Winter Kills

By Paul Gray

ISLAND SOJOURN by Elizabeth Arthur Harper & Row; 220 pages; $9.95

For most people, going back to nature means eating sugarless cereal or using a low-suds shampoo that smells like an avocado. Few actually light out for the wilderness and set up housekeeping, and those who attempt this transit from civilization back to the primeval usually find that they cannot get there from here. That is the upshot of Author Elizabeth Arthur's first book, and it is not exactly startling news. But Island Sojourn offers something much more durable than a scoop; the book is a graceful meditation on survival, both in a harsh external landscape and in the scarier terrain of the self.

The adventure begins in 1974, when Elizabeth and her husband Bob take part of their $18,000 nest egg and buy a three-acre island on Stuart Lake in British Columbia. Maneuvering a leaky river boat, the young Americans arrive in midsummer with a dog, a cat, their worldly possessions and high hopes: "We dreamed of making a permanent home in the wilderness, apart from the forces we thought were destroying and polluting the world." One of the first things they learn is that building a house from scratch is no way to cure materialism: "I have never in my life felt more completely tied to objects: raw materials and the tools to shape them with, garbage and structure." The house goes up, finally, but the money runs out before the place can be properly insulated. Elizabeth and Bob spend much of the bitter winter working at a bank and sawmill and living in a town some 40 miles away.

The next winter is better, at first. Though the winds howl and the thermometer dips to 50DEG below, the house is finished enough to stay fairly snug; it only catches fire twice. Between these moments of excitement, there is bread to be baked, books to be read, a crackling blaze in the fireplace to be contemplated. A dream of the counterculture seems about to come true, until cabin fever strikes. Suddenly, plates full of moose meat are being hurled about, hair is being pulled; Bob punches Elizabeth in the stomach. She writes: "I was free to hate him now, no doubts and no regrets. We could hate each other for having at last released the things we hated most in ourselves." The domestic turmoil subsides into a wary truce, but both parties know that they will never again winter there.

The backdrop of this psychodrama is irresistible to stay-at-homes. A bald eagle nests on the island; wolves come close enough to the house to be easily seen in the moonlight. Though she went off looking for permanence, Arthur discovers that she is a connoisseur of flux. The lake evokes her keenest descriptions: during a storm "the water was stirred every few minutes by a gigantic sweep like the slap of a hand." On a sunny day "the lake is ocean blue, throwing back the face of the sky and then catching it again."

Such pointillistic touches make Island Journey different from autobiography or nature writing. Though she sometimes takes herself a mite too seriously, Arthur gives an uncanny account of what her experience felt like. At her best, she can make a strange, unfamiliar setting provoke shocks of recognition.

--By Paul Gray

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