BEAR NECESSITIES
IF YOU’VE watched Escape to the Wild before – or the not altogether dissimilar Ben Fogle: New Lives in the Wild – you may have seen people who have left the rat race behind to live in some of the most extreme locations on Earth.
So at first glance, an episode about a couple who swapped London for Canada may not sound all that dramatic.
Yet as presenter Jimmy Doherty points out, this second edition, which takes him to the Yukon wilderness, gave him the biggest culture shock of the series.
He says: “I suppose out of all of them the Yukon felt like the most remote. It took me three flights and then a two-hour boat journey to get there. It was in the middle of nowhere! If I’d gone in one direction for two days, I would have hit Alaska, and still there would have been nothing.”
He undertook this trek to visit Neil and Louise, who live in a log cabin in Canada’s bear country.
As Jimmy discovers, it’s a certainly a great place for anyone in search of peace and quiet, but living so far off the grid wouldn’t be everyone’s idea of relaxing.
The presenter says: “There was no electricity, no running water. You fall into the illusion of thinking you’re in the woods at home, where you may not be able to see any signs of human life, but you know if you walk in one direction for an hour you’ll hit a road or a house, or hear an aeroplane. But there, you suddenly realise there is nothing; there are no people or footpaths, and just round the next corner there could be a bear or a wolf.”
With temperatures about to plummet, Jimmy helps Neil and Louise prepare for winter by gathering wood and hunting moose and grouse.
In the process, he realises that while their life may feel like an adventure, there is a price to pay for the scenery and solitude - and it includes hard graft and the dangers posed by their grizzly neighbours.
But while not every lifestyle featured in the series may appeal to him, Jimmy can see why some people would want to up sticks and try something completely different: “There was definitely an element of not wanting to live with regret. You go to every pub and there’s always a guy sitting at the end of the bar saying ‘I could have been this, I could have done that, I could have played for England.’
“I can understand the mentality of not wanting to live with regret, of preferring to fail, in trying to achieve something, than never do it at all.”
And that’s an approach he’s brought to his own career. Jimmy explains: “When I made the leap of setting up my own farm and leaping in to the unknown, I felt like I was building my own destiny with my own two hands, putting in the fencing, putting in the water, getting the electricity and the sewage system going, building my farm from scratch.
“In a very similar way, what these people have done is along those lines – much more grandiose, but comparable. It was a bit like a busman’s holiday, but with mosquitos!”
Or in this case, bears.