8. My Side of the Mountain

By Jean Craighead George

I was in Grade 6 when I was first introduced to My Side of the Mountain while attending Kerrisdale Elementary.  I, along with my two friends Ellen and Etta, was a bit of a teacher’s pet.  Mr Hoffman often gave us lunch money to buy him a sandwich at the nearby convenience store on 41^st Ave.  Looking back, it seems a little cringey now, but Mr Hoffman did provide some great reading material.  He was the sort of teacher who wore a suit to school every day, so not sure how much input he had in choosing the books for the curriculum, as the theme seemed to be surviving alone in the wild.  The three books I recall were Farley Mowat’s Lost in the Barrens, Scott O’Dell’s Island of the Blue Dolphins and Jean Craighead George’s My Side of the Mountain. 

Over the years, I’ve acquired copies of Island of the Blue Dolphins and My Side of the Mountain (my faves of the three books), including a copy of Frightful’s Mountain.  I recently found a copy of On the Far Side of the Mountain so felt I could jump into MSofM as I want to revisit the theme of wilderness survival for a short story I’m working on and maybe follow it up with the sequel.

 

These three books, MSotM esp, inspired my brief obsession with running away and living off the forest during my adolescence.  I had spotted a wilderness survival book at the Kerrisdale Public Library and promptly borrowed it.  I remember filling up my Steno spiral pad (the ones using green paper - Gregg ruled with a centre margin line – good for supply lists and shorthand notation) with drawings and copious notes. 

 

During this phase, I’d often fantasize about running away from home and living off the land somewhere in remote BC.  Sam Gribley had the advantage of having legacy family-owned property to use as a home base - his great-grandfather’s abandoned farm in the Catskill Mountains.  His motives were also different from mine – he had a true desire to live off the land, while I dreamed of getting away from my strict, oppressive parents.  I wasn’t happy growing up at home, so studying up on wilderness survival provided an outlet for my nerdy creativity and gave me something to distract myself from my depressingly cloistered situation.

 

Even at 12 years old, I knew the potential risks of a young girl traveling alone to a remote area of BC.  As an adult in the year 2025, My Side of the Mountain seems such an incredibly innocent and romanticized story of a 12 year old boy living like Davy Crockett in the Catskill Mountains.  It isn’t about whether Sam is capable of surviving on his own, or evading wild predators. Or how relatively easy it seemed to capture and train his falcon, Frightful, to hunt food for him.  Human predators also pose a potential threat. 

 

When Sam returns to his hollowed out hemlock tree, he finds a man there.  Hearing sirens earlier, he thought the man might be an escaped bandit, so he calls him “Bando”.  He turns out to be an English prof who got lost while hiking and decided to take a nap.  Sam and Bando become fast friends with Bando spending ten days with Sam helping him build a raft, make jam from the blueberries growing at the farm and carve whistles out of willow branches.  It goes to show how much innocence has been lost when someone like myself is surprised Bando didn’t take advantage of Sam in any way in the secluded forest.

 

Sam also steals deer carcasses from human hunters who have lost track of their prey.  I imagine a few of them would be mighty pissed and figure out that the rumours of a wild boy in the Catskills might be true, and start hunting for the kid.  But this never happens.

 

Then there’s the romanticisation of living off the land.  Not a word was used to describe how Sam deals with his own waste.  Does he dig a hole?  What does he use for toilet paper? Does he find a way to compost?  How does he keep his teeth clean?  He only got sick a couple times:  once almost succumbing to CO2 poisoning while sleeping in his tree from an unvented fire and another time from scurvy symptoms due to a lack of fresh greens in the late winter (quickly remedied with a hunger for rabbit liver).  He also never seems to injure himself, a miracle for a young boy living in the wild.

 

The book spends a fair amount of time describing the food Sam prepares and eats. He picks blueberries and strawberries that grow wild on his great-grandfather’s old farm.  He gathers wild onion and fragrant plants to add flavor to his meals, nuts and cattail tubers to supplement protein and carbs.  Learns how to make acorn flour, smoke fish and venison, and acquire salt from hickory sticks (when boiled dry they leave a salty residue).

 

Some of his meals include acorn pancakes topped with Bando’s blueberry jam.  Turtle soup.  Rabbit stew.  Pheasant pot pie.  Fish wrapped in leaves and baked in hot coals with wild rice. Boiled freshwater mussels with salt.  Then “take out meat. Eat by dipping in acorn paste flavored with a smudge of garlic, and green apples.”

 

For his first guest Bando, he prepares a feast:

 

“Brown puffballs in deer fat with a little wild garlic, fill pot with water, put venison in, boil. Wrap tubers in leaves and tick in coals. Cut up apples and boil in can with dogtooth violet bulbs. Raspberries to finish meal.”

 

Don’t get me wrong.  I enjoyed the food parts.  But the attention to detail could’ve also been paid to other important things.  For example, when Sam first set off for the mountains, he only had a penknife, a ball of cord, an ax, some flint and steel, and $40.  There was no mention of him acquiring more tools, but what did he use to cut up the deer into venison steaks to freeze for the winter?  Surely he didn’t rely on just his penknife and ax?

 

Sam’s parents are also praised for their unconventionality by allowing Sam such autonomy (though the mom does have concerns about being judged by normal society and by the novel’s end, the entire family leaves NYC to join Sam a la American Family Gribley). 

 

That being said, I can see why I loved My Side of the Mountain so much as a kid.  Despite the lack of useful info on how to survive four seasons in the Catskill Mountains and any sense of real risk, it was still a wonderfully written adventure story.  A true classic.  My daughter also read the book about a year ago, but as expected, it did not inspire the same sense of wonder and desire from her as it did me.  It was just lovely to revisit this book again after all these decades.