Up North is a certain way the wind feels on your face and the way an old wool shirt feels on your back. It's the peace that comes over you when you sit down to read one of your old trip journals, or the anticipation that bubbles inside when you start sorting through your tackle box early in the spring. In this unforgettable collection of essays, Sam Cook portrays the enchanting North Country as a state of mind as much as a geographical area. Up North captures the mystic moods, seasonal subtleties, and colorful characters that fill the region from the Minnesota canoe country to the vast expanse of the Northwest Territories. Organized by time of year, Up North describes every season's pleasures--sled dog racing in winter, hooking a northern pike on the first spring fishing trip, building a summer campfire, watching the aurora borealis in fall. Up North is an invitation to explore canoe country through Sam Cook's eyes and your own. "My favorite book for thedreamers or for any outdoor person who enjoys a good story... Sam Cook is a master at weaving a tale."
An indispensable guide to learning about things that go bump in the night and are forever sucking your blood in the wilderness. Easily carried in a knapsack or coat pocket, "Up North" provides fascinating facts about the flora, fauna and other natural phenomena readers are likely to encounter outdoors in Ontario. Illustrations. color photos.
Up north ath the cabin, I am a great gray dolphin. The lake is my ocean... Up north at the cabin, I am a fearless voyageur, guiding our canoe through the wilderness... Up north at the cabin I am always brave -- even in the dark woods, when blood thumps through my head like old Ojiway drums. The magic of summer, the call of the north woods, and the exuberance of childhood imagination combine here to create a book that will be treasured long after the last autumn leaf has fallen.
Northern Michigan is a place, like all places, in change. Over the past half century, its landscape has been bulldozed, subdivided, and built upon. Climate change warms the water of the Great Lakes at an alarming rate—Lake Superior is now the fastest-warming large body of freshwater on the planet—creating increasingly frequent and severe storm events, altering aquatic and shoreline ecosystems, and contributing to further invasions by non-native plants and animals. And yet the essence of this region, known to many as simply “Up North,” has proved remarkably perennial. Millions of acres of state and national forests and other public lands remain intact. Small towns peppered across the rural countryside have changed little over the decades, pushing back the machinery of progress with the help of dedicated land conservancies, conservation organizations, and other advocacy groups. Up North in Michigan, the new collection from celebrated nature writer Jerry Dennis, captures its author’s lifelong journey to better know this place he calls home by exploring it in every season, in every kind of weather, on foot, on bicycle, in canoes and cars. The essays in this book are more than an homage to a particular region, its people, and its natural wonders. They are a reflection on the Up North that can only be experienced through your feet and fingertips, through your ears, mouth, and nose—the Up North that makes its way into your bones as surely as sand makes its way into wood grain.
What if your survival depended on the villainy you long despised? Sister and brother. A loyalty forged in the crucible of their tragic upbringing in the Northwoods town of Backus, Minnesota. Cass, a quiet young woman caring for the grandmother who raised them. Jack, a fugitive carrying a life-changing sum of stolen drug money. Desperate, trusting only his sister, Jack enlists her help in burying the cash in their grandmother's back acres. Cass agrees to the scheme, a decision that soon endangers not only her unassuming backwoods existence, but both of their lives. Jack returns to hiding, and Cass learns of the bounty placed on his head, as the cast of characters in their orbit-some villains, some saviors, some perhaps both-emerges. Their corrupt cop uncle and lawless cousins. Their father, a violent, conniving career criminal whom the siblings blame for their mother's unsolved murder many years ago. Claiming reformation, he pledges to ensure her and Jack's safety. Bowed by the burdens of her love for Jack, haunted by a past that seems poised to repeat itself, Cass realizes that her survival may depend on her own measure of wickedness.
Ted Egan was born in Melbourne and spent his first sixteen years there, described in his The Paperboy's War. Since 1949 he has lived and worked in the Northern Territory, now based in Alice Springs, performing, writing, singing and recording his own songs, and collecting those of others. He speaks two Aboriginal languages, and often lectures on Aboriginal language and issues. He is an inaugural Life Member of the Australian Stockman's Hall of Fame. In 1991 he was awarded the Order of Australia for 'services to the Aboriginal People, and for an ongoing and significant contribution to Australia's literary heritage through song and verse'. He was at one time a member of the Prime Minister's National Reconciliation Council. Author of numerous books, his last was Justice All Their Own, an account of the clash of cultures when Aboriginals speared a group of Japanese fishermen and a white policeman to death in the early 1930s. Ted Egan, 17, was going to stop over en route to Brazil, but he still lives in the Territory. Sitdown Up North scatters our pre-conceptions of what Territorians are like. Egan's palette goes beyond red ochre and sky blue. There are nut-brown metho-drinking scholars, a white man whose first language is Cantonese, a dusky mother who pursued her 'stolen children' and an ebony-coloured son patiently decorating his revered father's bones in rainbows of intricate design, for starters. A love of song tuned his ear superbly to the vagaries of Territorians' speech. There's the ABC we expect of any good Outback yarn Adventure, Brawls and Close-shaves. But more than that ... The author's work gave him a rare, privileged position from which to watch change coming over the land. His acquaintanceship has been extraordinarily wide and diverse: bums and bureaucrats, elders and activists, publicans and politicians, stockmen and nurses, all hues, young 'uns and flourbags, Lingari, Coombs, Roberts, Whitlam. Good listener, insatiably curious, historian, Ted Egan knows his Territory. Where the record isn't pretty, he doesn't flinch. Commitment to a fair go, quick sympathies for the oppressed, honest recall of youth and his love of the place and all its people make Sitdown ... moving autobiography, refreshing history and an exotic tour of one of the world's least understood places. 'A bloody good yarn ... a rambunctious, insightful and compelling account of Territory frontier life' - Tim Bowden ' ... lucky enough to witness the Territory during one of its most interesting stages. He happened to be in the right place at the right time in some cases the wrong time.' - Les Hiddens
