Reading Journal 2024: Gone to the Woods: Surviving a Lost Childhood

Reading Journal 2024: Gone to the Woods: Surviving a Lost Childhood
Author: Gary Paulsen

There are a handful of books that I would call formative when it comes to my love of reading as a young child. Hatchet was one of those books.

What was it about Hatchet that captured my imagination? The adventure? The survival? A few years back when my son had to read it for his English class, reaquainting myself with the story left me thinking that it was connection that I felt with this young boy, captured at least in inspiration from Paulsen’s own life story, that endeared me to it.

Back in 2021, Paulsen released this memoir. I could now read his story. Sadly, he passed away soon after its release, leaving only one more book to release in his name. Fittingly, it would seem, a book that has been advertised as Hatchet on the ocean. A book that brings this inspiration full cirucle. For me, it would be this memoir that gives his long career its appropriate context, and for me, it helped me to unerstand why I felt that coinnection to his stories as a young child. Not because my story is similar, but because he understood what it was to be a child looking in at the world from the outisde, unable to articulate the stuff in his head in a way that would make sense and be understood. Likewise, I was someone who found freedom in my discovery of books, of story, who’s life was marked by my own version of the “librarian” who handed me my notebook and pencil. I might trade love for the woods for a love of culture, but in truth, what informs Paulsen’s story is a young boy escaped to the woods so as to find his way back into the world with a greater sense of his own place in it. I connected deeply all those years ago to Paulsen’s journey from finding it hard to connect with people but finding friendship with the creatures. A connection that allowed him to connect the crueler parts of nature with the violence he saw and experienced in the world.

What’s interesting too, about thinking back to my son’s reading assignment, is how much of his own story I can see in the pages of this memoir as well. A young boy having seen and experienced things that he could not adequately express or describe to his new Canadian home. A young kid whom, in those early years, often found himself imagining disappearing into the woods and off the grid, a young kid who’s room is still adorned with pictures of wolves. A young kid who struggled with school, who found some familiarity in the concept of the trades, who was handed by some the sugggestion of the military. All parts of Paulsen’s story that I think would be an equal connection for him.

There are those books that are less about artistic merit and more about connection and inspiration. This is one of them. Perhaps most inspiring is the fact that he finished the story of his childhood at eighty years old. A reminer that its never too late for any of us to understand where it is we come from, to understand who it is we are.