John Brady's Weblog

I enjoyed the early part where Guy Grieve described why the 9 to 5 in a large city was so soulless, and why he wanted a more direct connection with the world itself, and how he was attracted to and fascinated by Alaska.

Then, of course, he travels to Alaska, and sets about getting established with somewhere to live before the winter sets in, which he wants to experience. And that is when things got really weird, and I ended up questioning whether what I was seeing was really what happened.

First, he arrives in Alaska in late August / early September, with between 4 and 6 weeks before the snows arrive. In this period he has to build his own log cabin, from scratch. This is just too late to turn up and expect to get it all done before the cold spell hits. He should have turned up in July, and become acclimatised and accustomed to Alaska. Why did he leave it so late? Why did he not go out one month earlier? It just does not make any sense at all to go out that late in the season, and that close to the snows arriving.

Then, he meets up with Alaskan people that he has already been in contact with, and who will be helping him out, one way or another. This smacks of quite some prearranging on his part, to contact these people, make these agreements, and arrange access to the land where he is to build a cabin and stay the winter. How these arrangements were made is not explained. Very mysterious. If he had really been in contact with locals, he should have known to come out earlier in the year, as mentioned.

Guy then goes out to the remote area, sets up a tent, and begins cutting down trees in preparation for building his cabin within 4 to 6 weeks. Or rather he doesn't. He cuts down one tree, which falls onto his tent, and has to repair this mess. Instead of getting back to the tree cutting after this, he spends the next 2 weeks simply wandering around the area, with no sense of urgency at all, looking for food supplies, and not cutting down a single tree. This is bizarre behaviour. He knows he has less than 6 weeks before the snows, and just wastes 2 weeks wandering around on his own, without a care in the world.

He is saved when his local contact, Dave if I remember correctly (but I could be wrong), turns up to check on his progress. Within one day Dave has a number of trees cut down, properly, and is showing Guy the correct way to do everything.

At this point, the camera crew that has been with him these past 2 weeks leave. They come back 8 weeks later, after the snows have arrived, and the land is snow covered and the rivers and lakes frozen. Guy is now living in the log cabin, that he has built himself. And it looks impressive too. A well built, single room cabin. But hang on. How did Guy manage to build this to such a high standard when he couldn't even chop down a tree? We are shown early on that Guy is an office worker, who uses a telephone and computer keyboard each day. There is no mention of him having any wood working skills at all. Where did all this ability come from?

I can only conclude that Guy did not build the cabin himself, but instead his local contacts came in and did it for him. Otherwise he would have frozen to death in his tent. The log cabin looked exactly how it should be, with no skewed or leaning walls. All the logs were true and straight, and laid on top of each other, and striped of bark. And all this done by someone who couldn't even chop down a single tree on his own? I don't think so.

I know from reading a few books on Alaska, such as "One Man's Wilderness" by Sam Keith, that an important part of a cabin in Alaska is making it free of air leaks. If there are any major holes, then the heat will leak out and the cold come in - very quickly. And key to minimising the holes is preparing the logs, so that they are straight and true, with flat, even sides that will sit square on each other. There is no way that someone such as Guy, with no previous wood working or cabin building experience, could have built a log cabin like that in 4 weeks, and have made it well insulated enough to withstand an Alaskan winter.

Then someone loans Guy a dog sled team. This is not something done lightly in Alaska, as it takes time and money to feed and train a dog team, and they can be very valuable. No way is someone just going to loan a good dog team to a complete stranger with no prior experience, who wants to look after the dogs many miles away. Again, more signs of behind the scenes work and preparations.

Furthermore, Guy is over 50 miles away from the nearest village. So he is going to have to look after these dogs, and feed them every day. Again, this is a massive risk, letting a working dog team go with a complete stranger, who has to feed them every day to keep them alive. If he gets anything wrong, so far away from help, the dogs will just die. And where does the food for the dogs come from? Clearly a team of six or eight dogs is going to eat a lot more than one man. So where is Guy getting all of this food from, to feed himself and these dogs, each and every day? At various points it is made clear that Guy is not a natural hunter, and has almost no success in shooting or catching anything.

Later on we learn sometime during January / February that Guy has not eaten meat for over a month, and is trying to capture come beaver in a nearby lake. So what has he been living on then? Clearly he has a massive cache of supplies of dried and preserved goods by the cabin, to live on during the winter. And this is what he is living on. During the whole programme we only see him get one grouse like bird and one beaver. So, he was never in desparate circumstances during this self imposed exile. And how did he afford all of these supplies, bought in advance? I know from reading on the web that he was sponsered by a Scottish whisky company. Clearly some of their money was used on these supplies he bought.

It would seem that neither the television company or the whisky sponsor wanted Guy to be seen to fail, so behind the scenes they made sure that everything he needed was provided for.

The television programme came over very much as telling a story of a family man, troubled by the modern world, who needed to reconnect with nature in some way. And off Guy went to Alaska, built his own log cabin, survived all on his own, and came back home a better person for it. Which I do believe to be true.

But I think they left a lot out, such as the sponsorship money, the vast supplies of food stored in a cache by the log cabin, who really built the log cabin, and what else he did during the six month long winter? He didn't seem to achieve anything at all other than staying alive. All in all it felt like someone had promised a meal full of special tastes, but instead delivered something very bland that left you wanting more and wondering what was left out that could have made it much more interesting.

I've bought the book he's written about his adventure - Call of the Wild - so I'll see what other details he gives about what really happened.

# posted by John Brady @ 3:59 pm