Alone on the Ice by David Roberts

This is a modern telling of the expedition of Australian Douglas Mawson in the Antarctic.  It is a story that was recently given some attention with photos in National Geographic and one that deserves much more attention.  Because it was not an American it is often overlooked.   In addition, unlike Shackleton, Scott and Amundson, this expedition never intended to go to the pole.  Instead the concept was to fill in a blank on the Antarctic map and traverse the shore.

This was an adventure led by a scientist, someone who cared about the results of their research more than glory and yet by the time he got back to Australia he had completed the most grueling survival story in Antarctic history.

His mapping crew - Mawson, Ninnes, and Mertz was covering a virtually unknown part of the earth and they were doing it by foot and dog team, except for the Scandinavian Mertz who wore skis.

The tragedy began when Ninnes and his dog team broke through an ice bridge and dropped to their death down a huge crevasse with the teams food for both humans and dogs.  This left Mertz and Mawson with meager provisions and meager resources but over a 100 miles to travel.

The brutal conditions of the Antarctic, more crevasses, devasting blizzards, and savage cold wore on the two men until Mertz encumbered to the elements.   Having eaten the dogs, lost his companions and left with little food, Mawson continued to battle elements that the rest of us can only read about, but never truly understand.

But he made it, he made it a day after the boat that would have returned him to Australia left and he and a handful of men who had been left to maintain the camp had to shift their thoughts to surviving an additional year.

This too, was a test and a difficult one.  At least one party member lost sanity.  But they came through, Mawson went on to teach at University and the expedition eventually gained the fame it deserved.

Home to the Wilderness, Sally Carrighar

This autobiography was published in 1973 by a woman who had written the classic nature books - One Day at Teton Marsh, One Day on Beetle Rock, Icebound Summer.  Those are all worth going back to and rereading or getting acquainted with today.  Nature is not limited by time.

In this book Sally tells us about her life and how she came to her nature writing.  The story is compelling and I am pleased that I finally got to reading it.

She was not raised in a home that praised nature, nor a home that praised her.  She had a loving dad who was on the road with his work and perhaps to avoid being with her mother.  Her mother developed a psychosis that might have started with a difficult delivery of Sally, and if it was not that, Sally was still the brunt of her outbursts.

Throughout her life her mother hinted that if she were like Sally she would kill herself.  She made threats, she nearly starved Sally, she suggested that Sally could be poisoned and on and on.  Sally had few friends until adulthood.  She was stifled by a lack of self esteem - pretty logical.

When she found a stray dog that befriended her and lived on her porch for a while the mother made her get rid of the dog.  She did this by riding a bike that the dog followed and then riding off and abandoning it.  If it were at the home, she knew her mother would kill it.  Talk about sad!

Yet Sally survived this, became a successful writer who often gave up jobs in advertising, radio, Hollywood when here ethics prevented her from doing what the job demanded.

Luckily she found friendship and nature.  The friendship could not develop in to marriage and a child.  After watching a young woman berate her elderly mother on a bus, Sally could not face the idea of having a child of her own because she was so fearful that she might have a child that would manifest the insanity that was so apparent in her mother.

What she did find in nature was acceptance.  The animals came to her.  She had an affinity for relating to wild things and they seemed to accept her.  The stories of the animals coming in to her room and cabin are wonderful.

Her life in nature is expressed in the books she wrote and she left all of us with a real gift.

Insane City by Dave Barry

Dave Barry brings the craziness of Miami and the myriad strange characters together in a wonderful zany slapstick novel.   If you are a fan of Hiaasen’s novels like me, you will love this one.

The premise is that a good looking young man who has never really accomplished anything, never taken a stand, never got good grades and never got a good job is getting married at the Ritz Carlton on Biscayne Bay to a gorgeous and extremely rich woman who has been spending her well-financed life fighting for causes.

Seth arrives with his “groom posse” who are intent on him having a wonderful pre-wedding fling and Tina arrives with her entourage – super rich and no fun mom and dad, caterers, hairstylists, wedding planers and on and on – all flown in from around the world:  Plus her sister who is mostly known for smoking pot and doing nothing.

The groom party that he does not want goes awry.  The groom ends up with a friend who is wearing a 9 foot long live boa and a woman in a dress that barely squeezes in to the definition of a dress and then finds a stripper in his suite followed by her pimp boyfriend.  Seemingly helpless in the midst of all these events Seth rescues a woman and her two children who are fleeing form Haiti and takes them to his room. 

