Austin Chapter
Reader's Guide

June 2003

Rowing to Latitude: Journeys Along the Arctic's Edge
by Jill Fredston

1. Why did Jill Fredston write this book? (pgs. xv-xvi)

2. What is the significance of the book's title? (pg. 28)

3. Why do Jill and her husband Doug Fesler take these trips? Compare to Deep Water Passage, Nothing to Declare,...

   "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." --Henry David Thoreau, Walden (pg. 51)

   "Don't waste your life the way I've wasted mine." --Jill's grandmother, on her deathbed (pgs. 55-56)

4. How did Jill's & Doug's upbringing affect their lifestyle / life choices / work?

5. What do you think of the solitude/isolation of their journeys? Do you like it? Would you do it?

   "Making a choice--declaring what is essential--creates a framework for life that eliminates many choices but gives meaning to the things that remain." --Sue Bender (pg. 60)

6. Many sections of this book open with specific scholarly details of the trip, or the area in which they are traveling, but close in a more intimate --and beautifuly-written-- fashion. Cite a favorite example. Mine:
   • "It was as though we had our ears to the same conch shell, finding strength and grace in a common rhythm." (pg. 84)
   • "The river speaks a language rich in verbs--it is constantly rippling, sliding, eddying, burbling, and bending. Perhaps for that reason it made me feel very much alive, conscious of myself within an ever-changing mosaic of time and space." (pg. 104)

7. Jill & Doug heard many Native American stories on their trips (eg. Uncle Al's Inuit "Distant Time" stories). What did you think of these? Did they add to Jill's story? to your pleasure in this book?

   "The finiteness of a lifetime adds intensity to our search for truth, for beauty, for happiness, for love, for ourselves." (pg. 99-100)

8. Discuss your thoughts on travel. Are yours different from Jill's?

   "...the value of travel is not so much in leaving one place or reaching another as in the knowledge that when at last we go home, we will not return to exactly the same point. Travel takes us outside of ourselves and deeper within. It reminds us that despite geographic vastness, all places are connected to all others..." (pg. 139)

9. Each chapter contains an abundance of information on the history of the region, the geography, and culture, as well as conservation, ecology, and the environment. What do you think of this? Did you enjoy it? Did it "fit" in the Jill's story? Compare to other books we've read: Refuge (Terry Tempest Williams), Reason for Hope (Jane Goodall).

10. What appealed to you about Jill's adventures (and this book)? (nature, sense of adventure, travel to new places, challenges, native peoples/customs, ...)

    "It is precisely what is invisible in the land...that makes what is merely empty space to one person, a place to another." --Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams (pg. 138)

    "Bleak is a word commonly chosen to portray unsheltered, barren, treeless land by those of us who come from treed, hilly places in more temperate climates...We would do well...not to assume that others see the world exactly as we do and to bear in mind how alien and inhospitable our own landcape might seem to visitors from the North." (pg 146)

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