{"product_id":"starting-out-in-the-afternoon-isbn-9780679311881","title":"Starting Out In the Afternoon","description":"Jill Frayne’s long-term relationship was ending and her daughter was about to graduate and leave home. She decided to pack up her life and head for the Yukon.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Driving alone across the country from her home just north of Toronto, describing the land as it changes from Precambrian Shield to open prairie, Jill finds that solitude in the wilds is not what she expected. She is actively engaged by nature, her moods reflected in the changing landscape and weather. Camping in her tent as she travels, she begins to let go of the world she’s leaving and to enter the realm of the solitary traveller. The wilderness begins to work its magic on her, and she begins to feel a bond with the land and a kind of serenity. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e In \u003ci\u003eStarting Out in the Afternoon\u003c\/i\u003e, Frayne struggles to come to terms with her vulnerabilities and begins to find peace. In beautifully spare but potent language, she delivers an inspiring, contemplative memoir of the middle passage of a woman’s life and an eloquent meditation on the solace of living close to the wild land. Eventually what has begun as a three-month trip becomes a personal journey of several years, during which she is on the move and testing herself in the wilderness. She conquers her fears and begins a new relationship with nature, exuberant at becoming a competent outdoorswoman.“It is a beautifully written book, marked by original language and disciplined prose,  every page offering a memorable snapshot of the author’s often impossibly grand physical  surroundings…. for anyone who loves the outdoors \u003ci\u003eStarting Out In the Afternoon\u003c\/i\u003e is  a trip worth taking.” -- \u003ci\u003eThe Ottawa Citizen\u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “\u003ci\u003eStarting Out in the Afternoon\u003c\/i\u003e is a  wonderfully written tale of a middle-aged woman’s journey through the wilds of Canada  and Alaska. But the book, written in diary form, is more than a travelogue. Woven  into the rich descriptions of rugged mountains, mammoth trees and powerful seas are  the thoughts of a woman exploring her life’s journey…. The only downside to this  work is that it makes the reader grieve for the fact that Frayne didn’t start publishing  earlier in life.” -- \u003ci\u003eThe Toronto Sun\u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Her sentences are spare, yet their images  intense. Her eye is sharp.” -- \u003ci\u003eThe Edmonton Journal\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “\u003ci\u003eStarting Out in the Afternoon \u003c\/i\u003eis Jilly Frayne’s clear-eyed memoir of the trek -- by car, sneaker and kayak -- that  drew her to the Yukon, all the way from her home in southern Ontario and her career  as a family therapist. In the end, she discovers that the toughest, most rewarding  road trip is the one you take inside your own head and heart.” -- \u003ci\u003eChatelaine\u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “With  verve, ambition and, it seems, very little fear, [Jill Frayne] conquered B.C.’s northern  wilderness, bringing back stories of personal transformation at the mid-point of  [her] life.” -- \u003ci\u003eThe Vancouver Sun\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Frayne is very much an original, with a bracing,  vibrant style fresh as a gust of northern wind. Her memoir of a mid-life trek into  deep wilderness is less travelogue than soul-revealing confession, a cri du coeur  riddled with the complex, pulsing veins of relationship -- not just with other people,  but with that great and glorious enigma, the land…. Frayne writes early on that the  initial idea for her journey was inspired by a Peter Gzowski interview on Morningside.  How he would have loved this fresh, windy, woodsmoky piece of poetry, so full of  passion and vulnerability. No doubt Frayne’s parents are immensely proud of their  intrepid, inspired girl.” -- \u003ci\u003eThe Gazette\u003c\/i\u003e (Montreal)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “This memoir of her travels  is an involving, inspired balm for us armchair travellers.” -- \u003ci\u003eThe Toronto Star\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Frayne’s account of her spiritual and physical journey is a fun, introspective look  into the inner workings of a woman’s mind as she reflects on what has been and what  is yet possible.” -- \u003ci\u003eThe Guelph Mercury\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “[A] well-crafted, tough-minded recounting  of [Jill Frayne’s] voyage out and then inward . . . . Her metaphors enrich the journey  and her personal reflections give the shock of recognition that hard-won truths can  bring.” -- \u003ci\u003eQuill