On a warm summer evening, Brenda Missen, a 37-year-old single, unattached writer, pitches her tent beside a lake in Canada’s vast Algonquin Provincial Park. She’s on a four-night “reconnaissance mission,” an hour’s paddle from the parking lot, to find out if she has the capability – and nerve – to one day go on a real canoe trip in the park interior by herself. Paddling and portaging from her campsite by day and surviving imaginary bear attacks by night, she decides she’s ready. Then a ranger arrives to check her permit, and an inexplicable, powerful intuition tells her this is the person she’s meant to marry: going solo may not be necessary after all. But the fairy tale unravels. In the wake of their broken engagement, Missen ventures into the near wilderness on a series of solo canoe trips that blow all her perceptions of romance, relationships, God, and her own self (gently) out of the water. In our high-tech, urban age, when so many people are disconnected from the natural world, Tumblehome – part spiritual memoir, part travel adventure, and great part ode to the Earth – is a timely and important exploration of where our real roots lie.
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