Wintering, by Peter Geye
It seems like we are in the grip of an endless winter here in Minnesota. That is merely fatigue speaking, as we see another 40 degree day full of promise slag into a greyness full of stinging snow and cold. But it’s also good to be reminded of the beauty to be had in stoic endurance, so effectively expressed in the works of Peter Geye.
You could read his third novel, Wintering, as a story of wilderness survival and endurance. You could read it as a taunt and harrowing tale of generational conflicts–a tale between a father and son, and the secrets kept between them – or a statement of the keen cutting edge of memory. Or you could read it as a testament to the beauty and power of Minnesota’s fierce and elegant North Shore landscape.
And you’d be right, on all accounts.
A Tale Told Through Memories
Wintering is the tale of Harry Eide, told through the memories of his son Gustav, and Berit, the woman who waited patiently most of her life to be with him. Harry, now elderly and riddled with dementia, slips out of his sickbed one November night and disappears into the wilderness that surrounds the town of Gunflint, Minnesota, nestled on the North Shore of Lake Superior. His family and the entire town searched for a week with no trace except tracks heading up the river; months later children skating past the breakwater find his red woolen hat – nothing more. “People searched for don’t get found here,” Gus Eide says stoically to Berit. “Not in these woods.”
It’s not the first time Harry had quit civilization to disappear into the woods. Over 30 years earlier, Harry took another flight into the wilderness with 18-year-old Gus in tow. He made it sound like it would be an adventure, paddling canoes across the northern lake country using handmade maps, taking only what they could carry on their backs. They planned to spend the winter at an abandoned trapper’s fort and live off the land. Or at least, that’s what Harry told Gus. The truth turned out to be far different, and far darker.
Told in a series of flashbacks as Gus shares with Berit the truth of what happened that winter, we follow the pair’s trek up rivers, with portages through woods and around falls, and across lakes that were mere sketches on poorly documented maps. They lose their way but push on, testing their skills and their mettle. There is danger, there is stress and conflict, but there also is grandeur and beauty. Yet as they push deeper into the wild, Gus realizes his father has a hidden agenda – one that ultimately turns tragic.
Berit remembers the times she spent with Harry after his marriage fell apart and his health—both mental and physical—suffered from his trek up north. But she also was aware of conflicts that had been building many years prior, conflicts that touched her own life. Now, she can fill in some blanks for Gus that he suspected but never knew, for in her quiet way, she had harbored her own secrets over those many years.
Majesty, Anger, and Human Pettiness
It’s a harrowing tale, full of majesty and anger and human pettiness, drama both personal and primitive. It’s also beautifully written in a voice evoking the stark grandeur of the natural world during its coldest and bitterest times.
Gus made surveying his occupation between Thanksgiving and Christmas, weeks of hush and white and a kind of coldness he’d never known before. Sometimes he was gone for a day, sometimes two or three. Once, he was gone for four nights and crossed the Laurentian Divide. He knew because he came to a river whose south-rushing saults he couldn’t cross. His trails in the woods and across the frozen lakes gained permanence. He camped at the same spots and set fires on the heaps of old ashes. The snap of those fires was often the only accompaniment to the silence, and in that faint rasping he heard music unlike any he’d ever known before and to which he composed lyrics he’d never sing. He never once saw another breathing creature that wasn’t black-winged and aloft.
You may not be a wilderness adventurer; you may never snowshoe across a frozen lake or stand mere feet from a cranky moose or dine on freshly caught fish grilled over an open fire. But Peter Geye’s faultless prose will take you there, along with the men who dared to brave the elements and came home forever changed.
And you’ll be glad to have made the journey with them.
—Sharon Browning
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