Gary Paulsen - Brian's Return

For nearly twelve years I lived completely in the bush. For most of that period if I did not kill it with a bow and arrow or grow it in a garden or pick it in the woods (berries and hazelnuts) I did not eat it. I supported a family off the woods, as perhaps Brian will. We bought only salt and seasonings and clothing. All food and shelter and heat came from the bush or a garden and it must be said that the quality of the food I ate then far surpasses anything I can buy from the store now, either vegetable or animal (though I am now a vegetarian) and it was perhaps the healthiest time of my life.

Once you have seen the horizon, have followed it, have lived with nature in all its vicious beauty, it is impossible to come back to ‘‘normal’’ life. Like Brian, I tried. I bought a house in town with a yard and neighbors — because I thought that was the thing to do — and inside a week I was pacing like a panther in a cage, trying to see out, see across the town to the hills, to the trees, to the woods.

I simply could not do it. I went back to a hut in the mountains of New Mexico and though it was a small version of the bush — I had neighbors as close as three miles away and it was only twelve miles to a small town — I could see the trees and the sky and the horizon and for a time it kept me from going insane. But it was still not enough, still only pretend wilderness, and I found myself taking longer trips on a horse, days at a time, until I would hit a fence that stopped me, and in the end it was the same as before: I paced, pulled against the imaginary chain that held me, hated not being able to move toward the horizon. . So then I discovered sled dogs and ran two Iditarods.

When I developed heart disease after running those two races I had to give up my sled dogs and could not live in northern winters, and that denied the wild to me. I could not go back to the bush as Brian does in this book, though I tried several times, and I’m not certain what would have become of me had I not rediscovered the sea.

The sea saved me, and it continues to save me. I have always loved it, and at times in my life I had small boats and sailed, not on any long trips, just to local areas in California. But I had moved away from the coast and about the time it became evident that the hut in the New Mexico mountains was still too ‘‘tame’’ (if that is the right word) I found the sea again, right where it has always been, bought an old thirty-eight-foot sailboat, which I spent two years restoring, and went out into what is possibly the only big wilderness left — the Pacific Ocean.

I am there now. It is the winter of 1997–98 and El Niño has made it impossible for me to get across the Pacific until spring and so I sit in San Diego, repairing bits on the boat that seem to break simply because they are on a boat.

I have made two trips down to Mexico with the boat — she (boats have lives, souls, and they are feminine) is named Felicity —to see the Sea of Cortez. Last spring I took her from Mexico up the west coast of the United States, up the inside passage to Alaska, and then turned and came down the outside back to San Diego in preparation for going across to Hawaii, then down to the Marshall Islands and from there to Australia.

Unfortunately, as Brian finds on his return to the bush, man may propose, but nature disposes. El Niño has intervened and is lashing the ocean between San Diego and Hawaii with storms and wild southwesterly winds that Felicity could not possibly buck.

And so I am writing this on a laptop while seagulls fight over garbage up in the Dumpster at the top of the public docks. There is a soft rain coming down— I can hear it pattering on the skylight hatch over my head — and I have Mozart on the tape player while I wait.

Not long. Just until the wind changes. And then I will go again — always, as Brian must always go.

Gary Paulsen

On the sloop Felicity

San Diego Bay, February 1998