Product Description

Jill Fredston has traveled more than twenty thousand miles of the Arctic and sub-Arctic-backwards. With her ocean-going rowing shell and her husband, Doug Fesler, in a small boat of his own, she has disappeared every summer for years, exploring the rugged shorelines of Alaska, Canada, Greenland, Spitsbergen, and Norway. Carrying what they need to be self-sufficient, the two of them have battled mountainous seas and hurricane-force winds, dragged their boats across jumbles of ice, fended off grizzlies and polar bears, been serenaded by humpback whales and scrutinized by puffins, and reveled in moments of calm.

As Fredston writes, these trips are "neither a vacation nor an escape, they are a way of life." Rowing to Latitude is a lyrical, vivid celebration of these northern journeys and the insights they inspired. It is a passionate testimonial to the extraordinary grace and fragility of wild places, the power of companionship, the harsh but liberating reality of risk, the lure of discovery, and the challenges and joys of living an unconventional life.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #166333 in Books
• Published on: 2002-10-10
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 312 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780865476554
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From Publishers Weekly
In this lyrical look at rowing some of the world's most isolated and pristine coasts, Fredston focuses as much on her personal experience and her relationship with her husband, Doug Fesler, as she does on their actual journeys. The two avalanche experts, researchers and rescue trainers canoe the Arctic and sub-Arctic coastlines of Alaska, Canada, Greenland, Norway and Sweden for three months out of each year. They travel together but in separate canoes: an apt metaphor for their marriage. An avid rower since childhood, Fredston ultimately landed in Alaska, drawn by its possibility and wildness. There she met Fesler, the state's leading avalanche authority. They worked and rowed together, and eventually fell in love. Fredston ably describes both the big picture the coastline, encounters with polar bears, the high-stakes game of second-guessing storms and tides and the details of their travels. Her description of the physical act of rowing is rapturous, even sensual: "Sculling is the closest I'll ever come to being a ballerina, to creating visual music." Fredston seems less at ease relating her mother's battle with cancer, near the book's end. Still, the book soars. "Wilderness rowing is far more than sport to me; it has been a conduit to know and trust myself," Fredston explains. "It is my way of being, of thinking, of seeing. In the process, rowing has evolved from something I do to some way that I am. Figuratively and literally I have spent years rowing to latitude." A must-read for armchair travelers, as well as a close and loving look at an intimate relationship.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Growing up in a house on the waters of Long Island, Fredston started rowing at the age of ten, when she got her first rowboat. She and her husband, Doug Fesler, are avalanche experts and codirectors of the Alaska Mountain Safety Center, but during the summer months they explore the desolate reaches of the North, traveling under their own power in oceangoing skulls and kayaks. This is the story of their 20,000-mile water journeys through Alaska, Canada, Greenland, Spitsbergen, and Norway. The pair sees the world pass by in reverse as they row, backwards, down remote rivers and along barren, rugged shorelines. They travel along many of the same routes that Jonathan Waterman detailed in Arctic Crossing (LJ 4/15/01), but Fredston focuses more on the trip and only respectfully mentions contacts with the indigenous people and their culture. Like Waterman, the couple encounters fierce storms, ever-present mosquitoes, and abundant wildlife, but Fredston maintains that it is worth facing all this adversity in order to see and experience the natural beauty of the North. Enjoyable and well written, this first book is sure to be popular in public libraries. John Kenny, San Francisco P.L.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Among the leading avalanche specialists in North America, Fredston and her husband, Doug Fesler, use the proceeds of their work to pursue their first love, rowing in a motorless bliss along the Arctic coastlines. This book started innocently enough--as an annual newsletter to the couple's friends. Often, the narrative flits from subject to subject with the disjointedness of a newsletter--but, then, adventures in the wilderness happen disjointedly. The author, no matter the trouble--bears pawing at her tent at night, storms causing her small boat to spin around in circles--seems to suffer from terminal optimism. The reader waits in vain for fear or terror to show its head. Consequently, some of the natural drama of these travels is lightened. For lives that are solitary, poor, nasty, and brutish, there are good reasons to make these treks. But for those who can't manage to do so, volumes such as this one are the next best things to being there. Allen Weakland
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

A superb book by a marvelous writer
This one of those books that is not only a page-turner, when you get to the end you peek under the back cover hoping there's another four hundred pages.

Arctic coasts seem to have been made for Jill Fredston and her husband Doug, and they for the coasts. As if their income career as Alaskan avalanche forecasters wasn't thrill enough, in summers they airfreight his kayak and her scull from this to that spot in the Arctic, and then row - yes, oars - 900 to 1,500 miles down rivers, along coasts, around islands like Svalbard (Spitzbergen on some maps) so remote that rare few have ever examined close-up the majesty of their unpeopled sides. They've been wined, dined, drank to, photographed, endured the insults of hostile locals, even shot at. Their litany of terrifying waveform to tremulous eddy is why this book is such a page-turner. Yet they keep going - 20,000 miles worth thus far.

