Customer Reviews

North Country: A Personal Journey

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North Country by Howard Mosher.
Review by Jules Older

Howard Frank Mosher celebrated his 50th birthday by taking a trip. With his wife's blessing, he loaded the car, got himself some letters of introduction, and started across country, alone.

As autumn was approaching, a southern route might have made the most sense. But not for Mosher. Since childhood, when he and his uncles spent their summers fishing the rivers of Quebec, he'd been fascinated by the north country. So deep was his borealphilia that he'd settled down and raised his family in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom, just a few miles south of the Canadian border. And now, as a 50th birthday present to himself, he set off to explore that border from one end of the country to the other.

In late August, he headed east into Maine, where "farmhouses still sport brown wreaths on their doors, left over from last Christmas." He drove past "listing, bullet-pocked drive-in theater screens no Technicolor presentation or titillating coming attractions have flashed across for years." He wistfully noted "semiabandoned main streets running quickly into the interchangeable edge-of-town commercial strips that the boarded-up downtown stores have defected to."

From the coast of Maine, Mosher pointed the car west. He'd stop whenever he found a reason to. The reasons included flying a light smuggling run with a Quebec bush pilot and learning tricks for catching poachers from an Acadian game warden. They included gaining a new perspective on gambling from a Mohawk leader and hearing local history from old-timers on both sides of the Canadian border.

Mosher also got some unwanted lessons. He was stopped by the U.S. Air Force near a missile silo marked, "Use of Deadly Force Authorized." He was kept awake all night in a cheap motel by a pair of extremely loud newlyweds through one thin wall and an irate trucker banging on the other. And in the mountains of northern Idaho, he was stalked by a camouflaged survivalist armed with a hunting bow and deadly steel-tipped arrows.

Sometimes, Mosher would come across people or places that reminded him of events in his past. On those occasions, he'd slip back for a chapter or two, either to the dying Catskills town where he was raised or to Vermont's Northeast Kingdom where he wrote his five previous books and raised his own two children.

Not every writer would choose to record some of these events, no matter how forcefully they came to memory. One Mosher might have preferred to forget was the response his first book, Disappearances, drew from reviewers. The Montreal Gazette headline put it succinctly: "VERMONT WRITER SHOULD DISAPPEAR."

Over the years, Howard Frank Mosher seems to have hardened up. Two weeks before the trip, Harper's rejected one of his stories as "too linear and old-fashioned." Mosher "nailed the note to the side of my own weathered barn and blasted the living hell out of it with my shotgun..."

Though he shot the review and not the reviewer, it does make one consider one's critical words with care. Still, two things could make this very good book better. One would be a longer tarry with people and places of unusual interest. When you're traveling, it's often hard to slow down, but I'd have liked some longer rest and reflection stops along the way.

But the thing that's really missing is a bloody map. Even better, a bunch of bloody maps. Why Houghton Mifflin didn't see that a travel journal demands charts of the places the author takes readers is a mystery. They could have used the endpapers, could have inserted a center-spread-could, if they were really ambitious, augmented the journey map with detail maps at the beginning of each chapter.

Without maps, the reader faces the choice of staying in bed and trying to imagine exactly where Minnesota's Mesabi territory and Montana's Sweetgrass territory really lie, or trudging downstairs to get the atlas. A warm bed is a terrible thing to leave.

The way to best enjoy North Country is to read it alongside Howard Frank Mosher's last novel, Northern Borders. Together, they are fiction and faction, historical and contemporary, about one place and many. What they share is a celebration of the North Country and a fair sampling of the work of a leading northern writer.

As I read North Country and recalled Northern Borders, I was warmed by the fact that this chronicler of up-country tenacity and grit didn't take the advice of that Montreal reviewer. I'm thankful Howard Frank Mosher didn't disappear.
Jules Older is the author of Cow, published by Charlesbridge.

Howard Frank Mosher is a gifted writer. His descriptions provoke the imagination into painting landscapes and portraits that the human eye ordinarily can't see. I found it literally impossible to put this book down, and I will definitely be reading the rest of Mosher's stories!

