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Rowing to Latitude: Journeys Along the Arctic's Edge Kindle Edition
Two by sea: a couple rows the wild coasts of the far north in Rowing to Latitude: Journeys Along the Arctic's Edge.
Jill Fredston has traveled more than twenty thousand miles of the Arctic and sub-Arctic-backwards. With her ocean-going rowing shell and her husband, Doug Fesler, in a small boat of his own, she has disappeared every summer for years, exploring the rugged shorelines of Alaska, Canada, Greenland, Spitsbergen, and Norway. Carrying what they need to be self-sufficient, the two of them have battled mountainous seas and hurricane-force winds, dragged their boats across jumbles of ice, fended off grizzlies and polar bears, been serenaded by humpback whales and scrutinized by puffins, and reveled in moments of calm.
As Fredston writes, these trips are "neither a vacation nor an escape, they are a way of life." Rowing to Latitude is a lyrical, vivid celebration of these northern journeys and the insights they inspired. It is a passionate testimonial to the extraordinary grace and fragility of wild places, the power of companionship, the harsh but liberating reality of risk, the lure of discovery, and the challenges and joys of living an unconventional life.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherNorth Point Press
- Publication dateOctober 10, 2002
- File size1657 KB
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Review
“As with most trips, Rowing to Latitude rewards you when you finally get to where you're going. Fredston makes you see wilderness as a more precious commodity than you thought, and inspires you to stretch your limits physically and mentally.” ―Lynne McNeil, The San Diego Union-Tribune
“An honest and self-aware woman's record of her unusual life...a shrewd analytical look at human existence as a balance of danger and joy.” ―Judith Niemi, The Women's Review of Books
“Beguiling.” ―Gail Caldwell, The Boston Globe
“The book is far more than an adventure travel narrative. It also is deeply personal memoir and love story.” ―Brian Maffly, The Salt Lake Tribune
“[Fredston] sticks to telling good stories about battling, on primitive terms, the weather, the water, the land, the animals and some of the demons that haunt us all.” ―Craig Medred, Anchorage Daily New
“[Fredston] provides armchair travelers with a vivid portrait of wilderness rowing...full of intriguing personal digressions and moments of high drama.” ―John Freeman, The Wall Street Journal
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
I wish to speak a word for nature, for absolute freedom and wildness.--Henry David Thoreau, "Walking"PrefaceFOR YEARS my husband, Doug Fesler, and I have led a double life. In the winter, we work together as avalanche specialists. Then, with the lighter days of summer, we disappear (though my mother hates that word) on three-to-five-month-long wilderness rowing and kayaking trips. Somehow, more than twenty thousand miles have slid under our blades, a function of time and repetitive motion rather than undue strength or bravery.Once, far down the Yukon River, which begins in western Canada and cleaves Alaska, an old Athabascan subsistence fisherman hailed us from his aluminum skiff. In keeping with local custom, he was in no hurry to talk, preferring to drift in silence while his eyes appraised us through a poker mask of wrinkles. In time he asked, "Where you come from?" And a minute or two later, "Where you go?" More silence, while he digested our answers. Eventually he pronounced, "You must be plenty rich tospend the summer paddling." Doug leaned back, grinned, and replied without a trace of the awkwardness I feared was lit in neon upon my face, "If we were rich, we'd have a boat with a motor like yours."Though we are far from rich and occasionally prey to bouts of motor envy, paddling is our preferred mode of travel, at least until our joints completely disintegrate. It allows us to tickle the shoreline, and opens our senses to the rhythms around us. We are more attuned to our surroundings when we are moving at only five miles per hour, maybe six on a good day. With hours to think, it is also a little harder to escape from ourselves.We always travel in two boats. This gives us an extra margin of safety and allows us to carry several months' worth of supplies. More important, such separation keeps us from hating each other. It would take better people than we are to share a small boat day after day and then to crawl into the same tent night after night, for weeks on end. Until 1994, there was also the practical consideration that we propelled our boats differently. I am firmly committed to rowing, which does not allow any part of my body to ride for free. My legs, when confined by the spray skirt of a kayak, instantly begin to twitch, and my arms feel cast in bronze. Doug favored kayaking for the first thirteen thousand of the miles we journeyed together; oddly, he thought it was important to see where he was going. But at last he converted, reluctantly acknowledging the greater efficiency and speed afforded by a sliding seat and long oars.Onlookers frequently remark that they would love to do similar trips if only they had the time, or the necessary experience. No matter how often I've heard these comments, they still give me pause. As for time, we give it a high priority; if we wait too long, we will be unable to row. And we've gained the experience by doing, stroke by stroke.Most often, though, people question why we undertake these trips at all. They might as well ask us why we breathe or eat. Our journeys are food for our spirits, clean air for our souls. We don't care if they are firsts or farthests; we don't seek sponsors. They are neither a vacation nor an escape, they are a way of life.On a trip down the Yukon River in 1987, we made a habit of asking Native people who lived along its shores how far up- and downriver they had traveled. Usually they had ranged less than fifty miles in either direction--some a little farther in these days of snowmachines and skiffs with hefty outboard engines. Just over halfway down the river, however, at about the twelve-hundred-mile mark, we met Uncle Al, an Athabascan elder. He was slightly stooped with age but straightened when he answered, brown eyes aglow. As a young