During all the fiasco his luggage is lost and ends up at a primate house – don’t ask – you have to read to find out why.  But the story then brings in another uber-rich man that Tina’s father wants to impress.  The story then devolves with the aid of marijuana laced brownies at the wedding dinner, Tina losing her cool and no longer caring about the poor and repressed, only her perfect wedding, two goon body guards, the Miami police, a pirate ship, and an Orangutan.

If that does not provide you with enough potential, the governor shows up to the wedding and is greeted by a man in a flamingo suit, a tourist ship is hijacked, and a cannon shoots frozen chicken nuggets. 

Get the book. 

Wild by Cheryl Strayed

Wild is a very personal journey on the Pacific Crest Trail, an 1100 mile journey that deserves congratulations.  It is a story of a personal odyssey that is created by the death of Cheryl’s mother and the dizzying path that Cheryl careened on as she sought a closure. 

It is a tale of Cheryl in which the trail is the background to a soul searching and not the focus of the book.  It is as much about her divorce, her flirtation with drug addiction, numerous men in her bed, and the need to purge herself and find a new starting point.

She begins without any preparation and enters the trail as more than a novice.  The cliché – an accident waiting to happen - comes to mind.  And she makes many mistakes and pays penalties, but never the ultimate loss of limb or life and for this she is lucky.  She meets only a couple of shady characters – the kind that frightens every hiker and solo person, not other hikers, but people who she encounters along the transect that is a trail.

It is a definite woman’s voice and perspective and it is well written and provocative.  It did not become one of my favorites because I tend to like more interaction with the land and the land is mentioned, but not really pertinent to the books mission, but I would still recommend the book and say that is captures the reader and makes you want to follow the journey to the end – both the trails end and the psychological one. 

Six books - Winter readings

Winter Reading  - Six books

This is an eclectic group of books.  It is always good if each book stands on its own merit and is significantly different in theme and character than the previous so here are notes on five books that are each of different genres and each are equally enjoyable.

The Deep Blue Goodbye – John MacDonald

At one point (the seventies) I was in love with this series and the carefree character of Travis McGee.  He was the uber male for many men.  Living on a house boat in Florida he worked only when he needed money, taking his retirement in installment plans and then engaging in a dangerous plan to recover someone’s lost treasure (for a fee).  Typically it was a beautiful damsel in distress and the chivalrous McGee would not only rescue the money of valuables that had been unscrupulously taken from her, but in the process help the person to heal their own wounds (if they didn’t get killed in the process).

This was the first in the series – written nearly five decades ago and yes it is dated and this would not be the best for a new reader because MacDonald had not fully developed the character or his (the writer’s relationship) feeling for the depth of the McGee hero.  McGee develops as a man of mixed emotions, callous and caring, philosophical and action oriented; Sympathetic, but impatient.   It was fun to go back to the beginning and to meet McGee again and listen to his philosophical rants and ruminations while he tackles a man who uses and throws away women as he takes their fortunes.

His boat becomes the sanctuary for one of the shattered victims and McGee’s self-righteous indignation rises as he entangles himself with her while wanting to make sure the relationship will end – or we would lose the thread of this do-good buccaneer. 

Songlines Bruce Chatwin

Another old book:  This is a travel adventure of a British writer who wanted to get a sense of the Australian Bush and the Aborigines, the story evolves as he meets a man who has straddled the edge between  “abos” and the settlers and developers.   It touches on the life of the aborigine, but is limited by both the reluctance of the indigenous people to trust a white man and the impact that has already been felt by the people living on the fringe of the white world.

You begin to see and feel the differences in perspectives between the competing culture and you feel la sadness as the songlines of the continental island nation are erased by development.   In this case a new railroad is being brought through the land and because of legislation the company must identify the sacred places of the aborigines and avoid them.

To do that Chatwin and his Aussie friend will accompany various aborigines in to the field to talk about the sites.  Through this the understanding of aborigine ways becomes more evident, but still hard to define.  There are many sacred places that have specific stories that have been part of the oral tradition of the people for millenniums, but there is something else that the not indigenous will never understand – the entire continent is connected by songlines, the places for walkabouts, the paths that connect people, places, events, and history. 

These are not just paths but songlines, places where the music is felt and sung by the walker, places where the rhythm and sense of time and knowledge is in the rocks and plants and land.  These are the invisible threads that connected the people like telegraph, phone, and microwave towers would do for more recent civilizations.

As these songlines are erased the people are impoverished – not just economically, that has already happened, but more important – culturally.

The author has a tendency to   stick in chapters of quotes that he feels adds to the understanding, but I found to be distracting.  Otherwise, it is a fascinating insight that I have not found in other books.

