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| Call of the Wild |
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| Written by Richard Harris | |
 If you could, how long would you go for? A week? A month? Where would you go? Sweden? Canada? How about a year in Alaska on the Yukon in deep winter and would you do it if you were married with two kids, one just newly born?
Call of the Wild by Guy GrieveISBN 0-340-89824-0  I don't know about you, but I’ve often daydreamed about escaping the day-to-day existence of modern life and spending time in a true wilderness - a time to tune out from urban life, tune into nature and practice bushcraft skills where it counts. If you could, how long would you go for? A week? A month? Where would you go? Sweden? Canada? How about a year in Alaska on the Yukon in deep winter and would you do it if you were married with two kids, one just newly born? Well Guy Grieve did. Unable to stand the 3 hours a day commute to work as a marketing manager for a newspaper and up to his neck in debt, he left his wife and children (with her blessing I might add) to live for a year in Alaska, three hundred miles from the nearest road, days from the nearest human settlement and sponsored by a whisky distillery! This is his story of how his dissatisfaction with urban living and a growing need to “test himself” led to the greatest adventure of his life. Written in an unassuming style – Guy isn’t bigging himself up here - you really get to understand the realities of living in such a hostile environment and the real challenge that he’d taken on. Working every hour just to survive and often facing serious danger and temperatures of -60 it was his good fortune to find support and friendship in a local family who teach him the skills he’ll need just to live through his adventure - Guy took a musical instrument to play in the evenings, but never gets a minute to play it, such is the workload of cutting portage, food gathering, wood chopping and cabin building. Constantly carrying firearms against the danger of bear attack, Guy learns to hunt and trap for food and even trains up a dog sled team that he uses for transport during the deep winter. With full colour photos in two sections he ends the book with a few pages of author’s notes, in which he describes his equipment, foods stuffs, cooking and medical supplies, all of which I found interesting and useful. For me, it was the change that took place within him that affected me most – from mild mannered, urban marketing manager to a man at peace with himself, having stripped himself of the modern fripperies that seem to make up life in the new millennium. He says of himself; “Humility was my greatest ally when living alone in the woods – the realization that, if I forgot how frail and insignificant I was, I would die quickly. Humility helped me to deal with the pain, loneliness, hardship and hunger, as I believed I deserved nothing more. Every animal had a hard time in winter, so why should I be any different? In this comfortable, insulated world of ours it is easy to forget that our lives are no more or less significant that that of an ant”. And I can’t argue with that! Comments
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is the only way to describe this man’s egocentric quest of self-discovery. From start to finish Guy’s self portrait is deeply unsympathetic. It is only the almost super-human goodwill of those who consistently bail him out of trouble that his journey towards himself didn’t end in his ultimate demise. Here is an example of the cult of the individual carried to extremes. The book is only redeemed, from degenerating completely into a litany of complaints about his self imposed suffering and loneliness, by the account of those who out of generosity of spirit and character saw fit to ensure that there was something worth sending back to his wife and children. Responsibility, commitment and duty are all unfashionable words in contemporary western culture, so in one sense this account is only symptomatic of the sort of navel gazing, self absorbed introspection that has become the norm.
Guy Grieve - what a tit.
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