An Open Letter to Jon Krakauer

Jon Krakauer, what I want to tell you is so vast.
It expands years of my life. It connects the different “parts” of me. The “chapters” if you will, of my life.
I am going to write here, free-form as Sarah instructed us to do without editing, without re-writing, I am trying to write here without editing myself, but it is difficult as I have just smoked half a cigarette and I am buzzed and the physical limitations it places on me means many typographical errors – I can barely type coherently.
But the thought that I encountered while I was thinking of how to start this letter to you was that I understand, to a limited extent mind you, the enormity of challenging Nature.
My life and my relationship with Nature, with my brief and ever-so-narrow experience with Mountaineering and that part of my life, intertwined with my life as a Writer and my life as a Journalist and as a Filmmaker are all intertwined and somehow echo deeply with the kind of writing that you have produced.
I have known the harrowing experience of challenging Nature. While I taking the time to reflect briefly, to delve into my memories if ever so tentatively, I came across the memory of Jason. How he had come to climbing X mountain and told me that he almost froze to death along with another climber there on the side of that face, him trying to sleep in the bivvy bag that I had sewn him while young, while inexperienced, while idealistic about the sport, the challenge, the life.
Yet by the time he tried it, I myself had given up. Had walked away from the challenge. Had decided not to take it on as my own. It was a big part of why he and I are no longer together. Yet I feel it. I feel a kinship towards it. This desire to feel the ache of our Planet, to feel humbled by the sheer force and magnitude of the power of Nature.
I love to feel humbled.
Hence, I suppose, my inhibition to write to you.
Ok, it’s not easy to write to someone you admire greatly. I mean, who am I? Yet we are all Human, we all share in the awe of being alive.
For nine years I lived in British Columbia and forsook my parents, my sister and friends in order to maintain a fierce relationship with the Land. The mountains, the trees, the earth and sky and oxygen it fed me. The Earth never gave up on me. It always gave me more: more nutrients, more challenges, more questions to be answered.
Yet here I am today in my country’s largest city and I feel at home. I feel as though in those nine years I explored as much as I needed. I became aware of and could accept my limitations. Others could not. Others pressed on to the point of expiration. I admire that, yet I disdain it simultaneously.
Your writing was at first a quenching to a thirst. To understand more fully the quest to “bag a peak,” to understand the feeling of being pushed to ultimate physical limits. Lately, after reading “Under the Banner” my respect for you grew. I have to be honest though, when I first started the book I was annoyed and disappointed that perhaps it was a little sensationalist. The feature magazine writer in you pushed me away. Especially after “Into the Wild” captured me so fully because of its intimacy. But as I read further, I realized that you had spent a great deal of time, a great deal of energy – you had invested so much into this story that was at once a part of you also became a part of you. And as I read it, so did it become a part of me.
Religion proposes endless questions.
I have been working in television for the past – oh, almost ten years now. Sheesh, the greatest part of my adult life. I have often wondered why I am involved in television at all since it feels like it is too much too often the pap of the people. But it is, actually, a place where human stories are told. I am trying, right now, to piece my first film together. It is personal. It involves friends who have started to make maple syrup from the trees that grow on their land. It is also the story of a birthday party, an event that is consciously made to occur simultaneously with the spring maple rush. It is a lovely story of the excitement that we as humans have for the life-force of Nature.
I don’t know if it will turn out to mean anything more than a fond memory to myself and the friends who attended this weekend of maple sugaring in the bush – but at the same time there is a deeper reckoning. For myself at the very least.
Somehow I have ended up working for the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) in the Documentary Programming unit. I am the executive assistant to the Executive Director of Documentary Programming for CBC Television. There are too many times I have typed the word executive here and I am annoyed. The fact that I am an assistant is also annoying – but then, this is the story I have written for myself. Sometimes I think of the job as a corner instead of an opportunity which is maybe limiting myself.
All my life I have fancied myself a writer. I have fancied this of myself, yet I have also known it to be true on a much deeper, fundamental level. When I read your books, I feel a sense of relief. A sense of “ah, someone is answering my unwritten, unspoken, indescribable need.” You connect the disparate “chunks” (for lack of a better word at the moment) of my life.
The writer in me. The explorer in me. The philosopher in me. The journalist in me. I have never been published, yet does this detract from me? I used to think it did. I accept (happily) now that I am who I am.
My newfound friend (I am being forward in calling her a friend) my writing teacher and peer, Sarah, suggested that I write you a note to thank you for having an impact on my life. Isn’t that a lovely idea? She said that too often writers work in solitude.
I thank you, Jon. I thank you for questioning. I thank you for questing. I admire you greatly for your desire to feel connected with the unknown, the previously un-explained. You dare to attempt to explain the facets of life that are sacred, that many feel are not possible to put into words. You dare to try. And you do so with grace, with the utmost respect and with, I feel, a desire to understand more fully the nature of us, us strange, weird, egotistical, magical, creative wondrous creatures, us humans. And with your writing, you bring us together in a way that has never been done before.
It’s 1:49 am now and the day has taken its toll on this 33 year-old child who is unaccustomed to staying up this late on a “school night” and subsequently attempting to write. I appreciate your patience in reading through this bit of a slog. I wanted to reach out to you, more than any other author, because I believe in you, Jon. I believe your convictions to be true, and I am inspired by your desire to quest.
Thank you for the words and experiences you have shared with myself and your other readers. I am grateful for the efforts you have made and the thought and care you have infused in everything that you do and write.
All my best,
Your daughter, your sister, your friend and your colleague,
Ilka