and Quire\u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “[T]he writing is transcendental, ecstatic, as crisp  and clear as Lake Superior in October. . . . As the daughter of June Callwood and  Trent Frayne, she comes by it honestly, but genetics cannot explain the breath-taking  sweep of her style, the depths of her insights. Through words as carefully chosen  and necessary as survival gear, she journeys to the heart of her wild self.” -- Wayne  Grady, \u003ci\u003eThe Globe and Mail\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"This voyage of a middle-aged woman through Canada's wildest  landscape is so well rendered that the readers longs to take the same journey. As  Jill Frayne conquers her own fears, the landscape, which can be rough, cold and unforgiving,  comes into focus as a warm, wonderful friend. Frayne writes so beautifully about  her relationship with nature that the book becomes a detailed love story.\" -- Catherine  Gildiner, author of \u003ci\u003eToo Close to the Falls\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"Jill Frayne's journeys into wilderness  are like moving meditations, undertaken with awareness and respect, awash in wisdom,  insight and the serenity that exists in the soul of the natural world. Travelling  with her is, therefore, a transcendent experience.\" -- Alison Wearing, author of  \u003ci\u003eHoneymoon in Purdah\u003c\/i\u003eJILL FRAYNE is a writer and former family therapist. Her first book, \u003ci\u003eStarting Out in the Afternoon\u003c\/i\u003e, was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award. She has been published in \u003ci\u003eThe Walrus\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eLiterary Review of Canada\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eCanadian Geographic\u003c\/i\u003e magazines, to name a few. She lives on a bush lot north of Parry Sound and spends winters in the wild mountains on the Yukon border.\u003cb\u003eOne\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eStarting Out\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe spring my daughter finished high school, I packed up the car with everything I’d need to live outdoors for three months, everything I could think of for travel by car, kayak, bicycle and ferry, glanced one more time around my yard, which would go unplanted that year, and backed out of the driveway.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMy first night I got as far as Georgian Bay, turning in at a provincial park–empty this early in the season–and setting up camp beside a bog with a huge dome of granite in the middle. I was too miserable to eat, the prospect of the journey closing my throat. I sat cross-legged in my tent, a nylon clam open to the white twilight, relieved to be out of the car, with its summers’ worth of paraphernalia: camping gear and groceries, feather pillows and books, backpack and rainwear. We stress ourselves in order to change, and this time I’d chosen solitude and wild land as the forge.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAfter three days of driving I was still in Ontario. We think of the province as a pan of paved-over ground along the shore of Lake Ontario, a stretch of a hundred kilometres where most of us live, but the real Ontario is the Precambrian Shield–the great wastes of rock overarching tiny southern Ontario in an endless tract of elemental granite and pointed black spruce. The land up here is ponderous, orchestral, especially where the road follows Lake Superior, giving tremendous views of the hills standing up to their mighty shoulders in the sea. Once you leave Superior, though, and plunge into boreal forest–the dark, acid, interminable land west of Thunder Bay–the project of getting out of Ontario becomes daunting. This rock carapace is nothing less than the bulge of the earth’s raw core, scarred, disordered, primordial. The density and weight of the rock have an emotional quality that penetrates the mind. Time seems to clog in the runty trees and gravity tugs in a bold, unbounded way like nowhere else.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhen the prairie comes at last, it’s like emerging from a spelunking expedition, rescued by the sky, hauled up and out into the light. On the prairie there is no rock at all, no jagged angles, no glittering lakes, no lowering skies stabbed with evergreens. The morphology of prairie is round.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePast Kenora, the heavy sky and cut rock of the Shield quickly give way to open Manitoba prairie, the road straightening and stretching till it looks like a drawn wire slicing into the horizon. I ducked south of Winnipeg and drove into the setting sun, the evening sky a violet shawl around me.