Call of the American Wild: A Tenderfoot's Escape to Alaska
By Guy Grieve; Skyhorse Publishing, 2012, $17.99
Steeped in the stories of Jack London from an early age, Guy Grieve felt stuck in a rut selling advertising space for a newspaper in Edinburgh, Scotland. He longed for his own life-changing adventure. With plenty of time to ponder alternative lifestyles during his daily four-hour commute to and from work, Grieve settled on, of all places, Galena, Alaska.
Boatloads of young men (and women) have come to Alaska, usually hoping to strike it rich. But a more profound, personal motive is often involved: the idea of proving oneself capable of surviving in a hostile environment. If they survived, their stories of deadly cold, rogue bears and a lawless society were sometimes the only currency these adventurers brought home.
Jack London himself was a 21-year-old Californian who lived in Alaska and Canada's Yukon Territory a little less than a year. His short stories and novels of men and dogs during the Yukon gold rush made him a best-selling author and perhaps the best-known writer of the North.
Cat person becomes dog person
When Grieve's plane landed in Galena in August he smelled the familiar, pungent odor of burning peat, not unlike a scotch distillery back home. To his chagrin, he learned that the wild country he hoped to live in for a year had been toasted by a major wildfire. Fortunately, Grieve had contacted a local resident to help him get started. The Galena resident soon realized that Grieve needed a lot of help.
Planning to build his own log cabin and overwinter alone in the Bush, Grieve didn't know how to operate a chain saw, much less build a cabin or survive a subarctic winter. Before his sojourn ended, Grieve's Galena contacts loaned him the tools and equipment he needed to build the cabin, hunt and trap for food, run a dog team and work outdoors at temperatures as low as minus-60 Fahrenheit. Then they taught him how to use those tools.
As you can imagine, the learning curve was steep and the cost of a mistake was potentially fatal. Grieve turned out to be a fast learner. He's also witty and engaging writer, so the story of his odyssey is engaging.
With no one to share his day-to-day experiences or serve as a counterpoint, the impromptu loan of a dog becomes a turning point in Grieve's tale. It's a universal principle that a man with a dog is far more interesting than man or dog alone.
At first, Grieve, a self-admitted cat person, is not at all happy with his unwanted canine companion. But he and Fuzzy begin to tolerate and then depend on each other. Learning to understand Fuzzy's canine quirks and needs undoubtedly helped Grieve when he took on the care and training of a team of six sled dogs.
Man and his dog vs. man and his bus
The nature of Grieve's quest invites comparison with Jon Krakauer's "Into the Wild," the story of Chris McCandless, another faux wilderness adventurer.
I say faux not to belittle their pursuit of adventure or spiritual discovery but because, unlike McCandless and Grieve, most people who came to Alaska to survive in the wilderness have had to make a living in addition to chopping wood, finding food and surviving the cold. Keep in mind that Grieve was working hard to survive, but he didn't have to simultaneously survive the sometimes brutal and hazardous circumstances of a trapper, miner or woodcutter.
Both Grieve and McCandless envisioned themselves surviving alone in the wilds of Alaska and both hoped the experience would be transformative. The similarity ends there. McCandless couldn't survive four months of summer. Grieve not only survived an Alaska winter, but thrived.
His survival wasn't assured. During his first months living in a loaned wall tent and building the cabin -- as temperatures plummeted, snow accumulated and the Yukon River froze -- Grieve's story was painful. Although he lost lots of weight, he never reached the desperate straits of McCandless, whose journal was primarily a list of the foods he shot with his .22 rifle. Porcupines. Songbirds. That sort of thing.
The now-iconic bus is a grim reminder that McCandless -- who hunkered down and died a day's hike from the road system -- couldn't survive long without the trappings of civilization or human society. By contrast, Grieve's log cabin, although he didn't build it without help, is a testament to his newfound skills and perseverance.
A yawning gulf separates the attitudes of the two adventurers, too. McCandless abandoned his family and friends to go it alone. He was unwilling to ask for help and shunned the advice of knowledgeable Alaskans. Hiking into the backcountry with a .22 rifle and a 10-pound sack of rice for food, he didn't get far and never made it back.
Grieve knew the extent of his ignorance and relied on the advice of rural residents who knew how to survive in the Bush. He used a satellite phone to keep in touch with his family in Scotland and called his contacts in Galena for advice and supplies.
Grieve also used his satellite phone to file weekly columns with his Scottish newspaper. It was a job, but not one Jack London would have written a story about.
Unlike McCandless, Grieve had a wife and two young sons to anchor him. However, he also packed enough humility to realize when he was over his head.
Grieve's story really hits its stride when he's loaned a dog team and begins to embrace wilderness living with joie de vivre. He falls, gets up, falls, gets up. In the end he learns an essential fact of life: Dogs beat cats all to hell when it comes to teamwork.
Wearing a kilt in a Ruby bar
Having survived a boreal winter miles from the nearest village in Interior Alaska, one of Grieve's closest calls resulted from his spontaneous decision to wear a kilt into a bar in Ruby. Yikes.
The book is well worth a read. And if you read the book, you might also check out some of Grieve's weekly columns in The Scotsman. You'll find some surprising revelations, including Fuzzy's real name.
Rick Sinnott is a former Alaska Department of Fish and Game wildlife biologist and freelance writer based in Anchorage.