A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

I was upside down in a pile of dogs, all howling over the roar of the engine, when I heard the pilot scream, "There's too much weight in the tail! Throw the dogs forward or we're going down!"

I was still wearing my full winter gear, which included a down parka, and the dogs bit me and the pilot and ripped my parka so that soon the plane was filled with small white feathers and flying dogs and swear words and blood.

Only Gary Paulsen. He's to wild winter tales what Adrian Tchaikovsky is to bugs.

The true stories behind his books are much more OTT than the books themselves. I hate to doubt a person's word just because their stories seem unlikely considering how much hard-to-believe stuff has actually happened to me, but I can't help wondering if Paulsen just heard some stories and then said he saw them happen. Specifically, the plane he witnessed crashing in the ocean when he was a child on the boat that went to rescue the survivors, only to witness them all get eaten by sharks a la Quint's story from Jaws. ("The sailors were literally pulling people out of sharks' mouths." REALLY?) Or the kid he saw get killed by a deer he was feeding in front of a "Don't Feed The Deer" sign. I 100% believe the dog-and-plane story though.

Be that as it may, this book is pure distilled essence of Paulsen: nature and its dangers and beauty and grossness and violence, hunting and survival and life and death. And flying dogs.

By the author of Hatchet and about a bazillion other wildernessy books.

I read it while staying in a cabin in Mariposa which was heated by a woodburning stove. Since I was alone except for my cats and a truly astonishing number of bugs, I lit the fires myself. This was a new experience as normally I stay in my parents' house and Dad has charge of their stove. (My parents plus nine relatives were all staying in the main house. The cabin is about a 6 minute walk or 1 minute drive down a steep grade, and used to belong to their caretaker. He once opened the window and saw a bear staring back at him.)

Due to a combination of my lack of fire-starting experience and a shortage of kindling other than paper (the logs stayed dry in their shed but most of the kindling got left outside and rained on - the rain is also what caused the bugs to seek dryer homes), I frequently needed to make multiple tries before the fire took. It was a very pleasant, meditative, connect-with-your-ancestors activity, as was staring into the resulting fire. Since the cabin lacked internet, cell phone service, and TV, my activities while inside were limited to reading, writing, playing with my cats, and studying the behavior of fire. It was very satisfying.

To bring this back to the book in question, the other reason my stay was relaxing was that the way I was providing for myself was by writing, and that was the only paying work I did. My only chores were caring for my cats, sweeping the floor, my own laundry, dealing with the bugs, and pitching in a bit with cooking and dishwashing at the main house. I had modern conveniences like a propane lighter, and the logs were already cut. I was experiencing the idealized vacation version of country life, not the version where your survival depends on the work you put into your surroundings.

Clabbered Dirt, Sweet Grass is a lyrical account of the work of a Minnesota farm, arranged by seasons, at some unspecified point in the past; based on Paulsen’s age, I would guess the 1950s. Paulsen’s emphasis is on the unrelenting, backbreaking ceaselessness of the labor, and on how it gives the workers a sense of purpose and connection to the natural world. It’s all about the men’s work, though Paulsen does periodically note what the women are doing and that they’re working as hard as the men but at different tasks. But they seem to lead very separate lives.

It’s written in a very rhythmic, poetic style, which gives it a cyclical, almost Biblical feeling: “to every season…” Though nostalgic, it doesn’t portray the old times as a golden age. The book is interspersed with regular mentions, not detailed but horrifying, of farm accidents, often befalling very young children. The work that gives lives meaning is also necessary for survival, and doesn’t allow for enough rest to prevent accidents due to exhaustion, or to keep an eye on children to make sure they don’t fall into the machinery.

It’s very atmospheric, needless to say. It also has the implicit tension that most of this sort of book has, in which the entire book is an elegy for a way of life that has now mostly passed, by one of the people who didn’t go on to live it. Paulsen became a writer, not a farmer. The people in the book may hate certain tasks or long for more sleep, but nobody ever says they want something different out of life, some other meaning and purpose, or a job that doesn’t require eighteen-hour workdays or risk the lives of their children. And yet some of them must have, because not everyone got forced out of farming. Some people saw a chance to get out and jumped at it.

