North to the Night: A Spiritual Odyssey in the Arctic
by Alvah Simon
List Price:
Our Price: $2.69
You Save: $12.26 (82%)
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Buy Used: from $0.64 (click here)
Category: Book
See more book details and other editions
Book Summary Information
Author: Alvah SimonEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 1999-09-14
ISBN: 076790446X
Number of pages: 328
Publisher: Broadway
Book Reviews of North to the Night: A Spiritual Odyssey in the Arctic
Book Review: Brilliant Adventure, Excellent Story
Summary: 5 Stars
We are, many of us, driven by something. We may not understand it, but still we answer its call. For Alvah Simon, it is the call to explore.
Fortunately for his fellow adventurers, Simon can write too. In the prologue, Simon describes one moment from the literal dark night of his journey.
"As the snow hurls, horizontally, my tracks fill and begin to fade. It is a race now, for even a slight deviation from my outward course will take me past the salvation of the boat and on into an eternal emptiness. My hands probe frantically. I think, 'Surely I have gone too far,' and the dread of death fills my stomach."
Simon, his wife Diana and his cat Halifax sail to the top of the world to endure a winter encased in ice. After arriving at the winter-over point, Diana is called away by a family emergency. A radio call to an Inuit village 100 miles away brings men on snowmobiles to take her from the ice leaving Simon and Halifax alone.
Few people spend a single night alone under the stars. Simon spends months alone in a place where the smallest mistake can kill you. Even greater than outer dangers, are the inner demons released in stillness.
In reading this book, I found myself trying to bridge the gap between my own experiences and Simon's. Yes, I've been cold, hungry, alone, and afraid. But Simon has battered the edges of possibility so profoundly that the gap simply cannot be fully bridged. Still, he brings us close.
From the beginning, his journey is risky. With only a tiny window of travel between break-up and freeze-up, Simon and his ship-mates race North. One early night, he is speeding along when two tankers who had been travelling with him fall behind and he feels a shadow of fear. Still, he charges ahead until:
"A chill and then a shape appeared out of the fog -- a wall of ice, granite-hard, bow-crushing, bone-breaking ice. I slammed the helm over, ran up to the bow, dropped the yankee, and reefed the main."
In the next port, Simon pours out his tale to a stranger who responds simply "He who knows nothing, fears nothing."
Many days later, and facing a mechanical problem, Simon attempts to dock at a remote U.S. military base and is turned away.
"As we sailed away, I sadly looked over my shoulder at the exact spot that Knud Rasmusssen and Peter Freuchen first called "Ultima Thule." The last unknown is no longer. With radars and radios and airplanes and rockets, they were defending freedom as they understand it. By pushing on north and out of this region entirely, I was defending freedom as I understood it."
The meat of the story, I leave to Simon. But I will tell you that in the end -- after enduring months of cold, darkness, solitude and fear -- Simon finds the freedom he defends in the fearsome being of a Polar bear.
"I took one more step. The bear grunted and rocked forward. I opened my arms, turning my palms to the heavens. ...the bear rose above me, a horrible mountain of fang and claw, crushing power, and lightning speed.
The moment hung in its own eternity. And then the bear spun around and slid away in great strides across the tundra. I stood stunned and faint, my soul indelibly embossed with the bear's message: "Here I give you back your life. It has been washed pure by your fear. Enjoy it deeply, learn from it daily, and use it wisely, for there is a purpose larger than yourself."
This is a brilliant adventure, beautifully told. Read it.
Summary of North to the Night: A Spiritual Odyssey in the Arctic
In June 1994 Alvah Simon and his wife, Diana, set off in their 36-foot sailboat to explore the hauntingly beautiful world of icebergs, tundra, and fjords lying high above the Arctic Circle. Four months later, unexpected events would trap Simon alone on his boat, frozen in ice 100 miles from the nearest settlement, with the long polar night stretching into darkness for months to come.With his world circumscribed by screaming blizzards and marauding polar bears and his only companion a kitten named Halifax, Simon withstands months of crushing loneliness, sudden blindness, and private demons. Trapped in a boat buried beneath the drifting snow, he struggles through the perpetual darkness toward a spiritual awakening and an understanding of the forces that conspired to bring him there. He emerges five months later a transformed man.
Simon's powerful, triumphant story combines the suspense of Into Thin Air with a crystalline, lyrical prose to explore the hypnotic draw of one of earth's deepest and most dangerous wildernesses.
