About McNorth

I’m Nathan McNeill and my wife is Rebecca. We have six children and a menagerie of animals on a small farm in British Columbia, Canada where we moved from Jackson, Mississippi. I write about northern exploration both literal and figurative.

Those are the facts. This is the story.

My grandmother on my dad’s side (“Mama Mac” as we knew her) lived her entire life in Winston County, Mississippi except for brief periods when Daddy Mac was stationed elsewhere during World War II and at the very end. She was the head librarian of the Louisville library for thirty-five years. Her adult life was spent in the yellow house on Spring Street. She referred to Winston County as “God’s Country” in a tone of mock reverence — but she was dead serious. We used to live on Spring Street too, and when my parents broached the topic of moving away, her sadness was mixed with a heavy dose of incredulity. “Why would you want to leave Louisville?”

In Mississippi every effort has been made in all parts of society to shrink the scope of the unknown to very manageable proportions. This is, perhaps, because the south is hot and humid so for much of the year adventures would risk heat exhaustion.

It is quite a life. Get a stable job, an inexpensive house (real estate is cheap), surround yourself with family and friends, stay inside during the summer months, take strolls in the winter (when it’s really quite pleasant) and get a little closer each year to that storied destination deep in the old south underneath live oaks and Spanish moss where nothing unexpected ever happens and one can breathe.

No one ever quite gets there, but a lot of people try.

Even when we lived there, we weren’t model southerners. Much of this was my wife’s fault. Rebecca grew up in British Columbia in places where schools never close when it snows, but they do close when it gets too cold for children to walk to school even when bundled like eskimos — somewhere around -40 where the F and the C scales intersect.

Rebecca, however, can’t be blamed for all of our non-conformity. Even though both my parents are from small Mississippi towns, they moved places and tried things — ending up in uncivilized places like Indiana doing things like incubating softball-sized emerald green eggs laid by giant Australian flightless birds.

In the summer of 2017, we moved with five of our six children from Mississippi to BC to be closer to Rebecca’s parents. We left a lot of good friends, a great home near Jackson, and a comfortable way of life that we’d been participating in to one extent or another for fifteen years. We moved to a forty acre farm in Armstrong where we have been slowly settling in.

Jackson, Mississippi is at 32 degrees latitude. Since each degree of latitude is approximately 69 miles, this means that it’s 2,200 miles north of the equator and 4,000 miles south of the North Pole.

Armstrong, BC is at at 50 and a half degrees latitude, about 100 miles north of the 49th parallel at the US border. This puts us 3,500 miles north of the equator and still 2,700 miles south of Santa.

The North is vast and largely unexplored by most people. Even starting from our farm in Armstrong, one can travel north on good paved highways for twenty hours and still not reach the southern Yukon border at the 60th parallel. It is extraordinarily beautiful, but it is also foreboding because of it’s vastness, because of the cold, and because when you visit, you’re likely to be alone. Or maybe it’s because of the bears.

The North is also enticing. Its landscapes don’t appear yet on many postcards and so as you travel into it and through it, you have to form the frame yourself instead of receiving it from the plaque at the visitor’s center. Venturing north means going on an adventure. It means exploring. It means going just a little deeper and higher than you’ve gone before. It means expanding the definition of normal.

But why go north when it’s so comfortable down south? Why leave God’s Country to explore some god-forsaken wilderness like Indiana or Canada? Why hike a mountain ridge when you can see the same ridge from your porch? Why hunt moose or grow broccoli or milk cows when your local supermarket stocks all the food you’d ever need? Why make new friends when you haven’t tired of your old ones yet.

For some people, it’s the thrill of the unknown, but I don’t think that’s the case for us. Rather, what we’re attempting to do by fits and starts is expand the boundaries of our family’s life to include new layers that are deeper and more expressive — to grow into a new wholeness that is further up and further in.

We now live where the North starts. We don’t expect to finish but that is part of the adventure.

We hope you join us.