The book’s introduction is about Paulsen’s encounter with an old farmer mourning his inability to pass on his farm to his children, as his son is dead and his daughter doesn’t want to get married. It doesn’t say whether the daughter can’t keep it up by herself or doesn’t want it and that’s why she won’t marry or whether she does want it but her father won’t give it to her unless she has a husband. The same social forces that made it possible for the people who wanted to get off the farm to do so also often made it impossible for the people who wanted to keep things the way they were. Paulsen’s book gives the old farmer’s point of view on the work; the daughter’s is unspoken.

Clabbered Dirt, Sweet Grass

An absolutely lovely memoir by Oliver Sacks' boyfriend, a love story about Sacks and New York City: each equal objects of Hayes' affections.

Hayes, a writer and photographer, moves to New York City after the unexpected death of his partner. A lifelong insomniac, he wanders the city by day and night, sometimes striking up conversations with New Yorkers and asking if he can take their picture, sometimes simply observing. As a lover of cities and being a stranger in a new city, I found this to be one of the very best books I've read for capturing this state of mind. It also made me really miss New York, which I have not visited in many years.

The other part of the book is Hayes' account of how he met Oliver Sacks (when Sacks wrote him a fan letter), how they fell in love, how they stayed in love, and how Sacks died. It's heartbreaking but a lot more about life and love than it is about death. Love stories, even true ones, often feel generic: the emotions are real but not individual. This one makes both Sacks and Hayes and the particulars of their relationship come to life. Oliver Sacks is exactly as charmingly odd in love as one might expect from reading his books; Bill Hayes is a very different type of person (and an extremely different type of writer) but they share a wholehearted delight in observation, in other people's perceptions and experiences, and in the small details of life that make it an endless source of fascination and joy.

I recommend getting this book in hardcover. It's a very beautiful physical object, with the dustcover cut away to show snippets of the image below, as if peering through apartment windows. It also contains photographs which may not show up well in e-book.

Insomniac City: New York, Oliver, and Me



Thanks to Rydra Wong for the rec!

Woodswoman is the memoir of a woman who builds her own log cabin in the Adirondack mountains of upstate New York and lives in it, alone except for her dog. Some of us like well-written nature description, and some of us like stories in which nothing much happens but the carefully observed details of daily life and the change of seasons. This is a book for those of us.

LaBastille is impressively but understatedly bad-ass: she does build her own cabin, but hires help and explains exactly who hefted which logs and how; she wields a chain saw and a shotgun, but also has the only description ever of hugging a tree that didn’t make me want to throw a pie at the author. For fans of survival narratives, she has several hair-raising close encounters with truly terrifying spells of cold weather. There's some introspection but LaBastille is focused more outward than inward, and while the specter of environmental destruction looms over the book, there's very little preaching. I enjoyed this. Warning: she interacts a lot with animals, both pets and wild, and some of them die.

Woodswoman: Living Alone in the Adirondack Wilderness

Cold is a loosely organized set of musings on and facts about cold and cold climates, interspersed with the author’s visits to a few of them. Streever brings some historical events and scientific facts to vivid life, like his explanation of how a yellowjacket can survive with supercooled blood, but will instantly turn to ice and die if a drop of water falls on it, setting off a chain reaction. But the writing is just as often on the dry side, a lot of the information is more or less common knowledge, and the choices of what to leave out and what to include sometimes seem random. For instance, his discussion of freezing sailors and adapted pearl divers would have been the perfect place to bring up modern athletes: Lynne Cox swims in water so frigid that she had her teeth specially treated to prevent them from shattering from cold. But you will not learn that from reading this book.

The writing is good, but not so stellar as to make me happily read again about stuff I already know. Worth reading if haven’t read much before about cold places, but skippable if you have.

Cold: Adventures in the World's Frozen Places

Donorboy: A Novel, by Brendan Halpin. After her mothers are killed in an accident, a teenage girl ends up with the biological father she never knew. A YA novel told entirely in emails, journal entries, recorded conversations, etc, it’s clever and funny but the form eventually becomes wearisome.

The Girl Who Saw The Future, by Zoe Sherburne. A psychic girl struggles with fame when her stage mother makes her go public. Nothing brilliant, but a readable and unusual take on the psychic kid plot.