Following his "Arctic dreams" that began with a photograph of the haggard crew of the ill-fated ship Endurance, Alvah Simon and his wife, Diana, set sail to winter in the high north. "We call them explorers, but I knew that look in their eyes," Simon writes of the early Arctic adventurers. "They were seekers, and that is a different thing." With self-discovery as a deeper agenda, the couple ventures into Tay Bay of remote Bylot Island; it is their ultima Thule--"the Last Unknown." Their small boat is willingly frozen in the ice. When Diana is airlifted out of the Arctic to tend to an emergency back home, Simon is unexpectedly left in solitude. His journey turns inward as he confronts the "uncomfortable awakening of my spiritual self." In the waning daylight, then total darkness, Simon's days are punctuated by depression and mania, a crackled voice over the radio, Inuit visitors, and hard-earned lessons as he is driven by the forces of the Arctic winter and by "the total loss of the sun." In this elegant, well-paced book, the Arctic darkness becomes a psychological landscape perforated with light and revelation, and Simon's thrilling tale is as captivating as his language. There is a welcome intimacy here as we share the same icy hull, listening close to this searching man. Simon courageously tells us about his darkest moments, dreams, and nightmares, and when the sun emerges, new eyes greet land and relationships. Simon has discovered his ultima Thule. --Byron Ricks
Travel Books
Book Subjects
- Arts & Photography
- Audiobooks on Cassette
- Audiobooks on CD
- Biographies & Memoirs
- Business & Investing
- Children's Books
- Comics & Graphic Novels
- Computers & Internet
- Cooking, Food & Wine
- e-Books
- Engineering
- Entertainment
- Gay & Lesbian
- Health, Mind & Body
- History
- Home & Garden
- Horror
- Law
- Literature & Fiction
- Medicine
- Mystery & Thrillers
- Nonfiction
- Outdoors & Nature
- Parenting & Families
- Professional & Technical
- Reference
- Religion & Spirituality
- Romance
- Science
- Science Fiction & Fantasy
- Sports
- Teens
- Travel
Most talked about in The Northlands
Not Really an Alaskan Mountain Manby Doug Fine
Alaska Northwest Books; Published: 2004-09-01; Paperback; Book
Best price: $5.17
Price in other shops:
Death in the Grizzly Maze: The Timothy Treadwell Storyby Mike Lapinski
Falcon; Published: 2005-04-01; Paperback; Book
Best price: $1.00
Price in other shops:
Walking the Big Wild: From Yellowstone to the Yukon on the Grizzly Bears' Trailby Karsten Heuer
Mountaineers Books; Published: 2004-11; Paperback; Book
Best price: $3.95
Price in other shops:
This Raw Landby Wayne Short
Devils Thumb Pr; Published: 1968-09; Paperback; Book
Price in other shops:
The Klondike Fever: The Life and Death of the Last Great Gold Rushby Pierre Berton
Basic Books; Published: 2003-12-16; Paperback; Book
Best price: $6.34
Price in other shops:
True North: The Yukon and Northwest Territories (Illustrated History of Canada)by William R. Morrison
Oxford University Press, USA; Published: 1998-07-16; Paperback; Book
Best price: $48.50
Price in other shops:
Call of The Wild, White Fang (Bantam Classics)by Jack London
Bantam Classics; Published: 1991-03-01; Paperback; Book
Best price: $0.29
Price in other shops:
Trail to the Interiorby R. M. Patterson
Horsdal & Schubart Publishers, Ltd.; Published: 1993-06; Paperback; Book
Best price: $106.41
One Man's Wilderness: An Alaskan Odyssey (Anniversby Sam Keith, Richard Proenneke
Alaska Northwest Books; Published: 2003-06-01; Paperback; Book
Best price: $8.99
Price in other shops:
Alaska: Saga of a Bold Land--From Russian Fur Traders to the Gold Rush, Extraordinary Railroads, World War II, the Oil Boom, and the Fight Over ANWRby Walter R. Borneman
HarperCollins; Published: 2003-02-01; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $6.89
Price in other shops:
Similar Books and other products
Before the Wind: True Stories About Sailingby David Gowdey
International Marine/Ragged Mountain Press; Published: 1994-02-01; Paperback; Book
Best price: $5.95
Price in other shops:
Falling Leaves: The Memoir of an Unwanted Chinese Daughterby Adeline Yen Mah
Broadway; Published: 1999-04-06; Paperback; Book
Best price: $2.65
Price in other shops:
Arctic Dreamsby Barry Lopez
Vintage; Published: 2001-10-02; Paperback; Book
Best price: $8.46
Price in other shops:
Godforsaken Sea: The True Story of a Race Through the World's Most Dangerous Watersby Derek Lundy
Anchor; Published: 2000-06-06; Paperback; Book
Best price: $3.63
Price in other shops:
On the Water: Discovering America in a Row Boatby Nathaniel Stone
Broadway; Published: 2003-07-08; Paperback; Book
Best price: $4.79
Price in other shops:
Desperate Voyageby John Caldwell
Sheridan House; Published: 1991-09; Paperback; Book
Best price: $9.00
Price in other shops:
Arctic Crossing: One Man's 2,000-Mile Odyssey Among the Inuitby Jonathan Waterman
The Lyons Press; Published: 2002-09-01; Paperback; Book
Best price: $7.95
Price in other shops:
Adrift: Seventy-six Days Lost at Seaby Steven Callahan
Mariner Books; Published: 2002-10-17; Paperback; Book
Best price: $8.21
Price in other shops:
Sea Change: Alone Across the Atlantic in a Wooden Boatby Peter Nichols
Penguin (Non-Classics); Published: 1998-05-01; Paperback; Book
Best price: $15.90
My Old Man and the Seaby David Hays
Harper Perennial; Published: 1996-06-05; Paperback; Book
Best price: $0.94
Price in other shops: