Brian's Saga, continued: Winter, River, and Return

Brian's Winter /  The River / Brian's Return
© Gary Paulsen 1996, 1991, 1999

            Hatchet told the story of a young teenager named Brian who survived a crash landing in the middle of the Canadian wilderness.  Forced by the pressing urge to avoid death to become student of the landscape and a tinkerer, Brian discovered and invented ways to provide food and shelter for himself for over two months in the wild. The story ended when he triggered an emergency transmitter, and for some readers this felt like a bit of a cheat. What would have happened had Brian not stumbled upon the transmitter in the plane wreckage?  Brian’s Winter is an ‘alternate’ history that picks up after his dive into the lake to rummage through the plane, and sees him continue to mature as a woodsman, as he must to survive the Canadian winter. As with Hatchet, Paulsen takes readers through Brian’s thinking as ideas come to him, and as he struggles to turn them into fact. The River is the first sequel to Hatchet, and begins with a trio of men from the government asking Brian to return to the wilderness, this time with a psychologist in tow. They want to understand the mindset that makes survival possible -- how can it be taught, ahead of time?  Their mission goes the way of most well-thought plans: within days, the psychologist is in a coma, and Brian must construct a raft and get his deadweight companion back to some semblance of civilization before he dies.  Brian's Return is a sequel to both of these,  and depicts Brian's inability to cope within the zoo that is domesticity after having sucking all of the marrow out of life for months in the wilderness.  After realizing the woods are in his bones, he decides to return -- and there the novel ends.

     Although these three books don't complete Brian's saga (there is a fifth novel, Brian's Hunt), I bundled them together here because the last two are so minor. Brian's Winter is  almost as fascinating as the original novel, forcing Brian to adapt to completely new circumstances.  The larger animals that ignored Brian in Hatchet, like bears,  become far more interested in him as summer gives way to fall and they must prepare for hibernation. In addition to having to learn new skills -- weatherproofing his shelter,  creating winter clothing out of rabbit skins, fabricating snowshoes --  Brian takes on larger challenges, like hunting moose and deer. He does this not for sport, but out of necessity:  the Canadian winter storms are so savage that he is safer taking the occasional big kill than risking exposure every day looking for rabbits and grouse.  In River and Return,  river navigation gets some attention but wilderness survival plays second fiddle to the book's respective little plots.  Far more interesting than the plot of Brian's Return, I thought, was the author's note that almost everything that happens to Brian within the novels in the wild happened to him during his twelve years of living in the wilderness, including deer jumping into his canoe and skunks rescuing him from bears.  Brian's Winter  is a strong sequel to the fascinating Hatchet, but the other two seem more like extras than anything else.

           

Hatchet

Hatchet
© 1987 Gary Paulsen
195 pages

Hitching a ride on a small plane to meet his father in Alaska,  young Brian is left alone thousands of miles in air when his pilot succumbs to a heart attack.  The thirteen-year old is no pilot, but as he numbly sits taking in his perilous condition, he realizes he has to do something if he doesn't want to perish once the plane runs out of gas and careens into the thickly wooded Canadian wilderness. Taking his life into his hands, learning through trial and error how to control the plane in the air, when the time comes the young boy will guide the plane's failure with some measure of intelligence, sending it into a lake where he may scramble out into the water and swim for life.  Still alone, he must somehow  survive in the wild until help can reach him -- armed only with native brightness,  vague ideas about nature gleaned from various movies, and a little hatchet. Hatchet is the gripping story of a young man's endurance.

Although eventually rescued, Brian's summer sojourn in the wilderness is wrought with peril. From the moment he lands, he is assailed by woodland creatures great and small -- skunks, porcupines bears, wolves, and clouds of mosquitoes.  Struggling against feelings of hopelessness and despair, as well as against repeated injuries -- he really doesn't know what he's doing --   the young man slowly gains the experience and strength of spirit needed to prevail.  A boy accustomed to being taken care of his parents must build shelter, must find food, must outwit prey and predators alike. Nothing will be done for him, and he cannot stay still for a moment. Thrust into the struggle for existence, realizing it in full,  Brian quickly becomes a woodsman;  his senses and memory sharpened by necessity allow him to piece things together, allow him to invent solutions and find resources.  Some are encountered only by accident, as when he throws his hatchet at an invasive creature and the tool creates a shower of sparks upon crashing into a flint-flecked stone face. Other lessons he takes from experience, from long hours spent in observation, from series of mistakes. But he learns!  A primitive lean-to becomes a more sophisticated shelter, grubbing around for berries leads to fishing and hunting,  and timidity turns to courage.  This fantastic tale of adapting to the wilderness, of thriving against the elements, is not romanticized, however; even when he creates some measure of comfort for himself,  misery and disasters are never far away. It's an adventure, but one harsh and wild.

