Diary of a Wilderness Dweller by Chris Czajkowski

Book Review by Zinta Aistars

• Paperback: 207 pages
• Publisher: Harbour Pub Co, 2006
• Price: $19.95
• ISBN-10: 155017357X
• ISBN-13: 978-1550173574



When people read and heard about what Chris Czajkowski, a woman in her early 40s, had achieved in the wilderness, they exclaimed: How brave! How courageous! Ridiculous, Czajkowski would respond. To her understanding, she had achieved nothing more than many of us might, had we the mind to do so. “Skills will always find a way of arriving, it is the attitude that is important,” she writes in Diary of a Wilderness Dweller. “If you think you can do something, it will happen.” (Page 170)

What Czajkowski especially shook off were the comments that began with “especially for a woman.” And that is the end of that discussion. She’ll have none of it.

Yet what Czajkowski describes in her book, one of a series she has written about making her life in the northern wilderness (British Columbia, Canada) befits the unrealized dreams of many. She has left “civilized” society far in the distance, making her way into the mountains and woods, where she builds not one, but two log cabins entirely on her own.

For those who have been drawn to the books of Anne LaBastille, another woman who lived in a log cabin in the Adirondacks, I would say that Czajkowski’s are far superior. LaBastille had help building her cabin, and her books veer into personal essays on self-publishing rather than wilderness living. Czajkowski truly is a solitary traveler into the woods, and she stays entirely on task.

Then again, when I crave literary beauty in nature writing, I reach for Annie Dillard. Czajkowski certainly has her moments of artful and literary description, but her tone is mostly one of telling how to get the work done, what obstacles get in the way, how she endures and overcomes them. At times, that made me as a reader feel like I didn’t really know the writer of the diary as a person, even as I knew the world around her in detail.

Czajkowski begins her adventure with a moment of considering her “madness.” She has left her truck at the end of a logging road twenty miles away. She has hiked through unmarked forest and over a mountain to a piece of land beside an unnamed lake. She is going to build a log cabin very nearly with her bare hands, using just a few tools she has carried in or that a small airplane later delivers on the lake. So is she crazy? By end of the book, in retrospect, she writes that this adventure may have seemed mad and risked all, but had she not done it, she would have missed … everything. This is the kind of living that gives her life its value and its meaning.

Much can be explained by her musings midway through the book (pages 88 and 89): “People are always asking me why I live the way I do … I am not ‘sacrificing’ the outside world … I do have the enormous satisfaction of choosing what I want from it. The material things like television and washing machines, which most people take for granted and which, for some perverse reason, are used to measure our ‘standard of living,’ have never been as important to me as my surroundings.”

She explains that it is not that she is so very unsocial—she likes people and eventually creates a business out of her wilderness living by guiding wilderness tours—and she is not averse to tapping into some convenience if it is readily available, but when it is not, and she has the wilderness in trade, that is what she chooses.

“The words ‘remote’ and ‘isolated’ to describe my way of life are city conceits. ‘Remote’ means ‘apart from’ and I am indeed apart from the city and other people. But I am very close to nature and the way the world functions; in this respect it is city folk who are remote.” (Page 89)

Silence is one of her draws. She relishes the sounds of nature rather than the sounds of civilization, and muses that most people never experience it in the cacophony of machinery, automobiles, industry, stereos and conversation.

All ways and styles of life, Czajkowski writes, have their price to pay. Whatever one chooses is to choose against something else, and so we must choose what it is that we value and what we are willing to do without. Although at times she is “terrified” of her choices, facing extreme weather, predatory wildlife and other challenges and obstacles, she overcomes her fear to obtain a life that she can value.

In addition to writing her story, Czajkowski is also a visual artist, and her diary entries are here and there enhanced by skillful drawings. On art, she writes: “We live in what must be the only society in the world to separate art from life and condemn it as an unnecessary frill or, even worse, a hobby.” Yet everyone is an artist, she insists, and we shouldn’t try to subdue that natural part of ourselves. We use our sense of art when we decorate our homes or choose what clothes to wear. Why not relish our creativity and give it full rein?

Even if the author eschews it, the reader can’t help but admire her tenacity and skill at making do with what she has around her. She not only fells tall trees for the logs to construct her cabins, but hauls them over great distance, cuts them into boards for her floors, and fashions all parts of her cabins from them. She installs a reconstructed stove for cooking and heating, moving that, too, over long trails by herself. She hikes many miles through the most blustery cold and survives the night in spite of only partial shelter and one very curious and powerful bear. I wouldn’t say “even for a woman” when I read this diary—I would instead say “what a woman!” in respect for her willingness to follow her wilderness dream.

