Notes from The Century Before : A Journal from British Columbia

Rating:
Summary: Real Gem of a B.C. travelogue
Review: I just read this account of the author's three month exploration of northwestern B.C. in 1966 after it was recommended as one of the best 25 books of the last 25 years by the magazine Outdoor Canada. Edward Hoagland is a real find for me. I had never heard of him before, but his description by John Updike as "America's best living essayist" is close to the mark. His descriptions of the country and the people go far to preserve the early days of this wild and untamed corner of Canada. I love to read travelogues, and this one rates right up there with the best of them.

Rating:
Summary: Portraits from northwest BC.
Review: Two things brought my attention to this book. 1) Edward Hoagland's introductions in well known works of Thoreau and Muir, and 2) my interest in the beautiful expanse of wildness that is British Columbia. The book might be described as "quirky," and I have to wonder whether it was an influence in the creation of the early nineties television series "Northern Exposure" (one of the few TV programs I have ever cared for). Published in 1969, it is the account of a New York* novelist become journalist in the great, wild watersheds of the Stikine and Skeena River systems, waters coursing from the Cassiar Mountains, "from sources known only from aerial photographs, some of them where nobody alive had ever been."
*By the time the footloose essayist Hoagland recorder these images in the summer of 1966, he was already quite widely traveled, and had lived briefly in Hazelton, BC in 1960.
Hoagland renders "portraits" of trappers, merchants, guides, clerics, bush pilots, prospectors, "discoverers", and of the waters and forests that are their homes. He himself often fades from the text, reemerging as a curious anomaly in a world unfamiliar and unusual. In northwest BC, a wilderness "the size of several Ohios" in which the majority of residents are caribou, moose, grizzlies, marmots, wolves, beaver, otter, and lynx, each of the perhaps 1000 human residents, whether Indian or white, might be considered an anomaly. The author gravitates to the old-timers, asking "a dabbler's questions that to me are fun."
This volume is not for every reader. It is very unlike the wilderness travel accounts of Thoreau or Muir (who investigated closely a landscape's flora and geology). Hoagland's attentions here are mostly directed to the local "characters" and to the nuances of the human history of a great wilderness: "... airplanes have made mapping easier than naming nowadays. ... The surveyors of forty years ago did a much better job because they were actually on the spot. Being men of good intentions, they were glad to incorporate Indian names on their maps when they knew them." However, "it's an exceedingly accidental process ... if no Indian accompanied the mapper, or if he wasn't unusually expressive, all the native names slipped through the sieve and were lost right then and there."
The author admits, "I'm no outdoorsman, really," but he is taken with the beauty of northern BC: "Swaying and bucking as on a life raft, we scraped over a further series of ridges and peaks. This was the highest flying we had done; we were way up with the snow so that the cabin was cold. But the sunlight washed the whole sky a milky blue. Everywhere, into the haze a hundred miles off, a crescendo of up-pointing mountains shivered and shook. A cliff fell away beneath us as we crossed the lip. ... There was no chance to watch for game; the plunging land was life enough. It was a whole earth of mountains, beyond counting or guessing at, colored stark white and rock-brown. To live is to see, and although I was sweating against my stomach, I was irradiated. These were some of the finest minutes of my life."
Unlike most books of wilderness travel, this is not a record of the author as a man in the wilderness. It is a series of portraits of the true men and women (mostly men) of the wilderness. At Atlin Lake, for example, we meet three vigorous men in their nineties, one who came to the country during the Rush of 1899. We meet others who had first come to these mountains and rivers in the 1890's. In Hoagland's Journal from British Columbia, the century -- now centuries -- before, seem not so distant.