It’s a shame that you don’t know Gary Paulsen, that his name was never as recognizable as a Beverly Cleary (“Ramona the Pest”) or an Eric Carle (“The Very Hungry Caterpillar”), all of whom wrote books for children and all of whom died last year.
At least, I’m assuming you’ve never heard of Gary Paulsen. It’s a big assumption. His books sold more than 35 million copies, and if you came of age in the past four decades and had a thing for survival stories, chances are good you read him. Either way, your children will know him, and their children will know him. His best books appear timeless.
Still, now’s a good time to catch up.
January in Chicago, February in Chicago, mud season, ice season, the doldrums of another pandemic winter, the settling depression of a fresh chance at normality already slipping away. A lake so slate and overcast you don’t know where the sky begins. You just want to stay in and read stories about people who made calm out of chaos, and here you go. Paulsen grew up in Chicago, then crafted meaning out of hopelessness.
I’m whining about icy sidewalks. This guy escaped into the Minnesota woods along the Canadian border and flourished. Sometimes literally, certainly spiritually, he rarely left.
He was often compared with Ernest Hemingway, who was also fond of the wilderness, wrote brisk sentences full of violence, and wore a white beard and weathered face; but Chicago can’t claim two Hemingways, and I suspect Paulsen would have found Papa Hemingway kind of soft. After all, he once told NPR that Jack London — whose “Call of the Wild” and “White Fang” were obvious forerunners to Paulsen’s work — was a great writer but he “didn’t know what he was talking about.” London had a modest childhood, though compared with what Paulsen lived, none of us know what we’re talking about.
Paulsen was a soldier, a truck driver, a paperboy, an actor, an alcoholic (sober for the last 50 years of his life). He was an animal trapper, and sometimes a farmworker. He also made cheese, and was a writer for the original TV series of “Mission: Impossible.” As an adult, he lived in the Minnesota woods for nearly 20 years, deeply impoverished. You’ve only dreamed of leaving home to join the circus. At 14 years old, Paulsen did it.
Read enough of Gary Paulsen and you’ll think: Well, of course he did that, too.
He did everything.
Mostly though, he wrote. He wrote a lot. He wrote many, many adventure tales, most of which were culled from the details of his own life. He was so prolific that sometimes it seemed we would reading something new by Gary Paulson indefinitely. He wrote more than 200 books, for young adults, and grown-ups, though that line was fuzzy. The children he wrote about were like himself, forced to grow up quickly. Indeed, he before he left Chicago, he had lived a childhood so harsh and cruel, Dickens would have paused. He left and faced down nature, then as an adult, he sought out adventure.
He died of cardiac arrest last fall at his home in New Mexico. He was 82. But he finished one last book, which plays like the culminating words of a life stuffed with incident. “Northwind” reads in an elemental, back-to-basics register. It is about a Nordic boy who escapes a cholera outbreak in a wooden canoe, setting off for the Pacific Northwest. In an author’s note, Paulsen describes this setting as a “mythical frontier, inspired by the North American coast I traveled as well as the Norwegian coast of my ancestors.” Though it reads quite close to a fable or ancient Nordic legend, Paulsen then mentions that, oh, most of what happens to the boy in this, it also happened to him. For instance:
“Once, in the middle of the night in bad weather where the Columbia River comes slashing out to the sea, I had been caught up in dodging half-sunken logs pushed out of the river into open water — many boats have been sunk by them over the years — and I accidentally moved between what I found to be a large male orca and his family pod.”
That’s a footnote in the life of Gary Paulsen.
To be honest, read enough of him, some stories blur together. Last month I wrote a brief, year-end eulogy: His greatest hits are unmissable. He had three honors from the Newbery awards for children’s literature, for “Dogsong” (1985), “The Winter Room” (1989) and “Hatchet” (1986), his beloved classic, about the young survivor of a plane crash in the Yukon who learns to navigate the woods with only a hatchet. Which did not happen to Paulsen. Still, he wrote in 30th anniversary edition of the book, it came from “the darkest part of my childhood,” and when his character refuses to leave the fire he built behind, you suspect it’s more out of rare comfort than pragmatic survival. Paulsen often wrote straight memoir. If “Northwind” feels like a return to the core of Paulsen’s craft, “Gone to Woods,” which came out a year ago, read like a summation of his life and what he has learned. It was a third-person memoir, with Paulsen identifying himself only as “the boy.”
As I wrote last month: It recounted how he accompanied his mother to local bars, where she danced and flirted with strangers, who, in turn, would buy Paulsen fried chicken dinners so they could be alone with his mother. If no one was noticing her, he would stand on bar stools and sing for attention. That was the routine. She worked in a munitions factory, then took her son to local bars, daily. Eventually, she pinned a note on his shirt and put him on a train to Minnesota, to live with relatives in the North Woods.
I repeat that here because it helps explain why someone would escape into a forest. Paulsen once explained: “The woods were the first place I knew I belonged, where I was capable and I felt competent.” It’s also a harrowing image of World War II-era Chicago. All of that singing and flirting — often in a dive bar cynically named The Cozy Corners — was how Paulsen’s hard-drinking mother fed her son. So he left for his extended family, many of whom were Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, the classic Midwestern immigrants who populate his novel “The Winter Room.” He would describe himself as “the cousin who showed up” at relative’s farms. He flitted about, rarely living in one place for long. Eventually his parents — his father was on General Patton’s staff during the war — returned to get him. After which, things got worse. They drank, fought. Paulsen told Terry Gross that: “I would go down to the basement and hide from them. And around back of the furnace, there was an old easy chair with wires sticking up through the springs and a singe light hanging from the ceiling ... I’ll never forget that corner.”
Then again, he didn’t forget much.
His grandmother was a cook for a crew building roads into Canada. That’s the backbone for his novel “The Cookcamp.” In “Gone to the Woods” there’s a story so hard to shake you don’t even mind you already read it in his 1993 memoir, “Eastern Sun, Winter Moon.” He and his mother took a ship to the Philippines to visit Paulsen’s father who was stationed there, and on their way, they witness a plane crash in the ocean and its passengers attacked by sharks. He writes: “It took a long time for my eyes to close and stay closed and not make the pictures of the boats and the sharks and the screams and the woman putting her baby on the wing again and again while the sharks hit her.”
He wrote a number of times about the Iditarod dog-sledding races though Alaska, because Paulsen himself ran it a number of times. He liked to describe it as “primitive exaltation,” an experience so close to nature that he started to feel like a cave painting.
He told interviewers that his publisher, expecting a new book on the races, once asked him to quickly finish the latest manuscript, since they didn’t expect him to survive long.
Yet he lived long enough to write Westerns, and mysteries, books of humor and books about farm life, even several historical adventures. “Woods Runner” (2010) took his prototypical self-reliant 13-year-old and set the action during the Revolutionary War. He began writing novels in the mid-1960s, and it was slow burn; not until the mid-1980s was Gary Paulsen anything like a success. Even then he was never an ostentatious one, preferring, as his New York Times obituary noted, to live “simply — if not off the grid, then right at its edge.” He was, if nothing, consistent. He wrote of his adoptive Minnesota relatives treating him as a man, never a child, and his books continued that.
He repaid that gift.
He was given a library card when he seemed headed for a life of TV repair, and he never stopped forgetting, writing about the difficulty of surviving childhood with clarity, candor and hope. Read Gary Paulsen. “Northwind” is a good place to start. “Gone to the Woods,” too. Ask any kid who reads: “Hatchet” is hard to put down. Don’t worry if you’re an adult. Just read him. These are smart novels about cold, fire, hunger, exhaustion, being in over your head, then the realization, you are everything you need.
