Personal Canon: Alexander, Gilbert & McGuane

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Outside Magazine January 2003

The Outside Adventure Canon
Personal Canon: Alexander, Gilbert & McGuane

BEING THERE
By Caroline Alexander
I FIRST CAME ACROSS Mary Kingsley's TRAVELS IN WEST AFRICA in a library. I sat down on one of those plastic ladders and thumbed through the book, and by the time I reached the checkout desk, I'd decided to retrace her footsteps.

Although Travels in West Africa was published in 1897, Kingsley's humor and sensibility are extraordinarily modern. She started out a very sad woman, a spinster. (In the movie, she'd be played by Emma Thompson.) Her contemporaries wrote books in which a hero, bent on a specific goal, triumphed over, or was defeated by, geography. But for Kingsley, the journey—a ramble from Sierra Leone to the "Great Peak of the Cameroons"—was the story. And the Africans she met were not merely guides, porters, or villagers, but characters she brought to life as individuals. Hers is a journey about discovery, not just about getting from A to Z, and it is filled with insights.

Kingsley was my companion when I went to West Africa in 1987. I carried her book everywhere, and people were always thrilled to see the name of their village in print. But one old man asked me, as if he were facing down an impostor, "If you were here all those years ago, what are you doing here now?"

CAROLINE ALEXANDER'S NEXT BOOK, THE BOUNTY, WILL BE PUBLISHED IN SEPTEMBER

FREE BIRD
By Elizabeth gilbert
I CAN'T HAVE BEEN the only kid who was inspired by MY SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN to stalk imaginary deer during those short hours between piano lessons and dinner, can I? The story, by Jean Craighead George, is simple: A city boy named Sam Gribley runs away to the country, lives in a tree trunk, and survives the winter. My sister and I took the book seriously enough to turn it into a game. After school, we'd run out to the woods behind our house and pretend to live in a hollowed-out tree, getting by on a diet of nuts and berries. Our game really wasn't all that different from the one my parents were playing—returning to the farm, trying to live off the land. It was the seventies, after all. But the best thing was that it took us out of the world of obligations. Even as kids you have chores; what Sam had was absolute freedom. He didn't have to write an essay on the birds of America—he had a pet falcon! I think that's still true, even for us grown-ups, this desire to get back to a natural state. I just spent ten days hiking in the White Mountains with my dad, and it was great—we were free from obligations the whole time.

ELIZABETH GILBERT IS THE AUTHOR OF THE LAST AMERICAN MAN

COWBOYS IN THE SNOW
By Thomas McGuane
GRASS BEYOND THE MOUNTAINS, by Richmond P. Hobson Jr., is the true story of a young man from New York whose business expectations were crushed by the Depression. He headed west, where he became a skilled cowboy. In Wyoming he paired up with a mysterious character, probably a rustler, and the two of them drove in a dilapidated sausage truck to remotest northern British Columbia to start a cattle operation. It was an adventure that should have killed them both, but somehow they succeeded.

Hobson had the most wonderful capacity to convey the natural marvels of that land. He utilized his wide horizon of reference to capture the magic of the country and in so doing gave us a glimpse of something now gone. The perils of enduring winter in such an implacable landscape are described vividly: The horses had to be tough, and the horsemanship was remarkable. There were cattle drives in blizzards so extreme that cowboys went blind, but the horses got them through. Grass Beyond the Mountains makes a reader wish that he had been there, and vastly relieved that he was not.

THOMAS MCGUANE'S LATEST NOVEL IS THE CADENCE OF GRASS

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