Book reviews | Books and my backpack

If you have walked the Pacific Crest Trail, you may have met Barney Scout Mann at his Southern California home, where he and his wife Sandy have hosted trekkers who are embarking on the adventure of their lives. Thousands more have benefitted from his dedication to the trail through his many years of work with the Pacific Crest Trail Association.

If you walked the PCT in 2007, you may have met him and his wife on the trail, when he kicked off his quest for distance hiking’s coveted triple crown, which he completed in 2017.

However, the inspirational adventurer, who has backpacked for more than 50 years, may have saved his most influential work for Journeys North, which reads like a gripping novel. He tells the tales of six who braved challenges that would send many hikers home. Ultimately, when a snowstorm blocks their path, they must choose between quitting and searching for an elusive detour.

His book brings home the personal side of the trek, stretching beyond the six main characters through compelling anecdotes about other backpackers traveling the PCT.

If it not had been in the middle of winter when I read it, Scout’s book may have spurred me to travel to his home to pick up some trail magic before I launched my own PCT trek. Sure, I recently completed the John Muir Trail, which follows the PCT much of its way through California’s Sierra Nevada. My heart is enthusiastic, but are my body and mind ready to make the jump from my 243-mile trek to the 2,653 miles through three states on the entire PCT?

If you read Journeys North, be prepared to feel the urge to take the next step(s).

It was “like peeling an onion.”

Gary Paulsen used those words to describe how he felt while writing his memoir, Gone to the Woods: Surviving a Lost Childhood.

Author of more than 200 books, mostly aimed at children aged 10 and up, Paulsen wrote the gut-wrenching childhood story that was published shortly before he died of cardiac arrest in October 2021.

Gone.

To live, in 1944, at just five years old, with relatives on their Minnesota farm to escape his alcoholic mother who had made him sing in Chicago bars.

Gone.

At age seven, to the Philippines, where he witnessed grisly living conditions and killings that would haunt any adult, while living with his parents. Both of them alcoholics. His father served there during World War II.

Gone.

Would describe a teenager who looked for ways to escape his life with his parents back in the USA. Gone to the woods, where he learned to hunt and trap his own food. Gone to the library, where he learned to love books thanks to a librarian whom he at first suspected might be like other kids and adults in his life: Up to no good. But that librarian came to know him without many words passing between them. Her gift of a spiral notebook and a yellow Number Two pencil changed his life.

In his memoir, Paulsen talks about himself in the third person. Is it to keep emotional distance from himself (“I”) and ”the boy,” which he uses throughout the book?

Gone.

But a voice I still hear. His most famous work, Hatchet, about Brian, a youth who survives by himself in the Alaskan wilderness after a plane crash, was one of my favorites to read aloud in class to my sixth-graders and to my sons as they sat next to me on the couch where we shared other Paulsen books. The book moved me, enthralled me. Newbery Medal judges chose it as a most cherished book, one of three Newbery honors he won.

As an adult, Paulsen lived a life filled with his awe for nature. He sailed, hiked, explored, even entered the Iditarod three times, completing it once.

Through his characters and stories, Paulsen taught millions of kids (and more than a few adults) life lessons. In Hatchet, Brian remembers that the tears he shed during the hard times he endured had taught him “the most important rule for survival, which was that feeling sorry for yourself didn’t work.”

Not gone.

Gary Paulsen’s characters, lessons, and the growing 35 million copies of his beloved books will be around for a long, long time.