****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
I think I know why Richard Proenneke was up there in the wilds alone. This gentle, unforgettable man was also a craftsman and a perfectionist. His quest for beauty in the mundane, for precision and geometric elegance would have driven me -- and lesser beings like me -- nuts. Reading about it made me able to fall in love with the man. Living it would have led to the authorities searching for the body. Having said that, however, I must also say that this incredibly readable book is a treasure. It should not be overlooked.Author Sam Keith (who bases the book on Proenneke's journals) captured the sights, sounds, smells and tastes of the bush. This is the story of a cabin. Richard Proenneke builds it by hand, to his own unbendable standards of practicality and aesthetics, and makes the reader love every minute of it. Interspersed within this chronicle are Proenneke's encounters with bears, weasels, birds, wolverines and other humans. Proenneke admires critters. It's only the two-legged varmints that offend him, offend nature, and most of the time, destroy it randomly. His encounters with animals are laugh out loud funny, touching, impressive; his encounters with humans -- or their aftermath -- do not say much for us as a species.Recently the local PBS station ran two films about Proenneke, using his own footage. It was a thrill to see the cabin I'd so often imagined, to look closely for the wolf print on the fireplace, to share his encounters with bears, moose and various camp robbers. But best of all, for me, was to watch him painstakingly his food cache. This project is a pefect example of doing things right and doing them well. The cache was a miniature replica of the cabin, meticulously crafted on the ground, then disassembled, the pieces carried up to a high(out of the reach of bears) platform, and carefully reassembled there. How can you not lose your heart to a man who would trouble to do that...just for the sheer joy of doing it.Proenneke was not a prig, by any means. Not an anal-retentive pencil straightener...just someone whose soul would not permit cheapjack, shoddy work. In one of the documentaries, we get a perfect example of the difference. While everything is the cabin is rough-hewn, it is aesthetically pleasing and perfectly designed. Utilitarian and, in its own way, beautiful. But when Proenneke's sister sends him a pair of kitchen curtains, our pragmatic loner finds a nice stick and uses that as his curtain rod. Perfection is never smug.Proenneke is a hero, a man in full, an icon, and maybe the last of his kind. His book is unforgettable. I hope you experience it.
