Helen Hoover – författare

In the farthest wilds of northeastern Minnesota, back in the Gunflint Range, the author of this book and her artist-husband have a two-room cabin home in the bush country. Beginning one Christmas Day when they first watched the starving deer they later named Peter, the Hoovers had many opportunities, a passionate inclination, and the nature skills to observe this whitetail buck—joined later by his mate, and finally by several of their offspring—through the changing seasons of four years. Close as their relationship was to the generations of beautiful animals, the Hoovers did not consider them pets but fellow inhabitants of that wild country. Their observations reveal the rewards of living close to wild creatures; but more than that, they add valuable information to our knowledge of the cycle of life of the deer and other creatures native to the same world. For although the deer are the chief characters of this book, they are by no means the only wild creatures Mrs. Hoover writes of. Her naturalist’s eye is just as sharp and her affection just as great for the antics of a curious chickadee or a flying squirrel. Mrs. Hoover’s identification with nature knows no favoritism. The Hoovers’ world—the bush country of the United States-Canadian border—is farther removed from civilization than “Mr. Emerson’s woodlot,” but the close relationship of The Gift of the Deer to Walden is evident for all to enjoy. Adrian Hoover’s drawings are from life, and they add another level of understanding to his wife’s vivid prose.

To escape the city, to live close to nature in the beauty and quiet of the wilderness, to try to find within oneself a pioneer resourcefulness of spirit, mind, and hand—it is an almost universal dream. Helen Hoover and her husband made it come true for themselves, and this is the richly told story of how they did it. As she demonstrated in The Gift of the Deer—a book greatly loved and praised—Mrs. Hoover has the gift of sharing with her readers her own profound feeling for the wilderness she has made her home and for the wild animals whom she makes her friends, without destroying the integrity of their wild lives. But she was not always so at ease with nature. And she tells here how she and her husband, leaving behind everything that was familiar to them, bridged the infinite distance in life-style from Chicago, where they had lived, to a cabin home on the fringe of Minnesota’s northernmost wilderness. Neither of them had so much as a Cub Scout’s experience of the woods, and their first year was punctuated with near-disasters. They quickly discovered that a long-time desire for the simple Thoreauvian life was not enough. The obstinance of inanimate objects—the crumbling stone foundation, the leaky roof, the unruly double-bitted ax that must be mastered when you depend on a woodburning stove at thirty below—was new to them. The changing seasons astonished the not only with surprising loveliness but with unexpected crises of survival. But they managed, despite their trials, to rebuild their primitive cabin. And, as they worked and learned, they built for themselves, little by little, a rewarding relationship not only with the sparsely settled community but with a marvelous succession of their closest neighbors: wild weasels and jays, squirrels and shy fishers, even bears in the basement. The reader experiences it all, the hardships and joys, the gradual feeling of becoming connected to earth and elements, of belonging. The is the special delight of Helen Hoover’s warm, evocative, and sometimes extremely funny account of the way in which two city people made for themselves A Place in the Woods.

This is a book that takes us inside the Hoovers’ wilderness home during those sixteen Years of the Forest and lets us experience not only the joys and the techniques but also the challenges and travails of going it alone in the beautiful but not always accommodating wilderness, far from the technology and services that city people take for granted. It is a book of wilderness adventure, it is an education in the ingenuities of wilderness housekeeping, filled with practical details about making do, building and rebuilding, gardening for fun and for food, even advice about getting away from getting-away-from-it-all.  Good times and Hard times, good neighbors and bad neighbors, the strains engendered by conflicting views—and passions—about the use of the environment: Mrs. Hoover shares her experience without stint. But above all—over, under, and all around her straightforward and practical approach to life in the wilderness—there is, as always, the sensitive and moving awareness of nature (especially of the animals with whom she and her husband shared the forest, often helping them through starving winters) that is the special quality of her writing and her life.