Related:
The Sea Wolf, Jack London
My Side of the Mountain, Jean Craighead George

The View from the Summit

The View from the Summit: The Remarkable Memoir from the First Person to Conquer Everest
© 1999 Sir Edmund Hillary
310 pages

The Himalayan Mountain range boasts the highest peaks on the surface of the globe; its heights equal the cruising altitude of a cruising jetliner. . In 1954, Sir Edmund Hillary and  Tenzing Norgay accomplished what many before had perished attempting: they reached the summit of Mount Everest.The View from the Summit tells the story of Hillary’s ascent up the mountain,  presented within a  partial biography of his life.  Beginning with its climactic triumph, that perilous day in 1954,  View then offers a look back, to Hillary’s childhood in New Zealand, where he began as a beekeeper. However humble that might sound, it was considered duty serious enough to warrant officials attempting to prevent Hillary from risking his life,  not that he let their concerns stop him from joining the air service. Hillary never shrunk from death; even after besting Everest, he went on to a series of similarly extreme adventures.  Merely climbing Everest wasn’t good enough, no; he had to climb several other peaks in the range, shoot the rapids of the Ganges,  trek across both the North and South Poles (once with Neil Armstrong) and give a speech upon being knighted. (His first thought after becoming a Peer of the Realm: “Oh, God, I’ll have to buy new overalls.”)  He was in short quite the character, pugilistic and stubborn; even the death of loved ones didn’t stop him from taking on challenges. His many accomplishments don’t include writing like a journalist; readers will find this tale of outdoors adventure tending toward the technical  the feats are more exciting than their telling.  His sober, factful approach has its own appeal, however.   Those interested primarily in the ascent of Everest should know that this is only a partial account of that challenge;  High Adventure  is Hillary's chief Everest memoir.

The Men Who United the States

 The Men Who United the States: America's Explorers, Inventors, Eccentrics and Mavericks, and the Creation of One Nation, Indivisible
© 2013 Simon Winchester
496 pages

The Men who United the States is a storied account of how the American people came to realize their ‘manifest destiny’, from the explorers who plied rivers and mapped the vast expanses to the technological tools that knit the continent together. It is organized thematically, utilizing the five elements of Chinese mythology: wood,  earth, water, fire, and metal.  Although most sections cover the full expanse of American history, the focus of each moves forward; ‘metal’ largely concerns revolutions in communications technology,  culminating in the Internet  while ‘fire’ covers the effects of the steam and combustion engines. Politics and war are downplayed: this is the tale of explorers and inventors whose dangerous  and enterprising deeds made political dreams a factual reality.  Winchester is a personable author, often inserting his attempts to retrace the tracks of some intrepid but doomed explorer along mountain passes or through river rapids. It's an odd element in a work of history, but works well enough despite sometimes bordering on off-topic.  Winchester makes for a winsome host through the annals of American explorers, and his work of adventure, history, and technological progress are sure to find a warm reception among readers.

