I thought this was going to be an essay about how adventure books help me sleep (I find it terribly difficult to sleep), but as I was choosing which books to include, I realized something else bound these books: there is a wisdom to the authors. Their stories – which range from raising orphaned grizzly cubs in Russia to meditating alone in a Himalayan cave for over a decade – tend to start from a place of fear: fear of solitude, of discomfort, of cold weather, of shoddy bedding and meager rations and avalanches and wildfires and poachers and all the sorry and terrifying things of the world. But over time, that fear becomes acceptance, and love, for the world as it is. That is freedom, to be humbled by the world until one truly feels one’s connection to it.
But what does this have to do with my debut novel Hovel, where the narrator is living in the mountains but not exactly raising grizzly cubs? (Her job involves editing internet videos of kittens doing cute things.) Really, she is not feeling so connected to the world. Yet that changes as she embarks on the smallest of adventures – cooking by candlelight, peeing in the woods, foraging in places where foraging definitely isn’t allowed. It is transgressive, in this day and age, to do even these small things. Yet adventure books like the following make me believe probing the world from as many new angles as possible does have meaning.
A Woman in the Polar Night by Christiane Ritter
When the boat dropped Christiane Ritter off on Svalbard to join her husband Hermann for a season, she was dismayed. It was the 1930s and Hermann had gone there as a scientist, become entranced by the place, and stayed on as a trapper. Well she couldn’t see the charm. The landscape, high above the Arctic Circle, was bleak and treeless, and the hut she was expected to live in was freezing. As for dinner? It was almost always seal meat. Hardly sachertorte.
Ritter missed home in Vienna. Until she didn’t. Something happened when she no longer had visitors to attend to or elaborate meals to prepare. In the unending darkness of an Arctic winter, she could just lie in her bunk listening to the silence. A ‘holy quiet’ – that was how she described it.
Ritter ended up staying on Svalbard for much longer than a season, and I was glad to include a little of her story in Hovel.
Sooyoong Park studied literature at university, and it shows in his prose. That he has spent over a decade essentially meditating alone in a bunker, that shows too. I can’t recommend this book enough.
For fifteen years Park spent six months of the year underground in a small bunker in Russia’s Ussuri Forest while trying to film the elusive Siberian tiger. The conditions he lived in were not for the faint of heart; it was essential that the tigers did not know of his presence, and so even though winter temperatures were well below freezing, he had no fire. He ate no warming dishes – just pre-cooked rice balls. Even with these precautions, one night a tigress attacked the bunker. One of her cubs came crashing through the ceiling – it was terrifying. Yet such stories make for amazing reading while snug in a bed at night.
Truly, it can be terrifying in the taiga, but Park never comes off as boastful about his experiences. This is a man who befriends the mice that raid his food supply (and he does not have much of a supply). This is a man who says things in interviews like, “In the city, human beings think they are god. They forget their relationships to other living things. When I follow the tracks of tigers, I feel happy, and humble, because I know at the end of those tracks there is a tiger that can kill me – but a tiger I love.”
Cave in the Snow by Vicki Mackenzie
This is a biography of Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo, a Londoner (at least in this life) who spent much of her thirties and forties meditating in an Indian cave. When she emerged in 1988, having spent twelve years without a bed – just a little meditation box – she was glowing. Watching videos of her now, in her eighty-second year, speaking from the monastery for women that she’s built in Himachal Pradesh, she’s glowing still.
In this book, journalist Vicki Mackenzie has done a beautiful job of writing about Palmo’s life, especially in that cave where her rations nearly ran out and blizzards were frequent. When, during one storm, it looked like she might meet her end, Palmo accepted her fate. All things are transient after all, including a life.
A few years before Charlie Russell died, I watched him give a talk in Waterton Lakes National Park. “You don’t need to hoot and holler to let bears know you’re coming along the path,” he said to the audience. “That will just scare all the birds and other animals away. Bears have such good hearing. They move out of the way for each other just by listening for the sounds of twigs snapping.”
He would know. For years, he and his former partner Maureen Enns spent summers on Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula, raising grizzly cubs who’d been orphaned due to poaching. They taught the cubs how to fish for salmon and how to forage for berries, so they could survive in the wild. I love the book about their time there so much that I included parts of it in Hovel.
Black Bear: A Story of Siblinghood and Survival by Trina Moyles
This book, in which Trina Moyles moves from fearing the black bears who graze beside the remote Alberta fire lookout where she works to accepting them, and respecting them, and maybe even being obsessed with them, is beautifully written (Moyles is a lauded environmental journalist as well as an expert at spotting smoke). There’s so much wisdom contained in Black Bear’s pages, so much so that I did something I rarely do, and wrote down certain passages in my very best notebook – the one I hope I will hold onto for my whole life. I especially love this section in the epilogue:
“I am willing to accept the risk of living with bears, and the knowing that an attack could happen. I’d rather live with bears in this way than experience the opposite: a wilderness sanitized for my own safety, or convenience. That is not a wilderness I want to live in, or a shared future I want to imagine. Living with bears, and understanding the risks, sharpens my observatory senses in ways that bring me closer to all the living things in the forest. For that, I am grateful to bears and I am humbled by living with them.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Ailsa Ross writes about people, place, and art for Outside, Orion, the Guardian, the BBC, and others. She grew up in the north of Scotland and lives in the Canadian Badlands. This is her first novel.