I don't read books
about the outdoors very often. There are trees outside my house
right now; I could go look at them if I wanted to. Going outside is
a thing to do, not read about. One can even read outside, and if one
is reading about the outdoors outside, isn't that redundant? With
all the trees and lakes and urban deer around here, why would I spend
time reading about somebody else's trees? That said, I've just read
read four outdoors books roughly back to back and they've all been
good ones, which is amazing, as it's hard to make, "I spent
several days walking around" sound interesting. It's beastly hard to find an author who's up to describing time in the woods without being boring, and it's hard to say anything about even a good author's time in the woods other than, "I laughed a lot while I was reading this." Take Kevin Callan's reasonably new book, Dazed
but Not Confused. I liked it a lot, but I've got nothing in particular to
say about it. Kevin tells stories about
the outdoors and canoeing. Some of them are reprinted from his last
book, Wilderness Pleasures,
and all were first published in Canadian canoeing magazines. Dazed but Not Confused
is divided into three sections: Playing in the Woods, Wilderness
Philosophy, and Life as a Wilderness Pornographer. Some Canadians
have been calling Kevin a "wilderness pornographer" because
he keeps writing books about backwoods canoe routes they considered
their exclusive domain.
There
are good stories in here, although the tone is more pensive than in Wilderness Pleasures. Kevin
tells the full story of breaking a foot on his trip with his friend
Ashley, who considers wearing a Speedo while camping acceptable.
(Note: Wearing a Speedo is never acceptable). He goes on a Scottish
canoeing trip with his wife and daughter. He goes winter camping. He meets the camp girls from hell; vis: Pro-tip: If you are in the backwoods and you see a rescue helicopter
flying by, don't everybody in your group start waving "hi"
to it, because the helicopter pilot will think you are waving at him,
and he will land, and he will not have enough fuel to effect the
rescue of the injured person who is somewhere else in the forest, and
he will need to go back to town to refuel, and you will be charged
for the helicopter fuel. The only problem with Dazed but
Not Confused is the price. It's
$24.99 for a paperback, and we all know those are Canadian dollars, but is a Canadian publisher going to lower the price of a book for an American because American publishers always raise the price for Canadians? No.
I
had a veggie burger at the Gunflint Lodge last summer and it was
delightful, so it's nice to know how that came about. Justine
Kerfoot's mother bought the lodge and store in 1928 and Woman of
the Boundary Waters is about the early days before the now-BWCAW was a
designated Wilderness Area, back when there were a few Indian and
trapper families living on Gunflint Lake. Some later chapters are
organized into vignettes: disasters, the war, animals. Mrs. Kerfoot
remembers when everyone in the area got their first snowmobile, and
the dog team that the snowmobile replaced. She raised three children
at Gunflint Lodge, and recalls when they got electricity and phones
and indoor plumbing. She snowshoed around for miles, and hunted, and
nursed fawns back to health in the kitchen, and watched the seasons
change for fifty years. Essential reading for Minnesotans.
Terry
Pratchett's Wee Free Men takes place outdoors. It does. I
didn't say this blog post was all about the North Woods. It's a
bloody brilliant book and I'd been needing to read a Pratchett for a
while. Basically, Tiffany Aching is a young girl who's just decided
to become a witch when the fairy world pops through the doors of the
Discworld and kidnaps her brother. There's a lot of action, brawls
and battles and monsters and nightmares. She rescues her brother
with the help of the Wee Free Men who are, in Pratchett's wonderful
way of appropriating lore and mythology to his purposes while leaving
the archetypes unchallenged, Scots. I'm glad that there are four
Tiffany Aching books, so I've three yet to read.
The
Secret Garden also takes place outdoors. In a garden. This is
the first time I've reread it since I became an FHB afficianado.
The Secret Garden kills me. Last time I read it, it was all
about redemption. The garden saves Mary, who saves Colin, who saves
his father. This time I read it more for FHB herself, her robin, the
IRL garden she loved, her only seeing the kindness in people. That
got her in trouble towards the end of her life; she expected the best
of people (good people, not archetypal baddies like Miss Minchin),
and people aren't always at their best when someone with stacks of
money is being kind to them. I felt like Mary was a richer character
this time around reading, and FHB goes wild describing children's
play. Mary and Colin keep each other amused so well, even though
Mary does plateau in her personal development towards the middle,
which is fine. If a person is not outwardly churlish but still
contrary by nature, do they need to stop all their grumps forever to
be whole?
In
the thoroughly mediocre movie Return to the Secret Garden,
it's implied that Dickon dies in the Great War. Fiddlesticks to
that. I'd also say that Hilary McKay cribbed some of Martha to make
Alice, although Alice is much more shocking.
Nature
can bring us boatloads of stories, skills, and redemption. But what
if you don't get out enough? You will die wondering if it is better
not to have lived at all, that's what. Nobody could live a duller
life than Harriet Frean of The Life and Death of Harriet
Frean by May Sinclair. Sinclair
was a suffragist and Harriet Frean is the opposite, a woman who is
raised to be "nothing but beautifully behaved." Harriet
never tries to be anything but beautifully behaved and chugs along
dutifully and self-sacrificingly until, at the end of her life, she's
gained an inkling that maybe her parents didn't want her to be
beautifully behaved so that they could admire her across the
breakfast table when she was forty. She does fall in love with her
best friend's fiancee, but nobly refuses him as an act of
self-abnegation, which makes all three of them utterly miserable for
decades, but when her niece says, "Would you do it again?"
Harriet insists she would. How could she act selfishly, even if the
consequences would save her best friend's life? The Life
and Death of Harriet Frean is an
apropos manifesto for the elevation of women to the rank of humans.
I was reading Kate Chopin's The Awakening before
I started Harriet Frean
and HF is way better.
The Awakening reads
like a smoking gun forgery by English teachers, or a long form
Jeopardy question: "What is dissatisfaction?" Harriet
Frean nails the limited lack of
expectations predicated by Victorian mores; the only trouble is that
May Sinclair did it a bit too well. Every generation has its
slow-witted children who live at home for decades. Nowadays Harriet
would have the opportunity to drop out of community college before
she moved back to her parents' couch, but she never would be Interim
Department Manager Harriet Frean.
In
conclusion, stop sitting around on your internets and go outside.
Next
up, more FHB.
