You’re in there, too, Jon! Brandon obviously relied pretty heavily on you and Glenn Lewis for the kayaking chapters. I’m happy to see your research in print.
Brandon’s authorial approach in
To Be a Warrior is that of a journalist. He reports the facts of Kayak Bill’s life in dry fashion: Here is Bill making his first-ever aid climb. Here he is notching a first ascent with a group of famous climbers. Now here’s Bill living in a float house on the coast. Now he’s in Sointula.
The factual approach is not without merit. As Jon said, above, Brandon’s book fills in a number of details about Bill’s life, including the decade of the 1980s that none of the other Kayak Bill writers had previously been able to cover. What’s missing from Brandon’s book—but what the other Kayak Bill writers were able to capture—is the magic of Kayak Bill.
To those of us who admire him, Kayak Bill is more than the sum of his parts. Bill’s climbing routes may have been impressive in their time, but there were better climbers than him even during the 1970s when he was active. Bill’s kayaking expeditions were lengthy and remote, but there are plenty of kayakers who have paddled deeper into the wilderness under more challenging conditions. Even Harvey Island, Bill’s most remote campsite, is less than thirty-five miles from a town.
What makes Bill special is not the technical details of his adventures but rather the spirit in which he undertook them. He rejected a life of conformity and dependence in favor of a life on his terms alone. It is the boldness of his lifestyle that inspires me and the other Kayak Bill writers, not the boldness of any particular kayaking or climbing adventure.
The other writers—Colin Lake, Keith Webb, Jon Dawkins, and Neil Frazer—talk about the ways Bill’s life made them think about their own lives, or about the wilderness, or about their relationships with other people, or even about the way they, the authors, felt about Bill. No such introspection is present in Brandon’s book. Even when Brandon interviews people who were close to Bill, including Bill’s girlfriend, his son, his painting mentor, and his climbing and coastal buddies of decades’ acquaintance, there is no mention of how Bill made anyone else think or feel.
Nor is there much mention of how Bill felt himself. Bill didn’t always live in the wilderness, and he didn’t always forage for food. He wasn’t even always a loner. For decades, he lived in ordinary houses alongside friends or his girlfriend while he worked conventional jobs. In his mid-30s, Bill began drifting away from all that, spending more and more time alone in his kayak, but Brandon gives us no insight into why Bill changed and why at that point in his life.
Even the most wrenching episode in Bill’s life is presented without emotion. In 1996, having gradually spent less and less time at home over the years, Bill paddled away from his girlfriend and young son for good. His son never saw him again. Why did Bill abandon his family? Was it hard for him when he did? Was it hard for them? Did they understand that he was leaving forever? Are they still hurt? Brandon does not explore these questions. We learn more about Bill’s fistfight to win his girlfriend’s love than we do about his decision to leave her and their son forever. We learn more—a lot more—about Bill’s love for tobacco than we ever do about his love for his family.
There are similar gaps in Brandon’s account of Bill’s relationship with his birth family. Bill grew up in an orphanage, but he returned to his father after high school and lived with him for years. This would seem to be a critical juncture in Bill’s emotional development, but we learn nothing about Bill’s mind during those years. Instead, we learn about his motorcycle.
I read Brandon’s book hoping to make closer acquaintance with a hero of mine. However, Brandon offers less insight into Bill’s character than any of the other Kayak Bill writers offer in their articles. Brandon himself does not seem to feel the magic of Kayak Bill as strongly as the other writers do, leaving me to wonder why he felt called to write this book.
Jon Krakauer’s
Into the Wild and Mark Sundeen’s
The Man Who Quit Money are better examples of biographies of eccentric loners. The authors are able to penetrate their subjects’ interior lives—in Krakuer’s case, after the subject was dead. They devote substantial space to their subjects’ philosophies and relationships, the things that make their subjects interesting. The portraits in these books are vivid in ways that the portrait in
To Be a Warrior is not.
Read
To Be a Warrior for its excerpts from Bill’s journals, including his factual accounts of making passages, setting up camps, and foraging for food. For appreciation of what Kayak Bill’s life meant to other people, read one of the other writers on Jon’s blog,
3meterswell.blogspot.com
Alex