Into Thick Air

Into Thick Air
© 2003 Jim Mauser
388 pages

            Jim Mauser might be interested in the view from the Seven Summits, the highest points of each continent, were it not for the fact that they have accessibility issues. To Mauser, any place you can’t bike to isn’t worth bothering with. When Discovery offers to drop Mauser in the middle of nowhere and film him attempting to find his way back to civilization, Mauser has a better idea: why not finance and film his traveling to the seven lowest points on Earth – the seven anti-summits?   And so he embarks on a six-continent journey (Antarctica lowest point being covered by a very large pile of ice), through war zones and Passover, assailed by dogs, hurricanes, and crowds of children joyfully attempting to stone him,  to six of the lowest spots on Earth. Although his destinations are anticlimactic in the extreme, it’s the journeys getting there that makes this book. Mauser is rivaled only by Bill Bryson for the sheer entertainment value of his narrative, and is similar to him stylistically,  but Mauser records his world journeys with a botanist’s eye.  Those eyes are open to the full sweep of the glorious panorama of nature around them  -- the wildly divergent climates, the abundance of mesmerizing and often lethal fauna. Central to Mauser's story, like many travelers' tales, are the people he meets along the way, their kindnesses and eccentricities recorded along the way. Mauser isn't quite as vulnerable as world trekkers; his anti-summits are made in six completely different legs that take the better part of a decade to complete, and his starting locations for each leg seemed to be a week away from his destination, at best.  Even so, he's at considerable risk given his luck at pedaling into a place right before drama hits -- like a sudden case of the monsoon in South America -- and people around the world offer him friendly smiles and a stomach full of local cuisine. Into Thick Air is a fantastic cycle-touring book, treating the reader to a wide spectrum of human cultures and natural environments, with plenty of wry humor and scientific commentary on the way.

The Man Who Cycled the World

The Man Who Cycled the World
© 2011 Mark Beaumont
400 pages

Why did Mark Beaumont decide to try and break the world record for circumnavigating the world by bicycle? Well, it beat law school. In his early twenties, with his life's course unclear but full of energy and thirsty for adventure, Beaumont decided to tackle what few had before: cycling the world. His ambition was high, to break the record for doing it by at least two months, and the road ahead along. For nearly three hundred days, he pedaled -- starting in Paris, traveling to Istanbul, and then on to Calcutta via Iran and Pakistan, finally taking ships to Thailand, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States to cycle them in turn before returning to Europe at Portugal and ending in Paris again. Beaumont’s journey takes the reader with him through pleasant villages, congested cities, mesmerizing country scenes and desolate wildernesses beset by war. Though he largely escapes physical harm, (aside from being hit by a car in Texas, and mugged in Louisiana)  both he and his bike are put to the test by the 100-mile  days.  Through sickness and broken wheels, Beaumont had to struggle with not only  pedaling  upwards to 200 kilometers some days through hills and valleys, on roads that were sometimes scarcely more than dirt ruts, but cultural obstacles as well.  Although the English language is a world empire of its own,  communicating with the people whom he met and arranging food, lodging proved a constant struggle once outside of Europe.  Try finding a bike shop in the middle of a warzone, or worse -- in the United States.

Beaumont didn't do this alone;  shielded in part by the British embassy (presumably because of the BBC's interest in filming him) and guided by his dear mother in Scotland, he was also aided by the many strangers he met along the way.  Although the world is not filled with saints, it is peppered with them, and Beaumont was given a helping hand,  and a meal and a bed in a private home more often than he was scowled at or attacked. A global journey such as his offers the reader plenty of scope for adventure, peril, and a variety of landscapes, and Beaumont's account makes the most of these while minimizing  those portions of the journey which were more tedious.  This is one of the better cycling memoirs I've read, and I'm happy to learn that Beaumont has another. In his epilogue, he mentioned that after this journey he decided to climb the highest peak in North America, Mt. McKinley in Alaska,  then cycle down the coasts of North, Central, and South America to climb the highest peak there, Mt. Aconcagua.  He has now cycled in every continent save Africa and Antartica, and I intend on reading his The Man who Cycled the Americas as soon as it is available in US markets. (Or, I may just buy one from the UK. It certainly wouldn't be the first book of mine which has arrived bearing the marks of the Royal airmail.)

Into Thin Air

Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster
291 pages
© 1997 Jon Krakauer

When Outside magazine dispatched Jon Krakauer to join an expedition to climb Mount Everest in 1996 to investigate its commercialization, the opportunity allowed him to fulfill a lifelong dream of climbing to its top -- but in May 1996, that dream turned quickly into a nightmare, as Krakauer was intimate witness to one of Everest's greatest climbing disasters.  Into thin Air is his record of the experience, written less to fulfill Outside's hopes for an examination of profiteering and more as a way of coming to terms with the loss of so many people he'd spent nearly four weeks with.  It is at first exciting, then harrowing; an inspiring, longer climb up to the heights of human endeavor  that crashes quickly, sliding down a boulder-filled crevasse into the abyss.

