MAGIC TRAVELS

A geologist looks back on magic tricks, Arctic ordeals, and many encounters with feisty animals in this rollicking memoir.

McLaren, a Canadian geologist and consultant, recalls unusual pursuits, occupations, and journeys undertaken in his childhood and young adulthood. Growing up in Ottawa, he weathered several untoward lessons while learning to be a magician; one botched trick sent a boa constrictor lunging at a group of terrified cheerleaders. As a teenager, he worked two summers as a cowboy in the Canadian Rockies and recollects intricate procedurals on shoeing and packing horses along with many mishaps, including an agonizing horseback ride to a hospital after he managed to cut himself with both an ax and a chainsaw. After high school, McLaren spent a summer wandering Europe, sleeping in hostels and performing magic shows, and was set upon by guard dogs while relieving himself by the barbed wire along the East German border. In college, he landed another summer job in the Rockies on a geological mapping project and drove off a menacing grizzly by nailing it in the forehead with a tossed rock. The book culminates in a summer spent in the Canadian Arctic on a geology expedition, where he experienced “eerie and otherworldly” whiteouts—“with everything white and no visible horizon, it is like being suspended in emptiness”—and a tense encounter with a polar bear. McLaren’s reminiscences are mostly shaggy dog stories with no particular theme or moral, but they add up to a coherent account of maturation. Through his oddball jobs, japes, and pratfalls, readers see him accumulating knowledge—his horse-packing skills, for example, translated to snowmobiles—along with resourcefulness and initiative. His prose is vivid, punchy, and often raucous—“He held himself in place with a mouthful of my jeans while lashing out with his taloned hind legs in a series of violent kicks….If you have never been attacked by a man-eating rabbit, don’t sneer”—and waxes lyrical in odes to majestic northern landscapes. (“The deep orange orb of the sun competed with the white orb of the moon to cast rich dark shades of blue across an infinite, cloudless sky. Below, the snow on the mountain ice caps sparkled.”) The result is an engaging coming-of-age story full of hangdog charm.

An entertaining account of a boy edging toward manhood through a meandering picaresque.