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A Death on the Barrens
By George Grinnell.
$25 plus GST & Shipping. 334 pp.
Northern Books, Box 211, Station P, Toronto, ON M5S 2S7. 416-531-8873
ISBN 0-96804040-3
Review by JAMES MURPHY
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Picture yourself on a long wilderness journey. You are travelling down a beautiful river and across clear lakes. The air is filled with innumerable species of birds and their songs. The water teems with fish and muskox and caribou lounge peacefully on the green gently rolling tundra. You have seen no one other than your travelling companions for weeks and all your temporal worries seem far behind. Slightly giddy from lack of food, a profound quietude and serenity has settled on your spirit. Logically you know you shouldn't tarry but you linger there for weeks, entranced, as if moving would break some spell, disturbing your reverie. Danger lurks, yet you can't seem to focus on it.
In A Death on the Barrens, from Toronto's Northern Books, George Grinnell describes just such circumstances during a 1955 canoe trip down the Dubawnt River. Grinnell and four other young men were led on a poorly planned and lackadaisically executed trip by Arthur Moffatt, an old and more experienced canoeist, who ended up perishing on this trip from a spill into icy September waters. Lack of food, proper equipment and most importantly, lack of a planned itinerary, contributed to his demise. As a canoeist, I enjoy cautionary tales and would recommend this one as an excellent example of how not to conduct a canoe trip. But Grinnell also delves into the emotional and spiritual aspects of a long wilderness trip and it is this internal journey that proves most compelling.
Skillfully interweaving his own thoughts and feelings at the time with the details of the canoe trip, Grinnell touches on a lot of the appealing themes. The disaffected youth struggling to find his identity. The bounty and munificence of the natural environment. The renunciation of ego and self. It is not hard to see why at least some of them were lulled by the beauty of the tundra into a false sense of ease and security. What started out as a canoe trip slowly evolved into a vision quest in nature.
Knud Rassmussen in Across Arctic America quotes a shaman of the barrens as saying "all true wisdom is only to be learned far from the dwellings of men, out in the great solitudes and is only to be attained through suffering." Solitude, fasting and prayer are time-honoured techniques for shifting one's world view and seeking enlightenment. Moffatt himself might have been pursuing this in a casual way but the others at first were surely out just for a youthful grand adventure. The trouble with visions one has in solitude is that they are meaningless to anyone else unless you return to society to share your insight with others. I think Grinnell appreciates this and his book is an attempt to close the circle that was broken by Moffatt's death and make himself whole.
Grinnell gets into trouble, however, and loses much of the sympathy that the reader feels for him. In the epilogue, he shows himself to be deeply cynical and bitter instead of being full of youthful optimism and hope. He launches into a diatribe against capitalism, modern agriculture, technology and academia. Science is presented as inherently evil. Charles Darwin is the toady of vicious racists. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who practically invented income redistribution through taxation of the rich and became the champion of the disadvantaged through government social programs, is portrayed as a wicked capitalist exploiter. Grinnell's own Ph.D. from Berkeley is viewed as a means to disseminate lies and disinformation. How could this man go into teaching if he really felt this way? This is a classic case of biting the hand that fed you.
What we have here is a severely depressed individual whose life has been tinged by tragedy. He is not trying to engage in a serious discussion of these controversial social, political and moral issues. I believe he is using his slanted view of Western civilization as a crutch to deal with his own feeling of inadequacy and depression brought on by his father's suicide and both Moffatt's and his son's death. He paints these arguments with such broad strokes that even if you agree with him that free market economies are morally bankrupt, that technology is evil and that all white males should burn in hell forever for inventing the atomic bomb, he does the cause a disservice.
Grinnell mistakenly thinks that Moffatt was a bodhisatva, an enlightened being who has temporarily forsaken his own attainment of Nirvana to be reincarnated to guide others on their path. At best, Moffatt was a cracked bodhisatva, a partially enlightened being with a fatal flaw. One who is doomed to repeat his mistakes in an endless cycle. As Shakespeare's King lear said, "You do me wrong to take me out of the grave, Thou art a soul in bliss, but I am bound upon a wheel of fire that mine tear do scald like molten lead." I truly feel sorry for Grinnell. The serenity and inner peace that he glimpsed on his first trip into the Barrens completely escaped him when he returned to society. He is fascinated by both Christian and Buddhism but is unable to apply their central tenets of compassion and forgiveness to himself.
I was personally moved by much of this book. In 1978, on my first long northern canoe trip I wiped out on a potentially deadly rapid on the North Seal River in Manitoba. My partner was flushed downstream out of sight and I spent 45 minutes standing on the overturned canoe in the middle of the rapid contemplating what I thought was his probable death and my impending one. I finally mustered enough courage (or fear) to cut the packs loose, push the canoe upright and then swim for it. Grinnell talks about feeling "lucky" after his experience but lost that feeling and became bitter. I was lucky that day. We had done everything wrong yet we were both fine, recovered all our gear and continued all the way to Hudson Bay.
Perhaps because my experience didn't end in tragedy it was a life affirming experience that I have carried with me ever since. The sense of elation, serenity and hope has never left me and I truly feel "lucky" every day, especially when I am paddling. I am going on my sixth long canoe trip in the barrens this summer and though I am not particularly religious, I do believe in the power of prayer. I will make a special effort while out there to pray for George Grinnell's troubled spirit and for the redemption of all our souls.
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