Author: John Daniel
Publisher: PUBLISHERS GROUP WEST, May 2006
Binding: Softcover
ISBN: 1-59376-105-8
Synopsis
With writing as skilled & beautiful as Jon Krakauer's, John Daniel tells his intriguing & unusual tale of 6 months spent alone in nature. 6x9 inches, 352 pgs.
More Information
In November of 2000, after the presidential election but before the final results had been handed down by the Supreme Court, John Daniel climbed into his pickup, drove to a remote location in Oregon's Rogue River Canyon, and quit civilization. The strictures were severe with no two-way human communication not even with his wife and no radio, no music, not even his cat. He would isolate himself in a cabin sure to be snowed in soon after his arrival, intent on hearing no human voice but his own until spring thawed the road. This experiment in solitude was an attempt to clarify his identity while pursuing daily life without the distractions of the world at large. Daniel had spent a week or two alone before, but this would be an entirely new challenge, and as he drove off into the mountains he felt a fear-tinged freedom. Rogue River Journal chronicles his journey in solitude, a season of memory, and his search for a coherent place to stand on the earth.
He was intent on not hearing a human voice other than his own for the next six months. Thoreau's Journals were there, of course, for instruction and inspiration. In addition to the physical rigor of working in isolation, Daniel had assumed a hard spiritual task in deciding to live alone: to confront his now dead father. Rogue River Journal is the result, with writing as skilled as Jon Krakauer'sa remarkable memoir of both vivid present and past interwoven.
"Part memoir, part family portrait, part natural history, part Zen journal, John Daniel's study of solitude, self, and father is intricate, straight-facedly funny, unflinchingly honest, and as satisfying in the end as a long stay beside the great green river that helped give it birth." - David James Duncan, author of My Story as Told by Water
