Is this doomsday?

"Is this doomsday? Should I grow a potato patch? Should I clean out the orchard? Ron said he knew someone who had a cow to give away. Should we take it? Is this a possibly for-real Doomsday, or just a short interlude of inactivity to be forgotten by history?"   

~~ from "Letter from the Heartland" by Ken Ilgunas

what passed for "normal". . .

"But my journey wasn’t just a financial awakening. I had learned about subsistence living in Arctic villages, and worked with a 74-year-old maintenance man who lived in his 1980 Chevy Suburban year-round. I began to bring into question what passed for “normal” down in the lower 48, especially when it often led to a lifetime of work, bills and Bed Bath & Beyond purchases. Out of debt, I felt for the first time that my life was my own, and that I could do whatever I wished with it."

~~ from "When Home is a Campus Parking Lot" by Ken Ilgunas

The McCandless Mecca

I enjoyed The McCandless Mecca by Ken Ilgunas. It's not quite a novella, or not by yesterday's standards, but it includes the Ilgunas humor and thoughtfulness I remember well from Walden on Wheels. It certainly made me want to read Into the Wild, even if author Jon Krakauer has already rejected the conclusions he offered in that book. From Krakauer's article in The New Yorker, I enjoyed learning that Chris McCandless had Nikolai Gogol on hand during his final days:

Taped to the door was a note scrawled on a page torn from a novel by Nikolai Gogol:

attention possible visitors.
s.o.s.
i need your help. i am injured, near death, and too weak to hike out of here. i am all alone, this is no joke. in the name of god, please remain to save me. i am out collecting berries close by and shall return this evening. thank you,
chris mccandless
august ?

Ken Ingunas

I recommend Ken Ilgunas's two travel narratives Walden on Wheels and Trespassing Across America. Both have strong elements of memoir, often self-reflective comedy, and heartfelt views of what we are doing to the planet as well as each other and why we might want to change our ways. Partly because they are interesting books and partly because I so rarely read three books by the same author within a couple months, I may try to interview Ilgunas about these two along with his more polemical This Land is Our Land although I'm momentarily so deep in the weeds with my own problems and concerns that for now this blog is the best I can do on Ken's behalf. Please see Goodreads for my other recent reads.