cover image The Coldman Cometh: A Family's Adventure in the Alaska Bush

The Coldman Cometh: A Family's Adventure in the Alaska Bush

Bob Durr. Thomas Dunne Books, $24.95 (307pp) ISBN 978-0-312-31179-7

Durr (Down in Bristol Bay) writes about his move with his family in the 1960s from Syracuse to the Alaskan wilderness with a beat generation-style passion for the wilderness. Giving up a comfortable professorship and suburban life, he brought his wife and four children to a cabin where encounters with moose, bear, ptarmigans and walrus replaced meetings, papers and television. Readers learn not only about how Durr's wife, Carol, adjusted to life in the bush (warming her children's feet with rabbit sole inserts) and the""predicaments,"" usually dangerous and primal, that define pioneer-style living, but also about the old-time residents, like Gene Pope, for whom mountains""were never high enough... their slopes never slippery enough."" Perhaps as an unavoidable side effect of its subject matter, the book has a dated feel--for instance, Durr refers, albeit with great warmth, to his wife as""my little lady."" Interspersing narrative with philosophical, Thoreauvian literary ponderings on why living in the Alaskan bush seems more real than hum-drum American suburban life, Durr finds his""Mysterium Tremendum"" in nature.