Arctic seas are not for everyone, nor its shores. Times of paeanic bliss are cleft short by howling ice storms from out of nowhere. The inexpressible shoreside beauty of a hundredfold pod of whales is quite another thing if you are in a nineteen-foot rowing scull surrounded by twenty-foot thrashing flukes. The utter peace of standing before a 680-year-old, six-foot-diameter cedar is, a few hours later, a gut-wrenching horror trying to navigate through sucking tidal gyres like tornadoes of the sea, dozens of yards deep and just as merciless. They routinely assail waves that would give a Hawaiian surfer pause - not eight, not ten, but fifteen to twenty feet, whose tops are being truncated to spume by the wind. The Perfect Storm without a motor. The white shape afar in the midst of a skyscape of blue and worldscape of white is just another piece of ice till it rises to ten feet, has claws, and is charging at you, roaring, roaring. It is hard to believe that two 5" by 8" pages sprawled across your lap can evoke the same gut-wrenching fear as a Hollywood special-effects epic, but about a quarter of this book does just that. Perhaps they are so fearless because they are so well conditioned. Their resting pulse rate of 37 (versus 60 to 72 for most people) surely has something to do with their icy unintimidability.

Why would anyone in reasonable possession of their wits opt for this as a lifestyle? It's certainly not for merit-badge product endorsements. They are a very private couple, even humble when around people. Not so around sea, wind, ice, and cliffs. Ms. Fredston articulates her philosophy at the outset:

"In the process of journeying, we seem to have become the journey, blurring the boundaries between the physical landscape outside of ourselves and the spiritual landscape within. Once, during a long crossing in Labrador, we found ourselves in fog so thick it was impossible to see even the ends of our boats. Unable to distinguish gray water from gray air, I felt vertigo grab hold of my equilibrium, and the world began to spin. I needed a reference point - the sound of Doug's voice or the catch of my blades as they entered the water - to know what was right side up. Rounding thousands of miles of ragged shoreline together, driven by the joys and fears of not knowing what lies around the next bend, has helped us find an interior compass."
A little later, using images reminiscent of T.W, Eliot's poem "The Dry Salvages," she becomes that which she experiences:

"By the time I reached the sea, I know that I could do far worse than to live life like the Yukon [River]: Keep moving but find places to slow down. Don't go straight at the expense of meandering. Nurture others; accommodate both change and tradition. Savor the element of surprise. Be gracious, accepting, resilient."

Further on she again addresses her sense for spirit of place:

"Person, place, or thing? The games we played as kids had such seemingly simple answers. How can a person be a place? How can a place not become part of a person? We remember a place not just for its beauty but for the way that beauty made us feel; these feelings are woven into an emotional tapestry we call self. The most special places are the ones that give texture to our dreams, that ground us, make us whole, remind us of what is real."

Rowing to Latitude would be just another human-conquers-nature thriller if it wasn't for Jill Fredston's writing. Where has she been all our lives? Erudite, heartfelt, eloquent, adventurous, witty, tragic, liberating, concerned, poetic, blunt - all this can happen on a single page, and very often does. Her entire book has the quality of the moods of the sea, vividly personalized by her ability to melt the descriptive into the spiritual. She writes rings around the mass-market travel scribblers autographing books at Borders these days. It is a pity that she and her husband are Arctic devotees; there is a whole rest of the world that surely could do with her talent, with his compassion, with their insights. However, considering the fact that they think a fifty-degree day a swelter fit only for basking on a beach surrounded by icebergs, you know they would melt into popcorn oil if they tackled, say, Bali and the Sunda Islands.

So let's hope they don't run out of shorelines, their bones don't give out on them, and Ms. Fredston's hard drive doesn't crash. Five more books from them would be just about right. More pictures, too. The sixteen herein were a saucer of chip dip compared with the image banquet that is the Arctic. In this environment, where the energy of life is dribbled so sparingly, Ms. Fredston sees the underlying spiritual energy of the earth which must be before life can be, just as soul and heart must be before mind can be.

Fantastic
I can honestly say that normally I don't really care for books like this...basically it's an adventure journal with moments of introspection. I said basically because this book is much, much more. With a little caution I let the author, Jill (I almost feel we're on a first name basis), take me along for the highs and the lows of her adventures with her loving husband. Anything I say about it will probably not do this book justice. You don't have to be a rower, kayaker or even a nature lover to enjoy this book...the author has a little of everything for just about everyone. I only have two regrets: 1) I finished the book and 2) that it wasn't me that wrote this book!

Inspiring, Adventurous, Real
I just finished reading this book. I stopped part way through, because it was so good, I didn't want to finish it yet. Now, I'm going to name it as the book of the month when I host my book club next. This book is so fresh, so in-your-marrow real, so insightful, adventurous, and breathtakingly descriptive, it defies easy categorization. Ms. Fredston is a fantastic writer, and after hearing her words for the last 286 pages in my head, I sincerely would consider it a tremendous privilege and honor to meet her in person. She has sent me on a search for the woman in me who is so wise, so calm in the face of crisis, so adaptable, so loving, and so passionate about life and living it. I know I have emerged from this reading with a sincere desire to make my life what it is I desire, instead of waiting for "someday". I am thrilled to have her voice added to the voices of other women, so few, who lead us boldly into our dreams, fears, and wildest adventures. You must read this book, and if you have a daughter in high school or college, give her one as well.