In honor of his 50th birthday, Howard Mosher decided to take a solo journey exploring his home ground. His chosen turf is the "north country," the borderlands between the United States and Canada. Mosher traveled from Maine to Washington, meandering a few miles one either side of the border.

In this account of his odyssey, Mosher intersperses short anecdotes from his life as a resident and traveler in these areas, combined with mini-sketches of the people and places he encounters. Nobody and no place merits more than three pages of Mosher's spare prose. Mosher voices himself in the taciturn manner of the hardy border people. He strives for a rough-and-ready effect, implying that his itinerary was haphazard, and that his encounters were primarily ones of chance. I suspect that a lot more planning went into the trip than Mosher suggests.

My favorite chapter was the one on "fresh starts," in which Mosher profiled people who had left one life for another. For Mosher, traveling through places both familiar and completely new was its own form of fresh start.

Howard Frank Mosher has crafted a warm, inviting story of his journey across the America via the backroads border of Canada. This book invokes the wanderlust... Read "Stranger in the Kingdom" and "Northern Borders" for superior fiction. Warm and intriguing.

I discovered Howard Frank Mosher's work by accident, while looking for something else. But it was a good accident. I haven't read any of his fiction yet, but this memoir of Mosher's picaresque journey from Maine to Washington across the top of the U.S. the year he turned fifty is an absolute gem. It may not exactly sparkle with definite highs and lows, but it does emit a steady glow of interesting observations of people he meets and the places he visits along the way. Of particular interest to me was his pilgrimage to the Whitemud River territory of southern Saskatchewan, along the Montana border, the country where Wallace Stegner grew up and described so vividly in The Big Rock Candy Mountain and other works. Mosher's musings on this area and his own obvious admiration for and tenuous connections with Stegner moved me enough to go to my own bookshelves and find a copy of Stegner's Wolf Willow, which had been languishing there for nearly a year since I bought it. And now I've begun reading it. As he traveled through the Big Sky country, he also mentioned a memoir by A.B. Guthrie I'd never heard of, The Blue Hen's Chick, which is now on my to-read list. I also remembered James Dickey's book, Deliverance, and the subsequent movie version, when Mosher told of meeting - and being briefly stalked by - an oddly sinister survivalist armed with a high-tech bow and arrow somewhere in the mountains of northern Idaho. And there was the lonesome cowboy he encountered, still pining for a woman who'd left him three years before; and the cynical yet hopeful small-town newspaper editor, trying to dry himself out along the fishing streams of Washington. The book is filled with small stories of people and places that make you stop and think about this beautiful country we live in. A damn good read. Thanks for writing it, Howard. - Tim Bazzett, author of BOOKLOVER

Despite its readable style and brief chapters, it took me about as long to get through NORTH COUNTRY as it took Mosher to make the trip that became the book's subject--a drive along America's Northern Border from the East Coast to the West.

The problem is that the book has a lazy quality. Each day, Mosher leaves his ramshackle motel, has coffee at the local cafe, and hunts up another colorful, independent-minded Northerner to talk to. The book should have been called PORCH COUNTRY, as he simply chats his way from coast to coast. Much of his material could have been gathered over the telephone. The book lacks momentum, and he has few adventures of note. He has to make a big deal out of minor events, such as a noisy honeymooning couple in the next room keeping him awake. Most of the distinctive wildlife he sees, such as a black wolf, is sighted from his vehicle. Everybody he talks to is another tough-as-leather Northerner as ready to take on an intrusive government as to battle the elements. Apparently, the North Country is devoid of whiny, dependent types.

Mosher does have a knack for striking up conversations with strangers, so he does learn a lot about the struggles and triumphs of lives far different than those of middle class Americans. The boundary country information he presents is fascinating, and I realized how little I knew about these regions. I actually do recommend the book for its amiable exploration of neglected peoples and regions; just don't expect a compelling narrative.

Oddly, after telling us how he motored from Vermont to Washington State, Mosher doesn't tell us how he got home. Did he ditch his car and fly back? Did he turn around and retrace his route? Did he race home on the Interstate, pedal to the metal? Perhaps I'm the only reader who found the omission curious. I hope he made it back okay.