True North A Journey into Unexplored Wilderness

by Merrick, Elliott; Millman, Lawrence

• ISBN13: 9781556439094
• ISBN10: 1556439091
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-05-04
• Publisher: North Atlantic Books

Summary

While many people dream of abandoning civilization and heading into the wilderness, few manage to actually do it. One exception was twenty-four-year-old Elliott Merrick, who in 1929 left his advertising job in New Jersey and moved to Labrador, one of Canadars"s most remote regions. First published by Scribnerrs"s in 1933,True Northtells the captivating story of one of the high points of Merrickrs"s years there: a hunting trip he and his wife, Kay, made with trapper John Michelin in 1930. Covering 300 miles over a harsh winter, they experienced an unexplored realm of nature at its most intense and faced numerous challenges. Merrick accidentally shot himself in the thigh and almost cut off his toe. Freezing cold and hunger were constant. Nonetheless, the group found beauty and even magic in the stark landscape. The couple and the trappers bonded with each other and their environment through such surprisingly daunting tasks as fabricating sunglasses to avoid snow blindness and learning to wash underwear without it freezing. Merrickrs"s intimate style, rich with narrative detail, brings readers into a dramatic story of survival and shares the lesson the Merricks learned: that the greatest satisfaction in life can come from the simplest things.

Author Biography

Elliott Merrick was born in Montclair, New Jersey, the son of a New York-commuting executive. After graduating from Phillips Exeter Academy and Yale University, Merrick took a job as a reporter with the Passaic Daily News. In 1928 he became assistant advertising manager for the National Lead Company, his father’s company, but Merrick seemed to have nature in his blood and, in 1929, he left the business world behind and joined the Grenfell Mission in Labrador, Canada, as a summer WOP (Worker without Pay). He loved Labrador and its people and was able to stay in the region by taking a teaching assignment for the Mission in Northwest River. It was there that he met and fell in love with the Mission’s resident nurse, Australian-born Kate (Kay) Austen, whom he married in 1930. They lived for a brief time in a small cabin near the current site of the huge Goose Bay Airport. After a number of adventures in Labrador, the Merricks returned to the United States, living in New Jersey and Vermont during the middle of the depression. Elliott Merrick later taught English at the University of Vermont. He is the author of seven other books, including the best-selling Northern Nurse.

Excerpts

January 6
In those books of Arctic exploration that Stefansson describes as mere catalogs of hardships, there are seldom any accounts of the inconvenience of a nose, particularly a runny nose. Perhaps a nose is hardly suited to tales of Arctic feats. One wonders how Inuit manage their noses so well, how it is in the long years of evolution that they have not contrived to grow fur on them or lose them entirely. The greatest hardship of the trip to me is a raw, red nose that drips like some damp rock in a cave, simply from the cold, not from a cold. No one ever has a cold on trips like this. Colds grow only in places where every known means of science is organized to prevent them.

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Excerpted from True North: A Journey into Unexplored Wilderness by Elliott Merrick
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