After the hike was done, and the celebratory mooseburgers and moose-size ice cream cones had been consumed, we spent the next few days driving up the west coast of Newfoundland, to its very northern tip. There, on a characteristically drizzly gray day, we poked around a boggy green meadow dotted with grassy mounds. Directly to the north of us, beyond a stern and rockbound coast, was the open water of Iceberg Alley and the Labrador Sea. Next landmass: Greenland.
In the spring of 1960, a Norwegian explorer and adventurer named Helge Ingstad began a painstaking search in the seaside town of Newport, Rhode Island. Ingstad had spent years combing through the ancient Icelandic Sagas for clues about the location of Vinland, the short-lived Viking settlement supposedly founded by Leif Erikson, traveling from Greenland around 1,000 AD. Ingstad was looking for geographical clues that would match the description in the Sagas: a grassy meadow, a small river leading to an inland lake, a mountain whose ridgeline looked like the overturned keel of a ship. And better yet, he was looking for ruins that would confirm the presence of pre-Columbian Norse settlers. Newport had a "Norse" stone tower, but it turned out to be an eighteenth-century chimney.
Over the next few months, Ingstad traced the coastline north through Cape Cod, Boston, New Hampshire, Maine, Nova Scotia, and eventually Newfoundland. Everywhere he asked the same questions about landmarks and ruins, but it wasn't until he reached the northern tip of Newfoundland that he finally got the answer he was looking for. "Yes, I have heard of something like that," a man in the tiny fishing village of Raleigh told him. "Over at L'Anse aux Meadows. But you need to talk to George Decker."
L'Anse aux Meadows, at the time, was an even smaller fishing village with just thirteen families, accessible only by boat. It had a small river, an inland lake, a keel-shaped mountain, and open meadows where George Decker grazed a few sheep and cows, and where the local children played among what they called the "Indian mounds." Ingstad's ride—a medical mission's small boat carrying a nurse along the northern coast to vaccinate children in remote outports—was soon leaving, but he made plans to return the next year with his wife, a trained archaeologist named Anne Stine Ingstad. In succeeding years, the Ingstads led the excavation of what is now generally assumed to be Leifsbudir, or "Leif's camp," the heart of the Vinland settlement. To help dig, they hired a few of the locals, including a young boy named Clayton Colbourne.
When we visited L'Anse aux Meadows in 2022, Clayton Colbourne—now a trim septuagenarian with a thick white beard—was our tour guide. He was hired when Parks Canada took over the site in 1973, helping to build the replica sod houses where visitors to the national park now hobnob with costumed Vikings. In his current role, he finds that visitors are almost as fascinated by his tales of growing up in L'Anse aux Meadows in the 1950s as they are by the saga of the Viking settlement and its rediscovery. As we wandered through the remains of the settlement—a large leader's hall, huts for the crew, a shed for boat repair, a smelting hut that appears to have been used just once—his patter jumped back and forth between the distant past and a more recent past that, to us, was almost as foreign. "I used to play on these mounds as a kid," he said. "We just figured they were Indian remains."
Along the boardwalk leading across the bog from the archaeological site back to the visitor center, Colbourne paused at a giant two-piece sculpture looming like an arch above the path. The curves and whorls of the three-thousand-pound bronze monument evoke billowing sails, crashing waves, and, more abstractly, two hands reaching toward each other. The Meeting of Two Worlds, by Newfoundland sculptor Luben Boykov and Swedish sculptor Richard Brixel, was unveiled in 2002 to symbolize the closing of a giant loop. After humans migrated out of Africa, some went east through Asia and across the Bering Strait into the Americas; others went west through Europe. "This is where they came full circle," Colbourne said. "This was their first meeting in a hundred thousand years."
We can quibble about the exact dates. Patterns of early human migration are complex and still the topic of vigorous academic debate. But the idea—the symbolism of this massive monument, perched on the edge of an angry sea in one of the remotest corners of the continent—stopped me in my tracks. Scattered around the Norse site are excavated fire pits and tent rings, along with debris from toolmaking left behind by at least five different Indigenous groups dating back as far as five thousand years ago. The Norse weren't the only ones who made intrepid journeys to reach this spot. In fact, the people who were there waiting for them had made even more improbable voyages, through harsher environments, with much simpler technologies—but spurred, perhaps, by the same unnamed urge.
Standing beneath Boykov and Brixel's archway, the dilemmas that had been keeping me up at night—my masochistic fixation on the vacation itinerary less traveled; the recurring allure of a freshly trodden career path—began to feel like part of a much larger human story. Like my far-flung and long-forgotten ancestors, and like everyone else on the planet, I was born to explore. That exploration can take many forms for different people, and it has changed—and will continue to change—across my lifespan. The great age of geographical exploration has mostly passed, at least here on Earth, but exploration in a broader sense has never been more important as we confront destabilizing shifts in technology, society, and climate.
I've come to believe that the drive to explore can be both a source of meaning in our lives and a spur for growth. What makes exploring hard—the uncertainty, the struggle, the possibility of failure—is, at least in part, what makes it rewarding. That doesn't mean pushing onward to see what's around the next corner or over the next ridge is always the right choice, though. Letting your exploring circuitry take the reins can also leave you starving in the jungle, stranded on an ice-jammed ship, or staring endlessly at the flickering screen of your phone. To harness the power of exploring, then, we need to understand why we're drawn to the unknown, what we're seeking there, and how we can do it better.
This excerpt is from the eBook edition.
