‘North Country’ Worth Reading But Chapters On Northwest Unfair

“North Country: A Personal Journey” By Howard Frank Mosher (Houghton Mifflin, 259 pages, $23)

Under ordinary circumstances, I don’t even pick up books by writers - male or female - exploring their own complex transitions at mid-life. There are simply too many interesting and well-written books available to spend an evening as witness to someone else’s often self-indulgent introspection.

So it’s with this bias firmly in place that I read Howard Frank Mosher’s “North Country.” This Vermont-based writer spent his childhood traveling north into Canada with his family to fish and camp, and he yearned to repeat the experience midlife. “In the summer of my fiftieth year the desire to make such a trip acquired a certain urgency. It’s not that I was experiencing a midlife crisis - I wanted to celebrate turning fifty by having a midlife adventure, instead,” Mosher writes in the prologue.

Forewarned, why, then, proceed? Because it’s tough to resist reading about our region through the eyes of a writer from somewhere else. To perhaps discover new insights about our terrain, or glimpse how others might view our ways of living and surviving.

And Mosher chose a trip across the continent - east to west - along the border that separates the U.S. and Canada as his midlife adventure. He’s not the first to either have this idea or to turn it into a book. The border theme has appeared in many books. Mosher followed the footsteps if not the very roads of one - “Walking the Line.”

That aside, Mosher’s something of a master storyteller and his tales of colorful people living along the border (and traveling back and forth across the boundary with apparent impunity) are delightfully entertaining. They become less so as he moves west. And, after pausing in Montana to - what else? - fish, he deals with the piece of the border that crosses the Idaho Panhandle and Northeast Washington harshly.

Certainly the type of people he sought out in Bonners Ferry, Idaho, in Northport, Wash., in Osoyoos, British Columbia, fit within his guidelines of the independent, spirited people who straddle the international border. However, when he devotes an entire chapter to the Randy Weaver-Ruby Ridge incident and then seeks out survivalists living off-the-grid in the mountains in Boundary County, who, exactly, did he expect to find? Gentle ex-hippies growing organic vegetables in bucolic valleys? To portray the folk who people this region of the border country through the snapshots of the Boundary County sheriff involved at Ruby Ridge, a survivalist, a chance meeting with a hunter who may or may not have been stalking Mosher is to dismiss who we really are in our diversity, our tolerances and our intolerances.

In the late chapters of “North Country,” Mosher hiked in the Colville National forest and then ran for the Pacific Ocean where he attended a sunrise church service north of Bellingham, stood on the last dry square foot of U.S. border territory and then left for home to write about the adventure.

Is Mosher’s unsettling portrayal of our region reason enough to forgo “North Country”? No, settle in and enjoy the storytelling through the bulk of the book and then steel yourself or thumb past the Montana, Idaho and Washington chapters to the charming Notes from the End of the Line.

, DataTimes