Murder in the Keweenaw by Harley L. Sachs

Book Review by Zinta Aistars

• Format: Kindle Edition
• File Size: 265 KB
• Sold by: Amazon Digital Services
• Price: $4.99
• ASIN: B003Z4K530



This Kindle reading is still pretty new to me, but when I browsed for e-books recently, I was intrigued to find one that took place in my favorite northern haunt and one-time residence—the Keweenaw Peninsula, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. For a few bucks, it was mine.

The story of Murder in Keweenaw opens with a view into the life of a semi-retired CIA agent, written as a first person narrative, having a midlife crisis and retreating to a camp in the Keweenaw to regain his bearings. Eino, or E. J. Carlson, fits the Keweenaw demographic well. He comes of a Finnish heritage, although was born locally, in the small town of Lake Linden, on the Keweenaw Bay.

E. J. is recently divorced; his ex-wife Sonja has returned to her native Finland and taken their son, Jan Erik, with her. E. J. is brooding over the loss of his family and now lives in this small camp (what U.P. residents, or Yoopers, call cabins and cottages) in Jacobsville, spending quiet days coping with nightmares, the aftermath of PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder) as a result of his work as an agent, and fishing. His boat is a 22-foot sloop named SISU, Finnish for courage and an expression of Finnish pride.

While on one of his fishing trips, E. J. snags not a big fish—but a corpse. He fishes out of Lake Superior what turns out to be the dead body of a girl with a bullet hole in her back. He calls in the Coast Guard for help, reports to the local police, but can’t resist the pull of his own curiosity and tries to find out the girl’s identity and the reason for her death.

What follows is some fun background description of the area. At least for me, as a former resident and now frequent traveler in the area, I recognized most all the places and establishments named, including Lindell’s ice cream parlor in Lake Linden, where I once was hired for my first waitressing job and, happily, was fired two days later because I couldn’t stomach the boss’s directive to just dunk the dishes in a greasy sinkful of water rather than actually wash them. I just couldn’t seem to do it. But I transgress …

One thing leads to another, one clue to the next, and E. J. notes what he calls a “McMansion” that has been built near the Keweenaw Bay as an oddity. Yoopers don’t build mansions. One of the draws of the area is its return to a simpler life, a respect for wilderness. The McMansion exudes wealth, and in the U.P., wealth sticks out like a sore thumb. On closer inspection, and in line with a meeting on the water with the sexy inhabitant of a yacht, Roxy, E. J. discovers a porn business flourishing inside. Pretending to be a local offering his help, which in fact he is, E. J. ends up with an invitation to a party, where he observes porn videos being shot, and two Moldavian girls looking lost and afraid—they turn out to be a part of the sex slave trade now so epidemic in the United States.

“If these two women were illegal imports for the sex trade, no wonder they were nervous … I know now that the international sex trade traffics in thousands of women, twenty thousand to the United States alone, and even more to countries like Turkey and Saudi Arabia. Girls looking for work respond to newspaper ads for waitresses and housekeepers, jobs in foreign countries that turn out to be brothels. The destitute are exploited in this gruesome slavery and in countries like Indonesia desperate families even sell their children to brothels that cater to pedophiles.”

E. J. pretends interest in the goings-on of the mansion on the bay in order to solve the mystery of the dead girl. When the rich men who run the operation offer him a free taste of more than just what’s on the barbeque grill, asking him if he is familiar with Hugh Hefner parties, he responds:

“'I saw it once on television,’ I said. I didn’t add that it was a lot of old men in their sixties and seventies surrounded by pneumatic groupies young enough to be their daughters or even granddaughters. The television broadcast was ostensibly a biography of Hugh Hefner, but the absence of women his own age made the scene ludicrous. It was the fantasy of adolescents who never grow up and think they are god’s gift to women. Did the men think they were attractive to those girls? The girls were all playmates or wannabes who would do anything to be the next magazine centerfold. Did they have any talent, I wondered? Or were they simply exposing themselves for profit? … the girls with their t*ts on page three had eyes reminding me of sheep. Dumb.”

And then, E. J., while solving the mystery, accepts the favors of Roxy with her implants. Perhaps more than one sheep in this pasture.

So the author and his character delve into the dark recesses of a dark industry—of girls and women coerced into work that can kill their spirit, their self-esteem, and perhaps even take their lives. The topic is timely and deserving of coverage. The book is reasonably well written and reads quickly, if with the occasional annoyance of the name “Erik” being inserted into “AmErika” and wherever else it might fit. I don’t know what the author’s idea is by doing that—a secret nod to someone named Erik?—but for my editor’s eye, it was each and every time a jarring distraction from the storyline.

The author, Harley Sachs, is a former resident of Houghton, at the base of the Keweenaw. He is the author of many books, most of which are mysteries, and most if not all of which appear to be self-published. He is also the creator of a board game named Police State.


