2013 read #38: My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George.

My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George
181 pages
Published 1959
Read from March 16 to March 17
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

This is another juvenile lit book I first encountered in one of my brother's English primers. I forgot all about it until I found it while looking for Julie of the Wolves. I didn't like this one so well as Julie. While charming for the most part, in places it gets mechanical, as if written by a real live 12 year old boy more interested in sharing the particulars of his subsistence than in telling a good yarn. Nevertheless, it was mostly charming. My one hike in the Catskills last June primed me to find this book especially winsome. I could picture Sam's woods and gorge perfectly. I'm glad Craighead George made a point of detailing how crowded the Catskills get with hikers and poachers; even a book set in the 1950s would have a hard time pretending the Catskills were outright wilderness. I did find it implausible that so many adults would casually aid and abet a young runaway, especially Bando the teacher, but what do I know? Maybe their indulgence seemed more plausible when this was written. And maybe my own personal sense of adequate parentage is far too civilized and soft, because I kind of felt that Sam was a dick to leave his family for no real reason, and his parents were assholes for letting him. But the author basically proclaimed this was her wish-fulfillment fantasy in her preface, so maybe I shouldn't read into it too much. I just thought Julie was a better book because Julie actually had, you know, a reason to be among the wolves.

I find it interesting that "running away to the woods" is (or was?) a common childhood fantasy, not just mine. The idyll of Tom Sawyer on the island and Huck Finn on the raft were always my favorite portions of their respective books; by the time I was 14 or so I was certain that after I left my father and made a lot of money from my best-selling novels and long-distance hiking narratives, I would retire to build my own shack in some remote corner of the deep woods in the Montana wilderness. I didn't know then that hikers get everywhere, of course, but it was a persistent fantasy. I clung to it for at least a couple years. I didn't plan out the little details, like how I would feed myself and survive the -40°F winters, but it was my little mental refuge for a time. Sometimes the idea still has undeniable appeal, even if I'm more likely to wish for a summer vacation cabin instead.

Now I'm tempted to see if my library has a copy of Krakauer's Into the Wild handy. That would be a funny-ironic pairing.