Читать книгу Arctic Daughter - Jean Aspen - Страница 12

PROLOGUE

More than four decades have elapsed since two naïve kids followed their dreams down the Yukon River and up into the mountains on a remarkable adventure. What for me began as a hiatus from college would ultimately become a lifetime centered on wilderness.

In updating my books for a new generation, I am grateful for this chance of amending some inadvertent slights and for the opportunity to add a note about sequence. In the original book I thought to honor the privacy of others by using pseudonyms, yet twenty years later when I again paddled out of the mountains with my husband, Tom, and our young son after another year in the wilderness, I was remembered in the little Indian village. “Why,” people asked me, “did you change our names?” Referencing my early journals, I now wish to set that record straight.

In addition, because Phil and I lived in the Brooks Range for nearly four years, some events were included that compress those seasons. For example, the hike to the Arctic Continental Divide occurred in the summer of 1977, but to keep the book a reasonable length, I originally placed it in 1973, where it remains. In rereading this time capsule of my life, I was tempted to amend and polish my youthful voice, but have generally left it frozen in time. What right have I to direct that hopeful girl from my height of sixty-four years? Let her have her adventures and ideas, her untarnished enthusiasm. Any who wish to follow her wandering footprints into maturity can do so with my other books and documentary, going where she could not—across the mysterious expanse of my lifetime.

Wild Blessings,

Jeanie Aspen, October 2014