Griffiths gave up her job and sold everything she had to go and spend seven years of her life travelling in the world’s wildest and loneliest places, and living with the rugged, capable and wonderful peoples who still know how to survive in the wild.
In the Amazon, she asks what is the worst thing that could happen to her. La muerte, claro (Death, of course) is the blunt reply. It does not put her off.
The parts of Wild are Earth, Ice, Fire, Air, and Mind. Each one takes
fifty or eighty pages in the telling – and represents a year or more of
Griffiths’ life. It is an astonishing undertaking, indeed truly “elemental”.
Griffiths was a journalist, but in Wild she consciously chooses to abandon “the bounds of my tribe (physical bounds and intellectual bounds)”, preferring “the real outside”. Her descriptions are accurate, but intensely coloured by her experiences – alone on the ice or in the rain forest; in the company of the Inuit, the Aborigine, the Amazon tribes.
She is not afraid of ‘purple prose’ here and there, nor of admitting anger with white man’s racism – the despoliation of Australia, the scorn for “the idea of there being a famously large number of words for snow in Inuktitut”. For there really are many:
“When Igloolik residents were asked for [a] compilation of words for ice and snow, they provided a hundred or so.”
It really shouldn’t be a surprise – skiers know half-a-dozen words (powder, crust, firn or neve, ice, junk, sugar, slush, piste, drift, mogul …) and that is based on far less experience than the Inuit’s.
“Pukakjiujaq is hard snow turning ever so slightly soft; the
best for igloo-building because it will heat faster.”
This is precise knowledge, both on the part of the vanishing Inuit hunters – nowadays they live in heated houses in towns, with freezers and televisions – and on Griffiths’: her journalist’s eye for attributable facts serves her well. Wild is a unique book: passionate, informed, deeply-researched, intellectual, scorched by the earth’s wildest places. It’s not easy to put down.
Buy it from Amazon.com (commission paid)
Buy it from Amazon.co.uk (commission paid)