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWest of Winnipeg the horizon was dead flat, the only feature the occasional picket of willows barricading a farm. Secondary roads ran along beside the highway with pinprick vehicles, miles off, raising plumes of dust. Farmers, still on their machines in the spring twilight, turned the black ground. Bugs loaded up and baked on the car grille, and any time I slowed, the cool fields filled with birdsong. I turned off the highway and, in the last mauve light of day, found a campground on Lake Winnipeg in a willow grove full of singing birds and shadflies.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e* * * * *\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThose first days, driving queasily through the Precambrian scenery, unreeling the tender thread between me and home, I had doubts about my expedition, alone in a car on a three-month excursion to the Yukon.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWe all have spells of high suggestibility, and I was in one the previous September when I heard a radio interview with a painter, Doris McCarthy. She would have been close to eighty at the time, her voice cheerful and nicotine-cracked, her breathtaking Arctic canvases floating in my memory. At nine-thirty in the morning, while I drove to work from my home near Uxbridge, she and Peter Gzowski were reminiscing about Pangnirtung, a village on Baffin Island they both know. One of them recalled being there in July and, from a window, watching the freed ice move up the bay on the tide and out again on the ebb. Eyeing the approaching Scarborough skyline from my car, a fortress of upended concrete shoe-boxes under a bloom of smog, I was gripped by this image, by the elegance of this event, and I set my mind to go there.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIdeas that lay hold like this have to turn immutable in the mind if they’re going to amount to anything. When I discovered that Pangnirtung is not reachable by car, I could not let myself be deterred. I gave notice at my job and started telling people I was going to drive up to the Arctic the coming summer.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt was not so whimsical a resolve as it may seem. I’d managed a show of equanimity through my daughter’s adolescence and through a long renegotiation of terms with the man I’d been living with. I’d been seven years at a counselling agency fifty miles from home, where I spent my time listening to other harried families. I was watching for a harbinger of change. I believe in the accuracy of ideas that come in this way. After long suspense, long inertia, everything rushes together at once in a notion that has great force. This northern image had such vitality that I would go north even if I couldn’t get to the ice floes.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eJune 17, 1990\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe shrubs around the picnic table where I sit writing this morning are shaking with birds. I see kinds I thought had vanished–those darting ones that never seem to land–and a Baltimore oriole, his breast the colour of marigolds. Walking in the fields the other side of the thicket this morning, I saw a wedge of pelicans pass overhead, shining white birds rowing the sky without making a sound. They flew exactly in sync, their huge wings closing the air in slow unison. Beat . . . beat . . . beat . . . glide.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI pack up finally, whisking shadflies off my tent fly, and retrace the route out to the highway. In spite of the heat it’s barely spring, last year’s fields still white and razed. Only the rims of ditches show a rind of green. The houses, in clouds of muzzy willow, are built tall with narrow, tree-blocked windows, and have a secretive, forestalling look. Pickup trucks tilt in the front yards as though the drivers had to get out fast. I conjure secret strife going on behind the walls in rooms of filtered light. There’s a dogged atmosphere to these places, as if people living here are pitched against an enemy.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs the landscape empties, road signs get more frequent as though to keep up contact with motorists as we drive beyond the pale.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCheck Your Odometer.\u003cbr\u003eStart Check Now. 0––1––2––\u003cbr\u003ePut Your Garbage Into Orbit. 5 kms.\u003cbr\u003eOrbit. 10 secs.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI begin to look forward to Saskatchewan, which can’t afford road commentary and garbage cans resembling spaceships.","brand":"Vintage Canada","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46301864034533,"sku":"NP9780679311881","price":17.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780679311881.jpg?v=1767737275","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/starting-out-in-the-afternoon-isbn-9780679311881","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}