About this item
A quest to rediscover America's other border -- the fascinating but little-known northern one.America's northern border is the world's longest international boundary, yet it remains obscure even to Americans. The northern border was America's primary border for centuries -- much of the early history of the United States took place there -- and to the tens of millions who live and work near the line, the region even has its own name: the northland.Travel writer Porter Fox spent three years exploring 4,000 miles of the border between Maine and Washington, traveling by canoe, freighter, car, and foot. In Northland, he blends a deeply reported and beautifully written story of the region's history with a riveting account of his travels. Setting out from the easternmost point in the mainland United States, Fox follows explorer Samuel de Champlain's adventures across the Northeast; recounts the rise and fall of the timber, iron, and rail industries; crosses the Great Lakes on a freighter; tracks America's fur traders through the Boundary Waters; and traces the forty-ninth parallel from Minnesota to the Pacific Ocean.Fox, who grew up the son of a boat-builder in Maine's northland, packs his narrative with colorful characters (Captain Meriwether Lewis, railroad tycoon James J. Hill, Chief Red Cloud of the Lakota Sioux) and extraordinary landscapes (Glacier National Park, the Northwest Angle, Washington's North Cascades) . He weaves in his encounters with residents, border guards, Indian activists, and militia leaders to give a dynamic portrait of the northland today, wracked by climate change, water wars, oil booms, and border security. 5 maps
About the Author
Porter Fox was born in New York and raised on the coast of Maine. His book Northland: A 4,000-Mile Journey Along America's Forgotten Border will be published by W.W. Norton in the summer of 2018. He lives, writes, teaches and edits the award-winning literary travel writing journal Nowhere in Brooklyn. He graduated with an MFA in fiction from The New School in 2004 and teaches at Columbia University School of the Arts. His fiction, essays and nonfiction have been published in The New York Times Magazine, The Believer, Outside, Men's Journal, National Geographic Adventure, Powder, TheNewYorker.com, TheParisReview.com, Salon.com, Narrative, The Literary Review, Northwest Review, Third Coast and Conjunctions, among others. In 2013 he published DEEP: The Story of Skiing and the Future of Snow. The book was featured on the cover of The New York Times Sunday Review and in both the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. Fox has been anthologized in The Best American Travel Writing and was a finalist for the 2009 Robert Olen Butler Fiction Prize. He was a 2016 MacDowell Colony fellow and a recipient of MacDowell's Calderwood Foundation Art of Nonfiction Grant. He won a Western Press Association award in 2014 for a two-part feature about climate change and a Lowell Thomas Award for an excerpt from Northland. He has written and edited scripts for Roger Corman and several documentary filmmakers. He recently completed his first collection of short stories and an anthology of short fiction with poet Larry Fagin. He is a member of the Miss Rockaway Armada and Swimming Cities art collectives in New York and collaborated on installations on the Mississippi and Hudson rivers, Venice Biennale (2009) , Mass MoCA (2008) and New York City's Anonymous Gallery (2009) .
