Resurrecting The North

by Lawrence Millman

|

9 books

Given that my personal compass invariably points North, I’ve made twenty trips to Arctic Canada, fifteen trips to Greenland, nine trips to Alaska, and four trips to Siberia, but I’ve never been to Rome or the Taj Mahal. For why would I want to go somewhere that’s swarming with terrorists, sorry, tourists?

My literary compass points North, too— toward the obscure and the forgotten. Thus, I’ve induced publishers to bring back from the dead a number of out-of-print books about the North, although several of these books have gone out of print again. Below are descriptions of six such books, as well as two of my own that betray a certain kinship with them. Here, I should mention that my own books do not need to be resurrected from the dead…at least not yet.

Read more... Read less...

The Lure of the Labrador Wild

Original Edition

Dillon Wallace, 2021

At the beginning of the 20th century, the interior of Labrador was more or less unexplored. What a splendid place for me to explore and make a name for myself, thought New Yorker Leonidas Hubbard, so he set out on an expedition with two individuals, neither of whom had been to Labrador themselves. Almost immediately, they began canoeing on the wrong river, and disaster followed. Their attempt to fight off disaster resulted in still more disaster. In the end, Hubbard did make a name for himself, but in a way he would not have appreciated. Accounts of failed expeditions tend to be page-turners, and this one is no exception.

True North

A Journey into Unexplored Wilderness

Elliott Merrick, 2010

Elliott Merrick didn’t try to triumph over Labrador but simply met its rough integrity with a rough integrity of his own. In this book, he describes how he fell in love with that “pristine beautiful land” and also with a local nurse whom he later married. He also describes a 300-mile trip by snowshoe and toboggan in the dead of winter. About this trip, he makes the following statement: “We have traveled to the earth’s core and found meaning.” Merrick might have remained forever in this pristine land, but as he informed me toward the end of his life, “A degree in English from Yale did not prepare me for the life of a Labrador trapper.”

Two Against the Ice

Ejnar Mikkelsen, 2003

An account by the Danish explorer-writer Ejnar Mikkelsen of an early 20th-century expedition to East Greenland that went in search of the lost members from a previous expedition. The book features implacable cold, frostbite, starvation, scurvy, dreadful sledging conditions, snow blindness, apocalyptic storms, and various mortifications of the flesh. Mikkelsen’s diary of the expedition was eaten by a bear, but he still managed to write this remarkable book. A Netflix film entitled Against the Ice is based on the book, but it can’t hold a candle or even a matchstick to Two Against the Ice.

A Woman in the Polar Night

Christiane Ritter, 2024

This book gives the lie to the notion that women can’t tolerate the rigors of the Arctic. In the mid-1930s, Austrian hausfrau Christiane Ritter spent a year in Svalbard (otherwise known as Spitzbergen) with her hunter-trapper husband. Her book is an eloquent celebration of what she describes as a realm where “everything goes its own way…without human intervention.” Upon returning home, Christiane told her friends, “A year in the Arctic should be compulsory for everyone. Then you will come to realize what’s important in life and what isn’t.” That year seems to have had a salubrious effect on her own life, for she lived to be 103, alert and active to the very end.

Snow Man

John Hornby in Canada's Barren Lands

Malcolm Waldron, 1997

John Hornby was perhaps the most eccentric of all Arctic explorers. He had no tolerance for comfort; he used a stick in lieu of toilet tissue; and he had a tendency to gnaw on wolf skulls. In Snow Man, Malcolm Waldron tells the story of Hornby’s 1924-1925 overwintering with a fellow Brit inside (of all places!) an esker on the tundra. The two men could hardly stand each other. Likewise, they came close to starving to death several times. In the end, they managed to survive both the Arctic and each other by engaging in an extreme form of English pluck. Hornby was not so lucky on his next expedition, but that’s another story, one told in a diary entitled Unflinching by Edgar Christian.

Thirty Years In The Golden North

Although Jan Welzl did travel through Siberia in the late 19th century, some of his descriptions in this book seem a bit fanciful. Did certain indigenous people indeed worship 25 foot tall monkey gods, and did certain indigenous mailmen really deliver mail in sledges pulled by 350 dogs? Original reviewers of the book took it as the gospel truth, not realizing that Welzl, being a Moravian, was using Slavic wit to describe many of his putative adventures. A publisher agreed to reprint the book, but alas! went under before it could appear. But I don’t want to end this listing in a negative way. Let me end it by saying that Welzl spent the last years of his life trying to create a perpetual motion machine out of old beer cans and bicycle parts. This is actually true!

The Golden Grindstone

One Man's Adventures in the Yukon

Angus Graham, 2006

This account of insurance broker George Mitchell’s 1898 expedition to the Yukon goldfields might be the best book ever written about the celebrated Klondike gold rush…even though Mitchell never made it to the Klondike and thus never ended up mining for gold. Why didn’t he get there? you might ask. For one thing, he took a route far more difficult than the one other gold seekers took. For another, he shattered his kneecap in a locale where there was no doctor for miles around. And for another, he met a…well, you’ll have to read The Golden Grindstone to find out.

Goodbye, Ice

Lawrence Millman, 2020

Over the years, I’ve written up my wanderings in the North in prose, but not so long ago, I decided to describe some of them in poetry. For poems cut close to the heart — a place’s heart as well as one’s own heart. Especially poems (prejudice alert!) not filled with the sort of ambiguities dear to academics. Indeed, some of the poems in this book are often quite blatant in their meaning. Think Walt Whitman, Robert Service, and Leonard Cohen, but not Ezra Pound or T.S. Eliot. As you might guessed from the book’s title, climate change is a major player in these poems just as it is in the North itself.

Outsider

My Boyhood with Thoreau

Lawrence Millman, 2024

One of the reasons why I travel North is that I prefer nature to human-type beings, and the North has far more of the former than the latter. In my most recent book, I describe this preference as being a major component of my childhood. The book’s title refers not only to the out-of-doors being my habitat of choice but also to the fact that I was (and still am) outside any known social group…unless you consider mushrooms, snakes, and insects social groups. As for the book’s subtitle, I spent a goodly portion of my youth in the metaphoric company of the naturalist Henry David Thoreau. And not just my youth: in the gloom of the contemporary world, Thoreau stands like a beacon of light to me.