Kings of the Yukon Quotes

“There are five species of Pacific salmon in North America: the chum, the coho, the sockeye, the pink, and the Chinook. Each has its own diminutive: the chum is the dog, or the keta, the coho the silver, the sockeye the red, the pink the humpy, and the Chinook is the king. The original Chinook are people of the Pacific Northwest, and their language formed the core of Chinook Jargon, a pidgin trading language that stretched from Alaska to the Columbia River, along what now forms the border of Washington and Oregon, and incorporated the words of many tribes, as well as French and English. Any Canadian will still say Chinook for king, the best and biggest of the fish that the Chinook people traded.”
― Adam Weymouth, Kings of the Yukon: One Summer Paddling Across the Far North

“The spruce is sculpted by the elements, bottlebrush scrawny, topiaryed by the weather. This boreal forest stretches over eight thousand miles in an unbroken line around the circumference of the globe: 30 percent of the world’s tree cover, four million square miles, the planet’s single largest biome. A broad, evergreen brushstroke that encircles the north, running through North America, Scandinavia, Siberia, marking the band of the subarctic. Forests of moose, of lynx, of bear. Forests of thimbleberry, strawberry, nagoonberry, lowbush cranberry, highbush cranberry, watermelon berry, bunchberry, crowberry, huckleberry, blueberry, cloudberry, bearberry, salmonberry. Forests home to many of the world’s remaining hunter-gatherer societies, summers of wildfires and perpetual light, and winters of fifty below.”
― Adam Weymouth, Kings of the Yukon: One Summer Paddling Across the Far North

“There are always those first few days, I find, until I shed the city, before I feel at ease again. Before muscles feel good, before cracked burned skin stops hurting and feels like it’s at home. Before my eyes open as wide as they ought.”
― Adam Weymouth, Kings of the Yukon: One Summer Paddling Across the Far North

“We take a final look around. The sky, and the forest, and the river, and the fish. The last of the year's swallows blow away in gusts over the mountains to the south, like summer's embers.”
― Adam Weymouth, Kings of the Yukon: One Summer Paddling Across the Far North