With the distance of a lifetime, he would look back on the experience as a microcosm of life itself, in which it is never the execution of our plans but their interruption, those rude demolitions of the maquette we mistake for reality, that leaves us most profoundly transformed, deepened, magnified:

What shaped Hudson’s gift for channeling the beating heart of nature, for rendering the living world in such exultant and exacting detail, was the ruin of his best laid plans — an accident that befell him in Patagonia just before he left Argentina for good. Pulsating through it is the reminder that every loss of control is an invitation to surrende... See more