The Last Ranch Sam Bingham

This is a 1992 book that looks at the San Luis Valley in southern Colorado.  West of the Sangre de Christos this area is a near desert, an area where desertification and water rights complicate the human relationship to the natural ecosystem.  People come in with schemes to take the underground water and sell it to the cities while the long time ranchers try to figure out how to work with the land and bring back the grasses.   The book follows one family in particular who tries to meld with the natural limits and eke out a living.

They listen to various theories and some of them are sensible and very science based, but ecosystems take time to recover.  It also takes a large effort that combines a lot of ranchers over a large area to make these new efforts work.  However, there is no consensus, no commitment to a big project and certainly no sustained long term big scale effort. 

We learn about dry land theory from a South African who has tried to study his own country and share what he has seen in the natural world. There are BLM men committed to working with the ranchers and there are the get rich quick schemers.  The book gives some hope as well as sharing a window into a marginal existence, but since the book came out the family Bingham followed has broken up and the rancher who seemed most committed to the new ideas moved away leaving this landscape near to Great Sand Dunes National Monument in its perpetual cycle of dry and abused landscapes.

Women Pioneers for the Environment  Mary Joy Broten

Once more this book is older and needs an update.  Mary Joy worked for the National Audubon Society and was inspired by the work of the women she encountered on her job, in particular Hazel Wolf, a dynamic woman who remained active and energetic her entire life. 

Realizing that we have the Muir, Leopold, Burroughs… male pantheon of environmental heroes Broten set out to balance this with the often overlooked work of females who in the past worked on issues despite not have the vote, the position in the communities of the male, and not having the strength of the work place and yet did great work to attack the health and environmental abuse that surrounded them.

We learn of the most famous women – Carson and Earle, but we also learn about Ellen Swallow and her work on water, Gibbs and Love Canal, and on and on and on.  Women saw and stood up to the issues that threatened them, the health of their family and friends and the destruction of natural beauty and irreplaceable monuments like the living redwoods.

Not only should this be read, but each essay should send you to the web to update and continue your education.

Ancient Earth and the First Ancestors.  Morton and Gawboy

The geology of the Lake Superior Region is visible to hikers, drivers, sea kayakers.  It is the frame around the beautiful Lake and provides the setting for so many photographs and artistic images.  But the geology is also ancient, more ancient than most of America with rocks dating back over 3 billion years and therefore the story of how these rocks formed, why they look like they do today requires strong efforts by detectives called geologists to use their complex forensic tools to ferret out the tales of mountain building, continent building, a continental rift, volcanoes, iron ranges, and even concentrations of the same rock that makes the surface of the moon.

These rocks are also part of another earth story – the relationship of the American Indians to the land is told through their stories and deep understanding of where they lived.  Combined with geology we get a rich tapestry of our planet, but putting them together is a challenge.

In this creative book we learn great details about cataclysmic events that would have destroyed humans, had we been around, and then we here related indigenous stories.  The book is a dialogue – geologist and Native, both professors, who travel to the geologic sites and take us back to the Socratic dialogues.  At first I was not sure I liked the approach and the conversation between the two individuals, but I was soon taken in and taken for a ride which was both enjoyable and enlightening.

Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies.  Arthur Goldway

This is almost a dictionary of these groups, but Goldway goes far beyond a simple definition to tell us the history and the works of these manifestations of the human mind.  There are some truly terrible groups – Aryans, Ku Klux Klan, Mafia, Thugs, Assassins, Taliban.   There are also the cultish religions of Reverend Moon, Scientology, Kabbalah and a few more that are easy to tell and less challenging than the fact that all religions began as cults and would still be that except that our culture has made some mainstream. 

What is amazing is the little details that relate to history, but sometimes get overlooked.  It is also fascinating to see who the people – dentists, pharmacist, writers – are that begin these religions and cultish groups.  Reading some makes me shake my head is disbelief – how could people… 

In the conspiracy section I was drawn to one experts belief that the shadow governments, the black helicopters, the New World Order and other key concepts that are used over and over, really serve a purpose for these people.  They need something to blame.  They cannot accept who they are, what has happened to them, and they do not want to take responsibility themselves, so it is much better to blame something else – especially if it is mysterious and seems to be out of our reach – a similar need is fulfilled by the various religions. 

This can be seen in the conspiracy theories that will not accept a single gunman or a simple explanation.  In science we learn about Occam’s Razor – the simplest explanation is usually the correct one – this is a concept that does not work for the groups and stories in this book.