped for. I once counted twenty-three trucks surrounding one luckless cheetah, and witnessed lion-inspired traffic jams that rivaled rush hour in Shanghai.

      This is as good a time as any to confess it all: my shameless hypocrisy, my surpassing selfishness, my burgeoning misanthropy. I want gorgeous landscapes and stunning wildlife and exotic travel, preferably without too much in the way of personal discomfort or heavy lifting, and I want it all to myself. I want it for the solitude that quiets the din in my head, for that clean break from all the distractions of home and modern living, and for a brief opportunity to settle the hell down and get to work making pictures. I’ve blazed a weaving and erratic career trail, but if I had to describe my shtick, it’s this: Go far. Go long. Go alone.

      That original VW camper was a pretty good starting point for independent travel, offering the open road and a bit of wandering hippie street cred I otherwise lacked. My African truck was a fine next step, permitting months of wilderness travel, rooftop tenting, and off-road shenanigans. In between, over a decade of summers, I puttered around in woefully undersized, inflatable dinghies across hundreds of miles of northern coastal waters. It made sense in so many ways; it was cheap, required no formal training, and yet was so dangerous and uncomfortable that no one was likely to follow. As a bonus, out on the water, I could go just about anywhere I damn well pleased.

      It occurred to me that what I needed next—more than retirement savings, more than the comforts of home, or the love of a good woman—was a real boat.

      C-Sick aground at low tide, Windfall Harbor, Alaska

      CHAPTER 5

      A HOLE IN THE WATER

      This might be a good time to point out that I hate boats.

      I hate the smell of them. I hate the cloying dampness, the sea-sickening bobbing-cork lurch, and the musty, cramped spaces. Then there’s the unmistakable correlation between time on the high seas and violent psychological disorder. I’m hardly the first to observe that life at sea offers all the benefits of prison time—with arguably worse company and distinctly better odds of drowning.

      Yet even as my brain and my accountant shouted, No, no, no, my heart said, Oh hell yeah. It was time for a proper boat. I already had plenty of experience bashing around the waters of Alaska, Canada, and Greenland in small and often leaky Zodiac dinghies. These were not much more than blow-up rafts with an outboard motor bolted on the back. Light enough to carry as airplane luggage, once inflated, they could carry thirty gallons of fuel, weeks’ worth of food, and all the camera gear I was willing to destroy. I covered thousands of miles of remote wilderness coastline in those boats, and felt like I was cheating death at every turn.

      Picture the elegant simplicity of paddling a sea kayak across the still waters of some wondrous coastal fjord. Now imagine the exact opposite. Riding in a Zodiac can best be described as neck-snapping, molar-shattering torment. Every ripple, bump, and wave on the water is amplified up the length of your spinal column. There’s no avoiding every drop of rain sent down from heaven nor the torrents of salt spray tossed up by the sea. Then, at the end of a long day’s watery travels, there remained the prospect of locating a suitable campsite, wrestling a soggy tent into submission, rehydrating a bag of freeze-dried cardboard over a hissing camp stove, and settling in for another cozy night’s sleep in the wet dirt, keeping one ear cocked for the sound of approaching bears.

      For years, I jealously watched big cabin cruisers motoring up and down Alaska’s Inside Passage as I squelched around the forest. From my dismal perch, I could watch proper yachting couples traveling in leather-upholstered splendor, sipping cocktails and preparing freshly caught salmon in their stainless steel galleys, before they settled down to eat by the warm glow of generator-powered lights. More than once, as I sat shivering in my dinghy, a stranger motored past and asked where my boat was. What could I say but, “You’re looking at it”? If I sniffled and looked suitably pathetic, I could usually wheedle a cup of hot chocolate out of them.

      Yet for all the months and miles I’d spent on the water, I didn’t know much about proper boating that I hadn’t picked up from Jacques Cousteau. On Sunday nights at seven thirty. I couldn’t change a spark plug or tie a proper knot or fix a leak, and I was not above navigating with the torn-out pages of a road atlas. Still, I felt smarter than the kayaker I once passed in Alaska’s Kenai Fjords who was using the cartoon map printed on some fish-and-chips joint’s souvenir placemat.