Eat your greens and don't dawdle

Ellesmere Island includes Canada’s most northerly point and is truly one of Earths’ remotest lands. In places, it lies snugged up only 30 kilometres from Greenland, with one coast bordering Baffin Bay and another skimming the Arctic Ocean.

Sledding through this inhospitable and beautiful territory is not for the faint of heart, but in 1998 a little-known author named Simon Winchester was doing just that.

“It was dark at that time of the year -- and cold, bitterly cold,” he recalls.

Dr. Winchester was awarded an honorary degree during Fall convocation ceremonies, where he spoke to graduates assembled in the Dalhousie Arts Centre.

“I had written The Professor and the Madman but it had not been published yet and I assumed it would be a failure like all the rest of my books,” he says.

During the sledding journey, his radio briefly crackled to life, connecting him with a Parks Canada administrator.

“Mr. Winchester, are you near a telephone?”

A terse message was passed along — he must get to a phone and contact his publisher in New York.

Following some navigational adjustments, and three days of sledding, his expedition reached a geological field station with a satellite telephone, enabling him to reach “... a creature I’d never heard of before, a publicist.”

“Are you anywhere near an airport?” she asked him.

“Are you joking?” he replied.

“There’s a reviewer for The New York Times who is interested in your book. You must do this.”

Arrangements were made for a ski plane flight to Resolute. He flew on to New York to meet the interviewer and photographer before returning to finish his expedition.

“But then, months clicked by with no review,” he recalls.

Eventually his publicist updated him:  “The good news is that the review is going to run on Labour Day. The bad news is that nobody reads the paper on Labour Day.”

Enter “meteorological serendipity,” as Dr. Winchester describes the ensuing derecho -- a warm weather system known to bring on fast-moving and severe thunderstorms.

“Everyone was shut inside and people had nothing to do but read the paper,” he says.

By the end of the day, his book was number one on Amazon.com and it would ride the bestseller list for 53 weeks.

Now, with a string of best selling books behind him — A Crack in the Edge of the World, The Man who Loved China, Krakatoa, The Map that Changed the World — he recalls that moment.

“It changed my life,” he says. “And it all started with that crackling radio signal in northern Canada.”

“And so my message to you graduates today is ‘eat your greens and don’t dawdle‘ — but above all, persist and embrace serendipity.”