“Alone Against the North” by Adam Shoalts

I first heard about Adam Shoalts — Canada’s Indiana Jones, as one journalist dubbed him — from my wife’s uncle. I was preparing a series of talks for a children’s camp that would all be structured around “adventure.” The angle I was developing was that life with Jesus was the greatest adventure of all, but I wanted to draw on real stories of adventure and adventurers as analogies. My uncle-in-law thought Adam Shoalts might fit the bill perfectly.

Adam Shoalts is an adventurer. I am not sure if he just doesn’t have the fear function that most of us have, the one that protects us from taking unnecessary risks, but he doesn’t leave that function turned on. There are moments in the book where he describes something like a mild anxiety, but usually it’s because his rickety canoe is on the edge of a massive waterfall and is about to tip over.

The book clips along at a fairly quick pace and has a lot of interest throughout. From time to time, I did wonder if the stories he was sharing were true. After all, he’s alone against the north. Oh well, I guess we just have to trust that it’s true.

I’ve read one other Adam Shoalts book, Beyond the Trees, which I actually enjoyed quite a bit. Although I did enjoy a lot of this book, there was a tone issue throughout that tripped me up. Whether he intends to or not, Shoalts comes across in these pages as extremely arrogant. (This characteristic was also noticed by at least one reviewer, who said that Shoalts’s trip appears to have been “powered by ego as swollen as a James Bay thundercloud”.)

One of the drivers of the way Shoalts comes across is in the way he talks about his “friend” Brent who initially accompanied him but finally had to leave when the trip proved too difficult. I was repeatedly reminded in these accounts just how much power the author holds in telling the story. Brent comes across… terribly. Rather than be critical of him, though, I find myself asking why Shoalts felt the need to go into as much detail as he did about Brent. There surely was a better way to tell that part of the story. Again and again, Shoalts describes all the ways that Brent failed him and all the ways that he nobly soldiered on. This thread in the book was disappointing to encounter and grating to read. I admire Brent for taking the high road.

I did enjoy a lot of the book, despite these passages and the arrogant tone. This is one of Shoalts’s first books, so possibly that contributed to it. Beyond the Trees did not give this impression (although it was only written four years later).

Furthermore, the adventures that Shoalts is describing are one-of-a-kind. They spark the imagination in a way that feels uniquely Canadian. As Margaret Atwood wrote in her book about Canadian literature:

What a lost person needs is a map of the territory, with his own position marked on it so he can see where he is in relation to everything else. Literature is not only a mirror; it is also a map, a geography of the mind. Our literature is one such map, if we can learn to read it as our literature, as the product of who and where we have been. We need such a map desperately, we need to know about here, because here is where we live. For the members of a country or a culture, shared knowledge of their place, their here, is not a luxury but a necessity. Without that knowledge we will not survive.