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Book review: ‘Uncharted’ a memoir of an unmoored couple launching into the unknown – Charleston Post Courier

Posted: February 15, 2020 at 9:45 pm

UNCHARTED: A Couples Empty-Nest Adventure Sailing From One Life to Another. By Kim Brown Seely. Sasquatch Books. 275 pages. $24.95.

I have a weakness for remote, confesses author Kim Seely in the prologue to this beautiful memoir/travelogue/wise guide to midlife. And she doesnt mean the TV remote.

The only channel surfing in "Uncharted" is through the narrow and treacherous waterways of Milbanke Sound and the Salish Sea, and points north along the rugged and remote British Columbia archipelago, as Seely and her husband embark on a sailing expedition toward the Great Bear Rainforest.

There are close calls, lost anchors and lost tempers, yet what Seely finds along the way makes "Uncharted" one of the most compelling books of nature writing that Ive read in a while (and this after a steady recent diet of Richard Powers, Robert Macfarlane and Barry Lopez).

A veteran journalist and award-winning travel writer, Seely has long embraced her lineage as the descendant of Westward pioneers and explorers, but in "Uncharted," her first book, she navigates new territory: the inward journey of a shifting personal and family landscape as her youngest of two sons leaves for college. That unmooredness (What now?) will be familiar to any parent who has done the final dormitory drop-off, climbed back into an empty car and turned toward home, the home that heretofore had been an ecosystem of offspring. Twenty years of parenting leaves deep ruts.

My husband and I had come to the edge of something, Seely writes. We could live safe small lives or try something new by launching into the unknown. Launch they did, aboard Heron, a 54-foot beauty of a cutter-rigged sailboat that Seelys husband, Jeff, bought on a whim. Never mind that neither knew much about sailing.

After upfitting the rig and testing the sails on a maiden voyage, their destination was a remote rain forest along the north coast of British Columbia, land of an elusive white bear that Seely, a Seattle resident, had heard about from a National Geographic photographer shed met. She later saw the photographers photo of said bear featured on the yellow Nat Geo cover beneath the header, The Wildest Place in North America: Land of the Spirit Bear.

Invitation enough. Amidst their mid-life recalibration as an empty-nest couple and as individuals, we put all our chips on wildness, Seely writes.

Writing about that wildness is Seelys strong suit. We read about majestic encounters with humpback whales and a mysterious fox, about places as haunting as their names, such as Desolation Sound and Cape Caution, about waking up on a sailboat in a faraway harbor feeling completely cut off from the outside world anchored safely, just the two of us held by the forest, its arms encircling us, as if this place ringed with evergreens was a reward for having set out and crossed this much of the strait.

This paradox feeling such strong connection in isolation, savoring the rare gift of exquisite solitude is parlayed with careful attention and strength.

Seelys prose is subtle, not overwrought, but dowsed with awe and reverence in ways that pique the readers imagination and wanderlust. I could smell that spruce forest; I could envision that enchanted cove and savor lingering there. To her credit, Seely also offers marital insights that dont feel too intrusive and confessional, rendering her husband as a fully realized (and, yes, adorable) character, and their marriage as gloriously real. Theres humor, anger, tension, tenderness, good wine, an excellent playlist, and one of the most tender sex scenes Ive read in a while, with nature as the seducer.

"Uncharted" is a quest narrative of the finest sort. Sailors will appreciate the zippy nautical adventure (including lovely hand-drawn maps); parents will relate to the quivery sea legs of empty-nesting (and finding a happy new equilibrium); and nature lovers will savor Seelys rapt observations and poetic descriptions.

Its a tale of two people living and exploring simply and boldly in a place that was both immense and contained, immense in the sheer expanse of sea and possibility; contained in that our boat felt as compact as a shell, and we existed in a world ... outside of time as we knew it.

Their discoveries along the way chart promising new ground, where wildness reminds us who we are or, more importantly, who we can become.

Reviewer Stephanie Hunt is a writer based in the South Carolina Lowcountry.

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Book review: 'Uncharted' a memoir of an unmoored couple launching into the unknown - Charleston Post Courier


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