Mount Everest stands as the highest above-ground mountain in the world, being part of the Himalayan mountain range that forms the border of Tibet and Nepal. The difficulty in ascending it lies not merely with the frequent winds, biting cold, or the fact that parts of the approach are icy, narrow, or so steep that they require technical skills with ropes to surmount. Nor is the difficulty limited to Everest's status as a natural gauntlet resembling an old-school video game, in which climbers must dodge falling rocks and ice missles from above while simutaneously hoping the ground underneath them doesn't give way. The greatest obstacle to human ascent is the fact that much of the peak towers so high that oxygen levels are but a third of what they are at sea level. Even ordinary respiatory requirements would find that amount insufficient, and a person dropped onto the peak by magic or a transporter would find himself unconscious in minutes. But climbing nearly 30,000 feet -- the cruising altitude of a transcontinental jet, like the Airbus Krakauer took to Nepal --   requires considerably more. Even when relying on canisters of bottled oxygen,   those who near the peak are operating on mental and physical vapors; their bodies find the effort of digestion so hard at that height that they prefer to consume muscle tissue for fuel. Physically exhausted and mentally handicapped at the peak, the difficulty in scaling Everest is returning to the ground safely. This proves tragically true with Krakauer's expedition.

In spite of the difficulty, Mount Everest is enormously popular both among serious mountaineers as well as rich would-be outdoorsmen who are anxious to prove their manliness by subduing the world's greatest physical challenges. When Krakauer joined a commercial expedition -- Adventure Consulants, run by an enthusiastic mountaineer named Rob Hall -- he was among nearly fifty people intending to climb up at once. That number included not only another commercial group, Mountain Madness, but various teams from Taiwan and South Africa, and a few enterprising individuals like a young Swede who bicycled from Europe to Nepal before hoofing it up the mountain.  The price for trying is enormous; even before equipment and plane fare are factored in, Nepal requires licenses to climb that start at $10,000 a head -- or $25,000 for individuals working alone.  Commercial guides like Hall and his nascent rival Scott Fischer (of Mountain Madness) charge even more, up to $65,000 in Hall's case.  That cost overs not only the guides' expertise, but their prepatory work; not only had Hall made the summit seven times prior, but he employed a crew of local Sherpas to establish ropes and create caches of supplies for his clients. For all their experience and preparation, however, humans high upon the peak of Everest are very subject to the wrath of Nature.

Though Jon Krakauer -- an experienced mountaineer -- was the first of his group to make the summit, and returned safely to one of their staging camps before nightfall, few of his team were as lucky. A fantastic storm hit the mountain as dozens of individuals were in the middle of climbing or descending, and it would be their undoing. Fierce winds not only destroyed physical guides, like the ropes, and flattened tents, but they prevented climbers from making progress at all; on narrow ledges and icy paths, any movement in the wrong direction could lead to death -- and it did.  They had to stay where they were, and every moment brough them closer to disaster, because once they exhausted their oxygen bottles, they would quickly become weak and delerious, if not not fatally hill;   high altitude and low pressure are lethal to a human body unadapted for either. As their brains were deteriorating, their bodies were increasingly numbed by the cold. Even those who had found a secure place to rest were not exempt from dangers of low oxygen or prolonged exposure.  Once the storm hit on May 10,   a disaster was born and people began to die at rates unseen outside of a slasher film.  Some were taken by the cold, others thrown into darkness by the wind.  Those involved in the commercial expeditions were the most badly ravaged,  in part because of their location and in part because they lost their leadership -- and once the guides were gone, a team of mountain-climbing novices were no match for the fury of of an awakened mount.  In a final chapter, Krakaurer -- whose authorial voice loses its edge as the disaster waxes, becoming increasingly desperate -- tries to explain what happened. Why was the 1996 expedition so lethal?   He puts forth a few guesses; the sheer number of people on the slopes, practically inviting catastophe, and the fact that their guide had never encountered a storm before. His prior ascents had all been blessed with clear skies, so reliably perfect for climbing that Hall regarded May 10 as an auspicious day for himself: all of his  summits were achieved on that day.

Into thin Air is a gripping look into what it takes -- and what it can cost -- to climb Mount Everest,  though it leaves one wondering why on Earth anyone would do it after Sir Edmund Hillary.  There is no reward for the hours of agony; the vista is barren and lifeless. Even Krakauer, who had dreamed of Everest, recorded that at the peak, he was too exhausted to care about his success.