REAL SELF-ISOLATION

Guy Grieve once spent a year in the Yukon, 300 miles from the nearest human, and found it a transformative and revelatory experience

Ionce lived in isolation. Profound isolation. I was thirty, I’d built a cabin three hundred miles from the nearest road, deep in the wilderness of the Interior of Alaska. I was ninety miles south of the Arctic Circle. I’d cut a mile-long portage through pure bush and forest up to a beaver lake where I cleared a site for the cabin amidst stands of white spruce and birch and cottonwood trees.

Across the lake, miles upon miles of black spruce grew only five or six feet high, inhibited by the perma frost that lay a few feet down. During the cabin build I lived in a canvas wall tent fitted out with a wood burning stove. I laid spruce boughs on the cold ground and a tarp over that and built a strange bed frame made of lengths of springy birch upon which I placed a length of plywood and my thick canvas bed roll.

Each day six more minutes of light was lost as winter began to tighten her knuckles over the land. Grizzly bears roamed about, feeding hard in preparation for hibernation. Beavers slapped the water with their flat tails as they hauled in the last of their food supplies to underwater ‘stick-piles’ and Bull moose, the world’s largest deer, weighing in at 1,500 pounds and high on testosterone, crashed through the woodland all around.

A wolf pack had settled on some high ground called Pilot Mountain and as I sat hunched beside my little fire I’d hear their lilting cries rising up before being whipped away by the winds barrelling in from Russia.

The Yukon river itself, a waterway as wide as a motorway, was un-navigable due to ice floes the size of cars. The clammy claw of winter was taking hold of every spot of water available: the little beaver lake also began to freeze up, its tightening new ice emitting long ululating pings and warbling sounds. It was the ‘ice singing’ as bush Alaskans told me later. No bush plane could land on the lake.

My world had become momentarily blue but largely black as the sun, far away to the south, only popped up for a few moments before completely disappearing for another day. In short, this was lockdown Alaska-style and it was the perfect place to lose my mind.

I kept sane by imposing a routine of reward and work. I let myself sleep in late only on Sundays. Mealtimes and cooking became a ceremony of wellbeing and after five o’clock each night a large tot of good whisky made me smile like an impoverished gold-miner who realises he has just hit the mother lode.

I worshipped my fire – it became winter’s fruit to me. But surprisingly quickly I stopped thinking of the outside world and instead cultivated a joy in the little things and in simplicity.

Books – and their unrivalled, beautifully slow release of imagery – allowed me to travel and guided my thoughts. I fell back on a mix of old school and leftfield favourites: there was the complete works of Shakespeare, rich with meaning and sustenance; the bible and its ludicrous Old Testament; and finally a script from the incomparable Woody Allen. All gathered to give me company and provide me with some much-needed mental sustenance.

But above all of these imaginary friends and distant mentors, it was the company on that trip which really renewed my spirits. Fuzzy, my camp dog, was half golden retriever and half poodle. Loyalty and intelligence were bred into him. For hours we would stare into each other’s eyes as we tried to understand each other. It comforted me to watch him pad about our encampment, endlessly exploring his environment and ever-alert for new dangers.

During my little forays outside I watched nature intently. I stared at the night sky and opened myself to the fresh simplicity of a world that would continue long after our money grubbing species was gone.

Later on when I could travel again I journeyed seven hours by dog sled to Galena and outside the general store a strikingly beautiful Athabascan woman asked me where my camp was while I loaded my sled.

She heard I was living alone and laughed. ‘Sounds like you got a good camp – but without a woman it’s only a half life,’ she said.

She was right, and not for the more obvious and earthy reaons. If you’re lucky enough to be with people, take this time to go on journeys with them that life and its pressures don’t normally allow. There’s a million miles of wilderness within people you might have taken for granted for years…

“I soon stopped thinking about the outside world and cultivated joy in the little things