Customer Reviews

Going Alone: Women's Adventures in the Wild (Adventura Books)

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I can't recommend this book highly enough. I'm a single older woman who always hikes alone, because my friends aren't into hiking. I thought I was the only one in this situation and was beginning to think that there was something wrong with me, because I do enjoy the solitude of solo hiking. Then I found "Going Alone" in my local bookstore. I read a couple of pages and bought it. I found myself muttering, "Me, too!" several times while reading it.

The essays cover a broad range of outdoor pursuits and the writing is excellent. It is really an inspiration for the solo adventurer.

This is a collection of short essays from various female authors about their solo wilderness experiences. They include hiking and backpacking, camping, cycling in France, kayaking, technical climbing, cross-country skiing, sailing, a solo hike in Antarctica (!), caving, fishing in Alaska the day after 9/11, and trekking in Nepal.

Considering the variety and strenuousness of these trips, I expected a exciting book of adventure. I was surprised to find that the stories are thoughtful and introspective - sometimes downright spiritual - rather than exciting. Although once I thought about it, it made sense. Women alone in the wilderness aren't going to take any dangerous risks, so these generally aren't stories of travel mishaps or life-threatening survival situations. And since the women are alone (theoretically - see below), there's no stories of amusing companions, relationships, or lively conversation. Aside from descriptions of the things she sees, a woman traveling alone in the wilderness can only write about her thoughts and feelings.

So this makes for a slow, non-thrilling, read, yet a valuable one. Unlike some travel anthologies I have read, the quality of the writing is consistently high. Which also is not surprising when you think about it. It takes considerably more skill to write an introspective essay than it does to recount the story of an exciting adventure. Three of the stories are particularly outstanding: "In The Tracks of the Old Ones," by Geneen Marie Haugen; "How Shall I Pray," by Susan Marsh; and "Turning Back," by Sherry Simpson. All are about aging and facing the realization that you are not as strong as you used to be and can no longer do the things you used to. In Sherry Simpson's bittersweet story, that fact is realized in the body of her faithful canine companion.

I was puzzled by the inclusion of "Reference Points," by Elyse Fields. It's a good story. But it doesn't belong in this particular book, as it tells of exploring unmapped sections of cave with some teenage male companions. What's that doing in a book called Going Alone?

(223 pages)

Quotes from Going Alone:

"I'm all for enhancing and adorning, but at what point does enhancement become cover, mask, make-up; self-exile, self-vanishing? In a culture that values fleeting youth and beauty beyond all other facets of a woman, where is solid ground, the bedrock beneath her feet?

I walked an uncertain path between a youthful wildness that attracts its own unearned attention and the less-sanctioned appeal of a woman at a certain age, gone a little too wild. In a world where people are dying of starvation and epidemic disease, aging is an admirable event. But the educated West is alarmingly short on perspective and reason, and I was dismayed as any aging starlet at the palpable attention my mere physical presence no longer engendered." - Geneen Marie Haugen

"An icon of American beauty, Marilyn Monroe, once said, 'I want to grow old without face-lifts. They take the life out of a face, the character. I want to have the courage to be loyal to the face I've made.' But Marilyn self-vanished, and who knows if one legendary woman's loyalty to her aging self might have enlarged what the cultural eye regards as worthy of celebration." - Geneen Marie Haugen

"These were ordinary women, women who'd navigated careers, children, husbands, and more than the requisite tragedies, women whose imaginations had not atrophied along with their ovaries, physically and soulfully manifested women who'd left only a scattering of humble markers on their paths. Ordinary as limestone, ordinary as diamonds." - Geneen Marie Haugen

". . . how much easier to be a prospector than an adventurer. Looking for gold was solid reason to roam around these hills. But looking for glory, or looking for God - that's just asking for failure."

- Sherry Simpson

"I cried. This is something wilderness is good for: crying as loudly as you want, letting tears and snot run down your face as you shake and sob. I cried because this was not the summer I would walk alone after all. I cried because I hated the idea of retracing my steps. I cried because the shadowed hills ahead would not reveal their mysteries to me.

And I cried because every time I looked at my old dog's face, I could see death in it. I knew she would die some day, of course. We all will. You know it and I know it, but we know it as dispassionately as a memo, as formally as a warranty that we glance at once and then tuck away in a junk drawer we hardly look in. There is no gut truth in such knowledge. But in that moment I knew that my dog would die before long, ad soon enough, I will, too. I myself had seen the red and slick tenderness of my own organs. I had seen the future in a lonely old woman holding out a Polaroid of a tumor the size of a basketball.

This, then, was my only discovery: that I had reached the place where middle age tips into loss, when everything worth caring about begins to disappear - not just my beloved dog, but relatives, friends, my husband, time itself, and all its possibilities. For two days I had walked just to arrive at this place, just so I could recognize that in life there is no turning back." - Sherry Simpson

"People make journeys out of curiosity, angst, and unrelenting boredom. Some have a mission, a message, and some go hoping they'll stumble across one. No doubt plenty step off the edge because they're afraid - and travel can suspend the inevitable reality - of seeing things as they really are, or because they are faced with an unattractive choice. Nobler excuses, say discovery or perspective or a parallel universe, are easily exposed for the sorry affliction they actually rationalize: wanderlust.

You're either a wanderer or you're not. If you are, the world is your personal enigma, and terra incognita beckons suggestively with answers to questions you never asked, only to poke holes in things you thought you knew.

But sometimes you just need a break." - Annie Getchell

I was disappointed in this book. A few of the stories are interesting but I would not call camping in the backyard for an hour during childhood or kayaking the Hudson for an hour "wild" adventures. I also am turned off by some of the contributor's attmept at writing, trying too hard to be clever, and failing.

One of the reasons I go alone into the wilderness is I can't handle all these other women who have so many issues!! Everytime I take a girlfriend with me I have to hear all about her life problems and they just don't stop talking. If I was a guy this would make me crazy!! As a woman whose husband is Ok with me going alone, I enjoy what there is to see and experience out there, not my inner voice hashing over life. It seems most of these women go out there to prove something to themselves and others. . not many have reached the stage of just quiet enjoyment. (I guess that is as polite a way as I can say "unprepared and whinning") All that said this is a valuable book if nothing else because it is a look into the way women are raised to believe that happiness comes from someone else, not themselves. As a result it may take a few generations for women to become whole so they can see and appreicate the outdoors. Susan Fox Rogers reports the way things are and for that, and her excellent job of doing that I will continue to read her books. After all, her stories reinforce why I go alone and makes me less tempted to take someone.