man, he said, he had traveled by canoe all the way to the headwater lakes, and had also followed the river a thousand miles from his home to the sea. When we asked why, he looked puzzled. "I had to know where the river came from and where it was going." We give a version of the same answer. We do these trips because we need to. The world of phones, computers, and deadlines cannot compare with singing birds, breaching whales, magnificent light shows, and crackling ice.If, on the day I took possession of my first ocean shell from the canopy of a dusty truck, someone had informed me that I would row more than enough miles to take me to the far side of the world and back, I would have marveled at the notion. As with most burgeoning ventures, this book also began innocently, as a holiday letter sent annually to friends, family, and those who had helped us along the way. The letters were evidently passed along through a maze of unseen channels. Before long, we began to receive requests from people we'd never heard of to add their names to our mailing list. If laziness or a hectic avalanche season caused us to miss a year, we'd end up fielding phone calls fromobscure corners of the world from people who were sure we had met one too many polar bears.Still, I shared the skepticism of the round-faced Inupiaq man who, weary of passing visitors to the Arctic declaring themselves instant experts, invited us to his house for whale blubber only after I had assured him in good faith that I was not writing a book. It was not until our stories began to take on a life of their own--retold to us by people unaware of their origins and unlikely ever to find themselves experiencing the expanse of the Arctic firsthand--that the stirrings of the book within became much harder to ignore.In the last few years, I've felt increasing urgency to give voice to the caribou that graze without fear along the Labrador shore, to the wide-shouldered brown bears of the Alaska Peninsula who depend upon the annual migration of salmon, to fjords uncut by roads or power lines. Doug and I are drawn to northern latitudes not out of sheer perversity, as our families claim, but because we seek wild country. The prevailing nasty weather of the sub-Arctic and Arctic can be a great deterrent to both dense settlement and tourism. But during our travels, we've witnessed the lengthening shadow of our civilization's influence over remote corners of the natural world. What finally galvanized me into writing, though, was an even more tangible reminder of the fragility of all that surrounds us. When my mother was diagnosed with advanced cancer, she said, "You have to write this book before I die." I responded, "All right, but you have to live a long time."In the process of journeying, we seem to have become the journey, blurring the boundaries between the physical landscape outside of ourselves and the spiritual landscape within. Once, during a long crossing in Labrador, we found ourselves in fog so thick that it was impossible to see even the ends of our boats. Unable to distinguish gray water from gray air, I felt vertigo grabhold of my equilibrium, and the world began to spin. I needed a reference point--the sound of Doug's voice or the catch of my blades as they entered the water--to know which way was right side up. Rounding thousands of miles of ragged shoreline together, driven by the joys and fears of not knowing what lies around the next bend, has helped us to find an interior compass.Doug and I have awoken many Alaska winter mornings inside cabins so fogged with the warm vapor of our dreams that we couldn't tell if the dark shape outside the window was a moose or a tree. To bring the object outside into clearer view, we had to start within, scraping a hole in the frost with our fingernails. This book begins much the same way.Copyright © 2001 by Jill Fredston
Product details
- ASIN : B0058U7I6Q
- Publisher : North Point Press; First edition (October 10, 2002)
- Publication date : October 10, 2002
- Language : English
- File size : 1657 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 317 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #597,499 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #13 in Polar Regions Sports
- #19 in Polar Regions Travel
- #554 in Boating (Books)
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The sun reappeared shortly after Petersburg. In celebration, we stopped uncharacteristically early on the end of Cape Fanshaw, a low-lying peninsula that protrudes into Frederick Sound. Though shiny, sculpted pebbles spoke of frequent waves, the sea was docile that day. As soon as we landed, we began to turn in circles, like chickens on a rotisserie, binoculars and cameras in hand. All around us were humpback whales, at least twenty-five of them, spouting geysers of spray, swimming with gentle undulations of their dorsal fins, leaping into clear sky, and slapping the water with their fifteen-foot side flukes and broad, notched tails. A mother and clad eased by, their sides touching. Only a hundred yards away, a forty-foot whale repeatedly torpedoed free of the water, twisted sideways in midair, and landed with a cannonlike explosion. Another whale, closer to shore, continuously and deliberately beats its tail against the water like a gong.
Jill Fredston was a competitive rower in college, she is an environmentalist and an avalanche expert with her husband Doug Fesler. Together they spend their summers engaging in mind boggling Arctic trips. Jill rows while her husband Doug paddles in a kayak. This works well for them as it provides them with a good 360 view with Jill rowing backwards and Doug facing forward.
Rowing to Latitude is a memoir giving the reader a glimpse of the forces that shaped Fredston's life, her philosophy as well as following along on her amazing journeys. We are introduced to some of the Inuit people who she meets on her journeys, we admire the wildlife and are scared by bears during the night. Jill takes the reader through some truly scary moments she has had in her boat and we witness some extraordinary sights as a whale suspended in an iceberg high above their heads by Spitsbergen Island.
For those who are fond of the environment and love tales of travel and adventure Rowing to Latitude is a great book to read
Reviewed in the United States on October 15, 2023