Paddling North

"Audrey Sutherland is not particularly famous in the adventuring world. I only stumbled across her because Patagonia, the clothing company, published some of her writing. She was just a woman living a normal, if slightly quirky, life with a normal-ish office job until she was in her 50s. Then she has this moment of looking in the mirror and she says to herself, ‘Why, you’re not getting any younger, are you?’ And from there she sets off. She does carry on her normal life, but every summer she goes off for a couple of months, kayaking up the beautiful coastline of Alaska through all the inlets and islands. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . She does some pretty tough, brave paddling but in a very relaxed, eccentric way. She’s got an inflatable kayak, a little yellow rubber dinghy basically, and she puts a very high priority on finding a scenic campsite every evening and cooking delicious food. I like that balance of things she does. Kayaking on your own is always quite dangerous anyway, but there are some extremely strong currents and very high tides. She has to do some quite big crossings, across open water from place to place. It’s way further than I would dare paddle in an inflatable kayak, so she’s pretty bold with what she’s doing. But she’s not on some great mission to prove something to the world, or to be the first to do x,y or z. She’s just going around doing what makes her feel excited, really. She’s trying to plot her way bit by bit right the way up the Alaskan coastline. She’s not ambling around, she does have an itinerary, but just for her own satisfaction. She meets vast numbers of bears and wolves and killer whales or orcas. On Robyn Davidson’s trip she seems to be mostly encountering horrible scary men, whereas Audrey Sutherland seems to be mostly encountering wild beasts. She deals with them fairly phlegmatically. What I liked about her book is just how down to earth it was and the priorities she has. Her reasons for adventure were quite different to a lot of stuff I’ve read. For example, she has recipes in the book. She makes a real effort to collect bits of seaweed and wild garlic along the way. She seems to have her priorities nicely sorted. Also, it’s quite inspiring that she began as a late middle-aged woman to do these sorts of things. She’s not this big strong person either. There’s one recipe she calls ‘Bear Bars’, which is essentially her homemade flapjacks that she takes on the trip. It’s a fairly standard recipe, but she says not to make them more than 24 hours before the trip begins or you’ll have eaten them all before you start. Then she writes about cooking wild mussels and things she can forage along the seashore. It’s stuff that you can make in the wild but it’s by no means survivalist food. And she takes along olive oil and she always takes a bottle of wine with her in the boat. But the takeaway of the book, the line that stands out for me is when she says, ‘Go simple, go solo, go now.’ It’s an amazing summary of how people should just get on with their adventures."