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Summary: Grab a Paddle, Sled Reins, GO NORTH with WATERMAN!
Review: When you head out by kayak, dogsled or skis into rough country, into the Northwest Passage--one of the remotest rinds of sea-ice and cleaved shores on earth--you need to travel with someone who is bright to geography and people, who holds his wits in every blast of weather, and, most vitally, who tells a great story. Jonathan Waterman is that kind of travelmate. Arctic Crossing--Waterman's account of his epic 2,200-mile exploration from Prudhoe Bay to the Gulf of Boothia (near Baffin Island)--floats and glides us on an unforgettable often haunting journey. Waterman artfully describes the intricate relationships among animals, people, religion, myth and livelihood in the modern Arctic--and ultimately, his own sacrificial solo quest for deeper connection to nature, spirit and the elusive "Tornassuk" or polar bear. This is classic Arctic literature at it's best. A tome to revisit again and again and to shelf beside Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams. An ulu knifeblade couldn't cut as clean to the marrow of Inuit life and Arctic landscape as this intrepid adventurer's eloquent, lucid words..."crescent-moon script" of caribou tracks... startled muskoxen circling a calf "wagon-train fashion, offering a wall of ten curled horns," or the Inuk adage: "Wisdom (silatujuq) is shown through silence." Waterman, a superb researcher, splays open the tragic expedition of Sir John Franklin as deftly as he tells of Inuit whale hunters chawing on "muktuk" (orange-colored blubber "that tastes like peanuts" but is tainted with PCBs, mercury and cadmium) or "Kabloona" (Inuit for white men or "bushy eyebrows") trophy-hunting barren ground grizzly while sitting armchair-like, swathed in blankets atop snowmobile-drawn sleds called "kamotiks." Arctic Crossing shows a candor missing in much Arctic literature. It is a story rife with beauty, joy, sadness, exploitation and, in the Inuit way--forgiveness. Despair and poverty like that found in old Harlem and little Havana haunt the great white north. The People are caught in a modern leg-hold trap--a fluxing Arctic ice rift between ancient ways of the hunt and the dole of modern White amenities. Waterman is startlingly open about what he observes. Here is a writer sparing us nothing including his own grave doubts and fears about expedition survival. Waterman illumines the perils of Arctic travel: iceberg-strewn straits, freak winds, hypothermia, grizzlies and mirage-bending light that warps distances--and the mind. An added plus is Waterman's ravishing photography: ethereal midnight light hovering above the tundra or the "commonplace scenes"--dogsleds shrinking into white oblivion and an Inuit woman deftly butchering caribou steaks with her ulu knife. Or the rare snap-- an ice floe throned polar bear (called "The One Who Gives Power" in northern Inuit) from the view of a kayak! Travel with Waterman now on an Arctic Crossing where two cultures meet in sacred, changing land. Grab the paddle, the sled reins--before it's too late.
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Summary: buy this book
Review: Who was it who said, "less is more"? That's one truth that stands out in Jonathan Waterman's "Artic Crossing" - a epical solo trip of the Northwest Passage done without fanfare, without oodles of sponsorship dough. I liked the author's cool, understated writing style, the wry observations about his sufferings and about the Inuits. No hyperbole, none of self-inflation that is so common in adventure writing, this book is truly believable. A wonderful read.
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