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Force of Blood: A Woods Cop Mystery by Joseph Heywood

Book Review by Zinta Aistars

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Lyons Press (September 1, 2011)
• Price: $24.95
• ISBN-10: 0762772840
• ISBN-13: 978-0762772841





Couple days prior to writing this review, I had the pleasure of meeting and interviewing on air the author, Joe Heywood, at Kalamazoo, Michigan’s WMUK radio station, the local NPR affiliate. Am I now too star-struck to write an unbiased review? Nah. I’m convinced the author is fully as tough (and as entertaining, and with the same spicy sense of humor) as his main character, DNR detective Grady Service, the woods cop of Heywood’s now eight-book mystery series. He can take it.

Z and author Joseph Heywood at WMUK studios

My bias is of a different kind. I was born with a compass embedded inside me, I’m sure of it by now. It always points north and that’s increasingly the only direction I seem to comfortably travel. Heywood’s series is set in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and the woods cops in the books solve their mysteries in the thick woods and breathtakingly beautiful wilderness of the U.P. That’s why I picked up the first in the series, Ice Hunter (2001), in the first place. I don’t read mysteries. I do read all things U.P.

That bias could have worked against Heywood, actually. I expect the author of stories set in my beloved U.P. to do them right. Describe those surroundings accurately, capture the life sense of the “Yooper” truthfully, bring vividly alive that unique northern territory I have known since childhood. He did.

And in the newest of the series, Force of Blood, he has—again. The story opens in the Mackinac area, that point between Michigan’s lower and upper peninsulas, in 2007. It’s a time when the economy is running thin, and funding for state jobs such as those of the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) is no exception. As jobs are cut, those dedicated to their work sometimes find themselves working without pay—and so Grady Service takes on a favor for a friend, checking out the unethical handling of Native American artifacts on the shores of Lake Superior.

From there, the story takes off at top speed. As he does throughout the series, Heywood keeps the reader turning pages (or clicking forward furiously on their Kindles) as fast as possible, no turning back. It’s the kind of book you read standing in line, waiting in the waiting room (irritated when it’s finally your turn), on your lunch break, propped against your plate.

Grady Service is a sharp, by now slightly aging, cop who loves walking his woodsy beat, no matter how high he rises in the ranks. He’s tough but fair, a man of integrity. His ongoing relationship with his arch enemy, Limpy Allerdyce, Yooper savvy criminal and delightfully colorful character, is a treat. Once again, Limpy helps him solve the mystery, along with a long list of other memorable characters. As usual, their names are hilarious (Heywood told me he gets many of these gems out of U.P. telephone books): Jane Rain, Belphoebe Cheke, Tuesday Friday, Lacey Lucey, Delmure Arcton Toliver, Flin Yardley, Odetta Trevillyan, Karylanne Pengelly, Ladania Wingel, Luticious Treebone, Persia Hunger, Crispin Franti, Marldeane Youvonne Brannigan, Godfroi Delongshamp, Summer Rose Genova, Honeypat, Zhenya Leukonovich, Ozzien Shotwiff, a cat called Cat, and on it goes.

Yet for all the laughs—oddball names, witty Grady Service lines, hilarious scenarios (a woods cop partner who paints her own WHAT?)—the topics can also get serious. The title, Force of Blood, alludes to the call in our blood to be who we really are. Call it genetics, call it cultural upbringing, call it being in touch with our innermost selves, but no matter what you do to a person to bury their personal reality, it will still win out in the end. In this case, the force of blood refers to Native Americans, who have historically been repressed and mistreated by the white man, sometimes forced to abandon their own language and traditions, yet will always bounce back in accordance to their truth. This particular story is about how to protect and handle the artifacts of an ancient culture.

Also of note in the storyline is how the DNR handles a 20,000-acre-wide sudden forest fire. It’s fascinating to read how such an emergency is handled, how quickly fire spreads, how people respond each in their own way.

My only gripe about the entire series is the usual love interest Service entertains. There’s always one—or several. This is where the well-researched reality of the woods cop adventures takes a detour, as these women tend to be, well, what one unfortunately expects from too many mystery/detective series—the stereotypical hot female with only one thing on her mind. Indeed, it almost seems that Grady Service has only one conversation with any of his women, even though they are said to be educated and smart and could surely enjoy relationships of broader scope. Each one seems identical to the others. At least Service’s relationship with his granddaughter has greater range.

Watch for other fun moments in this book, such as a surprise appearance of the author himself crossing paths with Grady Service. Drool-worthy pages appear again when Service enters the kitchen. He’s quite the cook. But it’s Service’s honing in on his target that will keep us coming back for more, and more, and more. If there are hints in this book that the woods cop is thinking about retirement, we hope it’s not too soon. Not for at least several more books …

Joseph Heywood is a resident of Portage, Michigan, but regularly spends many months of the year in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, riding along with woods cops as research for his books. He also writes poetry and nonfiction, and paints.

A short story by Joseph Heywood will appear in the Fall/Winter 2011-2012 Issue of The Smoking Poet.