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Imitation Thoreau
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20097 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1992 |
1,893 Words |
| Author
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Bruce Allen
Bruce Allen is a contributing editor to Kirkus Reviews and a
freelance reviewer for the Boston Globe, Sewanee Review, and
several other publications.
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EDGES OF THE EARTH
Richard Leo
New York: Henry Holt, 1991
303 pp., $19.95
Edges of the Earth recounts in exhaustive, sometimes exhausting detail the odyssey (and, some might argue, the Iliad as well) of Richard "Rick" Leo, a Chicago-born New Yorker and Harvard graduate who has lived since 1981 in what even its natives call "wilderness" Alaska.
An adventurous sort who had previously hitchhiked in that faraway land, and also traveled alone through Nepal and the Himalayas, Leo was prime, in 1981, to chuck his job as editor at the National Industrial Directories Corporation, and forsake the city's assorted pressures and madnesses for something simpler and truer ("Why not try to live in the mysteries way out at the edges instead of just traveling though?"). So, he went north to Alaska.
Leo first boarded the Alaskan ferry and then hitched a ride to Fairbanks, where "frozen smog" and quite unbelievable cold (not to mention a population laden with "aggressive, rapacious, sugar-junky, marginally psychotic episodic drunks") challenged his dreams of climbing ad eventually living beside the 20,000-foot Mt.McKinley (or, as the Athabascan Indians call it, Denali).
He started out in Talkeetna ("the center of mountaineering in Alaska and one of the four major climbing bases in the world"), west of Fairbanks. He moved into an abandoned cabin, and sent for his girlfriend, Melissa, who had more or less passively scrapped her dream of opening a restaurant in New York City to join him.
Wind, Weather, And Dogs
The book's first half is filled with brief sketches of neighborly eccentrics (Denny, an ex-Vietnam veteran turned bush pilot, is the most engaging of them) and rueful anecdotes about Leo's misadventures with wind and weather, culture shock, and, most amusingly, a team of sled dogs with minds of their own.
The narrative displays continual forward and backward motion. Rick and Melissa return "home" to Chicago for the birth of their son, Janus. Rick returns north for a "land rush" in which "state land [is] made available for state resident," and stakes our forty acres under Mt. McKinley (fifty miles from
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