THE CALL OF THE WILD
Author wonders how she can ‘live on this planet with sanity, if not joy’
Surrender: The Call of the American West Joanna Pocock House of Anansi Press
LONDON Yes, she was experiencing some sort of mid-life crisis. More urgently, Joanna Pocock adds with a smile, she was preoccupied with “the constant conundrum of a dying planet.” And always, as well, there was this restlessness of the spirit that has been with her since she was a youngster growing up in suburban Ottawa.
Which is why, in middle age, after years of living in England, this award-winning writer found herself immersed in the seductive, contradictory and often untamed mystique of the American West — finding it a vessel for her own personal struggles to come to terms with the stranger within herself and to deepen her own “awareness and connection with the Earth.”
In the process, she encountered a variety of cultures, many reflecting people living on the fringes and often entrenched in the political extremes of left and right. She experienced nature in its purity, which felt good, as well as in its plundering, which felt terribly wrong. And, as she witnessed a tribal bison hunt in Yellowstone National Park, went picnicking with an antigovernment “patriot” group, bonded with a 61-year-old transsexual person who brought new meaning to the idea of living off the land, and attended an eye-opening Ecosex workshop, Pocock continued to be driven by her own sense of urgency.
“How can I live on this planet with sanity, if not joy?” she kept asking herself. And the question continues to nag her now that she and her family are back in London after their sojourn away from home.
“If there’s one line that kind of sums up where I was with this book, it’s that one,” Pocock says now. The book in question is Surrender, now published in Canada after a critically praised arrival in Britain earlier this year. It’s an elegantly written travel work about one British-based family’s decision to move to Montana and experience the changing landscape of the American West, both social and cultural. But on another level, it’s a journey of meditation in which Pocock chronicles her own effort to come to terms with the shifting landscape of life itself.
“It’s very hard to live on the planet today with sanity because what we’re doing seems insane to me.” The Canadian-born Pocock is chatting quietly in the lounge of a central London hotel, far from the U.S. mountain states — places that for her had instilled both a wondrous sense of Eden reborn and a piercing awareness of a planet in peril.
London had been her home for many years when suddenly, approaching 50, she realized she now had more past than future. “In the beginning of the book, I talk about this mid-life restlessness that my husband and I were grappling with. We really wanted to leave London and try something new.”
More specifically it had to be a place “where the fabric of our lives and the rhythm of our days would be different.” So Pocock, her U.s.-born husband and six-yearold daughter ended up in Montana, where a bedroom window opened to mountains and endless blue skies — and, sometimes, to the face of an inquisitive deer.
In truth there’s always been something of the nomad in Pocock, who admits to a “complicated” relationship with her hometown of Ottawa.
“I grew up in the Alta Vista neighbourhood and never felt I belonged,” she says now. She’s quick to say she doesn’t want to “demonize” Ottawa — yet it appears that even as a child she felt an undefined yearning for another kind of existence. “I found the alienation of the suburbs kind of soul-destroying.”
Yet Ottawa is a recurring presence in her book, most notably when the death of her father brings her back. It remains part of the fabric of her life, but it doesn’t ease her yearning for a true sense of place.
I don’t know how we can justify using up all our resources, burning up the Amazon, chopping down the trees, poisoning the rivers and the air. How we justify doing that is, to me, insane. That’s not to say we can’t come up with the answers, but we have to try in order to save the Earth, which is really my biggest concern.
“My passports are both Canadian and Irish,” she says, struggling to explain. “I don’t really know what I am — which again is partly one of my reasons for writing Surrender.”
Montana confronted Pocock with a variety of cultures and lifestyles, some alarmingly extreme.
“We all know that the United States has so much that is truly good and amazing and so much that is truly horrific,” she says. But she’s cautious in her book about passing judgment.
“It was very important to me when confronting the bad extremes to try to humanize them, to try to understand them rather to try to brush them away. I’m very curious, so my inclination when faced with things I don’t understand is to try to understand rather than just judge them.”
She sometimes sees her experiences as a series of vivid snapshots. She cites one revealing moment when she attended an anti-trapping event, and someone told her he could never live anywhere where he was the top predator.
“I thought — wow, that’s the problem. We can’t see ourselves as prey. We have to dominate. That was a brilliant moment for me. Another was wolf-watching — seeing a female and her cubs playing. It was just wonderful and reinforced why we need to protect these magical wonderful creatures.”
But there were also times of dismay. “In terms of bad things, the most unsettling aspect was the rise of libertarian individualism and militancy, and this idea of the West being for ranches and cowboys, not the original inhabitants.”
And she remains haunted by “the sheer destruction of the land, the poisoning of the rivers, and disregard shown to Native Americans ... the idea of destroying wilderness for human habitation was the norm where I grew up and it has taken time for me to come to terms with that.”
She finds it unbearable that children may be destroying their health digging for cobalt in a developing country in order to extend the battery life of a smartphone in North America. She’s confounded by the fact that “people in northern Ontario have no clean drinking water while Nestlé ships bottled water around the world.”
Yet for all the eloquence of her own writing, she argues that the simplest of actions can help — for example, banishing plastic from one’s life.
“I don’t know how we can justify using up all our resources, burning up the Amazon, chopping down the trees, poisoning the rivers and the air. How we justify doing that is, to me, insane.
“That’s not to say we can’t come up with the answers, but we have to try in order to save the Earth, which is really my biggest concern. How can we steward the Earth into a future?”