Finding Petronella
A young woman, a 90-year-old legend, and the journey of a lifetime.
When I met Petronella van der Moer in 2013 and learned of her legendary 1949 adventure across Finland’s Arctic Circle, somewhere deep down I recognized I’d just touched something I badly needed....
It has taken five years, but we have arrived: to the place where my skill as a writer meets the story. To the place where the book gets more space than...
“It was not a bad highway, as highways go—long and flat and lined with evergreens and small houses—but it was a far cry from the serenely wooded trails of my imagination....
“These are people who live close to God, their god, the river. They bathe in her, scoop her up in containers to make coffee, drink her down. They skin ptarmigan and...
3/14/18 I’m standing in the meadow, soles of my feet slowly freezing, wishing the body did not have limits. My eyes will never be wide enough to catch this sky, the...
The Sami woman named Leena looked me up and down. I was wearing the warmest clothes I own—a ski jacket, snow pants, my best gloves and boots. Underneath all that I...
For those of you Finnish speakers, your moment has come. Here is a stirring, eloquent account of our epic 115-km journey to Lemmenjoki, written by none other than my partner in...
Saturday October 11, 2014 It is somewhere way deep down in the morning before the light, and I am awake. I am awake because I can’t figure out how to say goodbye. I...
This is it, I thought. From where I stood on the summit of Morgam-Viibus, the rolling hills of Lemmenjoki stretched out for miles and the magnitude of what I had just...
“You are still here!” Tinnti the boat driver looked at me in mild surprise as I walked up to where he and a bunch of other men were seated on the bench...
Finding Petronella 