A Country Child, by Alison Uttley. A childhood memoir barely veiled in fiction by the author of many mostly-forgotten but quite good British children’s books. If you like vivid descriptions of old-timey life in rural England, and I know I do, this book is for you. There’s no plot, but who cares?

The Company They Keep: C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien as Writers in Community, by Diana Pavlac Glyer. An excellent analysis of the Inklings as a writing group. Recommended to anyone with any interest in the Inklings, or who has basic knowledge of them and is interested in how writing groups function.

Here Abide Monsters, by Andre Norton. This bizarre fantasy put the Bermuda Triangle, elves, aliens, time travel, and Avalon in a blender, then forgot to actually blend. People from our world blunder into another weird world where they meet others from all periods of history, and learn that elves in flying saucers are kidnapping people and making them go cold and glowy, or maybe the flyer saucer people were aliens and the elves were someone else, it was hard to tell. Roman soldiers march, nixies attack, and there might be unicorns, I forget. Disjointed and strange, and I have no idea what was going on during the climax—and by “no idea,” I mean that, for instance, I could not tell whether or not several characters died. A mildly entertaining farrago of randomness.

Jamling Norgay is the son of Tenzing Norgay, who was, with Edmond Hillary, the first person to climb Mt. Everest. Like many famous men, his children found him awesome and distant, both literally and emotionally, and a hard act to live up to. Jamling Norgay was determined to climb Everest as well, a desire that only increased after his father's death; at that point, Jamling Norgay was as eager to commune with his father by walking in his footsteps as he was to match his exploit.

The book is an account of how he climbed Mt. Everest with the IMAX movie expedition, at the same time that a number of people were killed-- a time also chronicled by at least three other books that I know of. The IMAX expedition was not directly involved in the disaster, but gave up its own vital supplies and time in an effort to help out. (This was recounted in the other books as well.)

This is, unfortunately, an "as told to" account, a genre which has not once to my recollection produced a well-written book. The first page is particularly awful. However, there is enough interest in the subject matter to overcome the prose. Jamling Norgay is a Sherpa, and has strong ties to Tibet, India, and Nepal. The hired Sherpas have taken a disproportionate share of casualties on Everest trips and the non-Sherpa climbers get most of the glory; also, the Sherpas tend to climb because it pays better than the other jobs that are available, which is not to say that in any way it pays well enough considering the danger involved.

Norgay is a Sherpa by birth and culture, but climbs as a member of a team, not as hired help; this gives him even more cultural conflicts that he already got handed to him by his mixed heritage, his cross-continental upbringing, and his father's position. Norgay is forced to think a lot more than most Everest climbers about East vs. West, cultural conflicts and imperialism, religion and spirituality, the legacy of colonialism, and so forth, and that makes the book interesting enough to overcome Broughton Coburn's ham-handed approach to the English language.

If you read this book, it will tell you more about Sherpas in five pages than you will understand from reading any five other Everest accounts in entirety. And just that says a lot about the relationship of the Sherpas and most non-Sherpa climbers. (Jamling Norgay makes a good case that Edmond Hillary was an exception.)



I have not yet read Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, but I was not much impressed with City of Falling Angels, which is a perfect contrast to Touching my Father's Soul in that the prose is lovely and it's about a fascinating place and culture, but by focusing exclusively on the fabulously wealthy upper crust of society, it left out most of what I was interested in.

Berendt goes to Venice after the grand opera house, the Fenice, burns down, and decides to write a book about Venetians, rather than the more common accounts focusing on visitors to the city. He has some brilliant and funny scenes depicting eccentrics, like a rat poison magnate and a man who insists that contracts be signed with the print of the right big toe, but virtually everyone he focuses on is some sort of excruciatingly wealthy socialite. Halfway through the book, I was overcome with the impulse to join the Communist Party.

I had wanted to read about day to day life in Venice, but I had been thinking more of the day to day lives of fruit sellers and fake handbag sellers and gondoliers and artisans and restaurant owners, not gazillionaire expats and doges. There was also not much description of scenery or food or the smell of the water, nor, unless I missed it (I admit that I started skimming heavily) did Berendt once eat a cup or cone of gelato. Not bad, exactly, but not at all what I was looking for.