Arctic Son: Fulfilling the Dream

by Jean Aspen

Overview

The chronicle of a family’s first year alone in Alaskan wilderness, Arctic Son is a poetic journey of discovery into what we value in life. In 1992 Jean Aspen and her husband, Tom, left Arizona and took their young son to live in Alaska's interior wilderness, building a cabin out of logs, hunting for food, and letting the vast, harsh beauty of the Arctic close in around them. While Jean had faced Alaska's wilderness before in a life‑altering experience she described in Arctic Daughter. This journey would be different. Dogged by sickness and hardships, cut off from the rest of the world, her family faced not only a test of endurance, but of its own well‑being and survival. From a daily struggle against the elements to an encounter with a grizzly bear at arm's length, from moments of breathtaking beauty and self‑realization to a harrowing, six‑hundred‑mile river passage back to civilization, Arctic Son chronicles fourteen remarkable months in the Alaskan wilderness. At once a portrait of courage and a heart‑pounding adventure story, Arctic Son portrays a family's extraordinary journey into America's last frontier.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781941821008
Publisher:	Turner Publishing Company
Publication date:	04/09/2014
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	276
File size:	6 MB

About the Author

Daughter of arctic explorer Constance Helmericks, Jean Aspen began life in the wilderness. Throughout six decades, the natural world has remained central to her. Jean is the author of Arctic Daughter and Arctic Son. She and her husband, Tom Irons, live in Alaska and spend much of each year in Alaskan wilds.

Read an Excerpt

Near midnight we were jerked from sleep by the drone of a small plane! Pulling on jackets and rubber boots, Tom and I rushed down to the delta and lit our signal fire. The sky was burnt orange, but the land lay in deep shadow. The fire gusted brightly, blowing sparks across the sand. Spent from this small exertion, Tom returned to bed with our sleeping child while I watched the plane transect the valley in a hunting pattern. Finally it turned toward us. Shivering in my night clothes, I lay on the tarp, holding my hands over my head to indicate that I needed help. At last he spotted me and began to circle. I could see that he was on wheels, but I tried to indicate with gestures that the river was our airstrip. A streamer on the ground caught my eye in the twilight. I ran to pick it up and found a small plastic bottle tied to one end! I hadn’t seen it fall. Inside was a note. With shaking hands I opened it and read: “Hello from the Civil Air Patrol! We have notified the State Troopers that you need help. If you need immediate medical attention split your fire in two. You can turn off your ELT now.” Immediate medical attention? I wondered. The word “immediate” was the problem. I didn’t want food dropped, and I didn’t want help next week. I made up my mind and split the fire. It turned out to be the wrong answer, but as I’d told Luke, sometimes you make decisions without all the information. You do the best you can. I returned to bed but not to sleep. They had come! My family would be all right. I must have dozed, for my dreams included a familiar chop-chop-chop sound, growing insistently louder. “Helicopter!” I yelled, bolting upright, my heart pounding. It was twilight, the sun not yet up. I slid on my down vest and rubber boots and rushed for the beach where a large, serious-looking, army helicopter was settling in a tornado of sand. Two olive clad men with a stretcher ran toward me. “We heard there was a guy with a heart attack!” one of them said as we met. I felt bewildered. “We’re expecting a floatplane,” I began. “My little boy was bit by a squirrel and we’re concerned about rabies, but my husband is too sick to canoe out. I think he has TB.” They led me to the chopper where I again yelled our story to the grim looking pilot and copilot. The four men shut down the engines with a slowing whine of blades then followed me across the delta, shiny black boots sinking into the mud. It all seemed very unreal. Realizing the expense and trouble this trip had entailed, I was embarrassed that a Medevac team had come. The men were tired from the long trip and lack of sleep. We were beyond their normal range and they had taken out the rear seats to load extra bladders of fuel. Within our dim cabin the medic examined Luke’s fingers (now almost healed) with a flashlight. Then he listened to Tom’s chest with a stethoscope and asked him questions. The men had a whispered conference and one of them said, “You definitely need medical treatment and should both be seen by a doctor, but this isn’t an immediate emergency. It’d be better if we called someone else to come for you.” We later heard that private ambulance and charter companies resented lost business. “That’s fine,” we agreed, “but we need to get out soon.” I gave them the Warteses’ phone number saying, “Tell the pilot the river is high but clear of ice.” They said they would radio in flight. With that they were gone, leaving me feeling like Alice in Wonderland. I had reached a state where nothing seemed real. “Do you think anyone is on floats yet?” I asked Tom as the staccato of the chopper died away. “I hadn’t thought of that.” “Well, it’s out of our hands. Even if it takes two days, it’ll be a lot faster than the river. And safer.” “I know,” he said, softly. “I couldn’t sleep last night, thinking of the river. In my shape we might have all been killed.”

Editorial Reviews

A must read for any parent (and their children) who has ever contemplated the wonder of nature.”—Jonathan Waterman, Author

From the Publisher