True North: A Journey into Unexplored Wilderness

by Elliott Merrick

All this is not so much to me as the fall of one autumn leaf.

In pain and in joy, in those moments far in the night when a soul is itself, she came to know them as only a doctor or a doctor girl can.

There is not a neck in camp that isn’t stiff, not a leg that doesn’t ache, not a man that will admit either.

Kay had partridge pie cooked, and we ate in candlelight in the five o’clock dark. A beautiful, lonely day, and I love my life, every minute of it.

I love all that thou lovest, Spirit of Delight! The fresh Earth in new leaves dressed, And the starry night; Autumn evening, and the morn When the golden mists are born. I love snow, and all the forms Of the radiant frost; I love waves, and winds, and storms, Everything almost Which is Nature’s, and may be Untainted by man’s misery.

“That’s nothing. If you live to be a million, I’ll take your breath away every day you keep your eyes open.”

A million times this has happened and a million times it will happen again with not a soul to watch its peaceful change. Yet millions watch the movies. How can it be that men love the real world so little and love the sham they have built so much? It does not matter, and there is no use thinking about it. I am glad they stay in the movies and do not come here.

We have never shot a single goose since we arrived, though we have spent days hunting them, creeping on our stomachs through marshes and tangles of willows. I like them just the same. They’ll be wild and free till doomsday and after. And they are incurable romantics.

A mouse ran across Kay’s pillow one night, and that is the greatest menace of all.

A hillside has advantages, such as sliding down, but it is best of all for lying on. Businesspeople should be required to lie on a hillside for twenty minutes every week and look at the sky. I have a vision of hundreds of miles of hillsides deep in businesspeople, no talking or smoking cigars allowed. By and by there wouldn’t be any more businesspeople.

It keeps one out of touch with the world to have too much food, too many clothes, too many ways of transportation, too much house.

I’ve heard it said that the country makes men and the city uses them, and I know it is so.

And in my mind there is a huge difference between people who did big, spectacular things and people who were great in themselves. Probably some of the greatest people who ever lived have never been heard of, never had one line written about them. They were of the earth and returned to the earth, and their bodies fertilized good wheat. And a thousand Napoleons, streaking the sky with blood, cannot equal one of them.

I’ve never been happier than that morning on the hill. I thought to myself, “This is the place in the world where I would like most to be, and I am here.” People say it is no use poking off to far corners, that you are still you and you see but yourself through your own eyes. Well, they lie, poor things. I am a thousand different persons, and today I am the freest, strongest, happiest of them all. I can feel the charm of a city park, that oasis of green amid the stone, but it is not like this, and why pretend it is? Why be satisfied with half a loaf, with half-beauty, with half-honesty, with half-life? This moment is worth months of pain and fatigue and hunger mixed with the tight cramp of cold. This moment is worth twice what it cost. I should like to die in a place like this. I’d die five years sooner to be allowed to die here alone without benefit of clergy, for the clergy is no more necessary to my religion than ships are to the sea. What fun it would be to build a cabin on the lake and live here for years and years, just Kay and I. And in the spring the ducks would come, and in summer the grass and wild bluebells, and our canoe would creep in and out of every bay and cove. And the world could go its way and we would go ours in our own hidden world deep in the wilderness. We would not know of wars or increased taxes or inauguration addresses or who was the world’s heavyweight champion or how many were murdered yesterday, and it would be good not to know, and not to be ...

It is happiness, calling, “Come and take me if you are strong enough.”

I think of the people in the cities going home from work, standing and sitting in trolleys and trains. Some of them have their eyes closed tight to shut out the day that has jerked their spirits a thousand conflicting different ways, to blot out the noises, the greedy faces, and the horrible, colored signs. I feel as though the cares of all these people weighed heavy over the tree tops, as though some day someone must set all those lives free. No one can say what an evening like this is, or what it does. I can only say it is loneliness and solitude and beauty so sad it makes one’s heart break with sorrow and leap with gladness to have seen and been savage enough to feel. Whatever I say is only words. One has to be here in the cold, going home to partridge stew in a cabin, on hard legs, with the snow crunching, with months of the life behind one, to feel the red sky and the fading light creeping into one’s muscles and brain and nerves to motivate one’s life forever after. Kay met me in the doorway, and we watched the night grow dark. At least we know what we are losing, know that if we never come back it is our own fault. And that is worth knowing. However senseless life may ever be, the spruces will still be here, drawn up straight or whispering to each other in the darkness, listening, waiting, not for us to come back, but for men to become better, for men to come and rub their cheeks against the shaggy bark, clasp the ageless trunks in loving arms, and say, “This, oh, th...

We all drew in our chairs to a table with a white cloth, china cups and plates and saucers, shiny silver. We couldn’t get used to sitting on chairs at all, at a table with china cups. We had grown so used to our own black, flattened kettle, to sitting cross-legged on the brush with a tin cup and a tin plate, using one sheath knife between the two of us, that we had almost forgotten there were other ways. I felt that surely I would never get used to this kind of business again, and at the same time I had to resist an impulse to put my fingers into a jug of molasses that stood in the center of the table. There was baked, stuffed partridge, three-quarters of a bird apiece, thick brown gravy and pieces of pork, and potatoes with the taste of the earth so keen and sweet in them that if they had come from different gardens I am sure I could have distinguished the individual environment of each separate one. Once upon a time I considered potatoes an inevitable and boring part of every lunch and dinner. But not now. I have no doubt I was a dreadful spectacle at this point.

He told us that he had been able to keep his teeth so well because he didn’t wear them out by rubbing them with a brush. All the same, he rinses his mouth with salt water and runs a thread between all his teeth every day.