(Added May 2023)
“Be ye writer or reader, it is very pleasant to run away in a book.”
…
Continuing our mini-series on runaways, meet Sam Gribley, Jr., who leaves his home and family to live alone in the woods of the Catskill Mountains.
Like Claudia Kincaid [see “Mixed-up Files”], Sam is an adolescent idealist who feels cramped in a frenetic but well-organized life. In his case, the Gribley household contains eleven people—two parents, nine children, of whom the math suggests that three are in diapers—all stuffed into an unpretentious New York City USA apartment. In his case, Sam goes incommunicado not for eight days but for thirteen months. (May through June.) In his case, the family knows that he is leaving. In his case, they let him go … because they don’t believe him.
Aside from their physical discomfort, the Gribley family seems happy enough. During World War II, Mom worked in the cafeteria of a Children’s Hospital and remains dedicated to proper nutrition. She is a talented economizer, which is helpful with Dad’s modest income. They eat enough, they wear clothes enough, they have roof enough. Their great richness is in storytelling. A Gribley great-granddad once bought a farm in the Catskill Mountains, failed at it, then abandoned dry land and went to sea. Family legend has it that Gribley’s Mountain is still the name of their high place. Family legend also has it that “Gribley’s Folly” still belongs to the Gribleys, to the extent that the land legally belongs to anyone. And that’s it.
Many book reviewers assume that Sam ran away because he wanted living space. That may be an obvious answer but Sam himself never claims it as his reason. Sam could have gone to live with a set of loving grandparents. Then he would have been free of overcrowding yet would not have been cut off from valuable family connections. He would not have been deprived of friends, school, roast chicken, and television. Also, as the oldest and strongest child he even might have been useful in his grandparents’ house. But his heart does not lead him in that direction.
In truth there is no especial grievance or provocation that motivates Sam to run away from home. He never feels superfluous or unappreciated. He neither is raising nor solving a family problem, either real or imagined. He does not want to teach anyone a runaway’s song of “you’ll be sorry when I’m gone.” He just wants to live off the land. If their family has a high place, he presupposes a calling to “arise, go.” And he believes in that yearning strongly enough to speak to his parents. His parents, no doubt with eyes twinkling, let him go. After all, “everyone” runs away as a child. After all, they tell him, they both did it themselves. After all, he is just twelve years old.
(Dad even says, “You should. Every boy should.” Ahem.)
But unlike his father, his mother, his truck driver, his day-neighbor Bill, his friend Bando, his frenemy Matt, his author [JCG], his real-world author’s real-world mother and father and child and publisher … Sam Gribley, Jr. actually does it. Every other “runaway” comes home in time for their next meal. It is specifically stated in the preface that it was important to JCG that Sam Gribley, Jr. actually does it.
The author JCG was the daughter of a scientist in a family of naturalists. JCG learned basic flora and fauna and wilderness survival skills and even a little falconry alongside her brothers. This she passed on to her fictional counterpart Sam.
Ad astra. Sam reaches “his” mountain. He learns that the real world calls it Bitter Mountain and also calls it “haunted.” And the first thing he finds … is a poacher. Well, a 97-year-old little old lady poaching “his” strawberries. She has been picking strawberries on this land for thirty years; it’s a little late to stop her now.
(Aside from the steep slopes it is not at all bad land. The mountain includes abandoned raspberry bushes, blueberry shrubs, walnut trees, and apple trees. Whatever went wrong with Gribley’s Folly, it was good land for cold-weather fruit.)
Mrs. Ancient Strawberry Poacher, a force of nature in her own right, sets up the conflict between Sam’s dreams and Sam’s fate. She immediately bends Sam to her will, makes him help her, and then tattles on him. (She knows every youngster in town and he isn’t one of them.) So the legend of the “wild boy” of the woods already is begun before Sam lays him down to sleep on his first day. The Gentle Browser should look for these attributes in Sam’s interactions in the future. Maybe Sam had to go along to get along with a big household in a small home, but it’s difficult for him to alter this pattern even after a year of living alone. By the end even the mild-mannered Bando is imposing his will on Sam, however well-intentioned.
But that is still the future. Sam must construct a shelter, acquire food that grows, catch food that moves, stockpile nonperishable food for the winter, and sew his own clothes. He knows absolutely none of these things. Therefore he hies him to the library. He finds the librarian to be the first person who believes him. Without her help he probably would have failed (though that doesn’t necessarily mean that he would have gone home). The only interference she offers is a caution that if he does not want to become famous as aforesaid wild boy, then he needs a haircut. (She then cuts his hair for him.)
It starts sweetly enough. Sam captures a baby peregrine and raises it, cooing over it for entire chapters. Later he will climb trees to cut winter branches for the starving deer herd. But Sam must learn the difference between sweetness, sentimentality, and common sense. Only one of those three will keep him alive.
Sam was an omnivore in the city and has no qualms about being one now. He captured the falcon so that it would hunt meat for him. He feeds the deer because he harvests deer. (From his point of view, every hunter on his land is poaching, so he poaches deer back from them.)
Sam enjoys his Moment of Adam, naming the creatures and even nicknaming some people. Perspective is kept: he does not name his meals. Rabbits, frogs, and deer remain rabbits, frogs, and deer. He doesn’t nickname the librarian. And the humans he nicknames feel free to nickname Sam right back. Only “Bando” knows his own nickname. (Sam mistakes him for a bandit and reassures him that I won’t tell anyone you were here, if you don’t tell anyone that I was here. This is not what a lost tourist wanted to hear.)
To the extent that there are criticisms of this 64-year-old classic novel, they make two points. These are separate from the decades-old debate of whether rearing and training “Frightful” the falcon really is that easy. Rather, objection number one is that Sam’s survival is too easy. Objection number two is that the rest of the world is too lazy. Without detraction to the novel, we agree that these are valid observations. It happens that they are merely grown-up observations.
Regarding objection one, obstacles are mentioned. Does that previous sentence sound like a passive sentence? Why yes, it does. It surely does. Well, that reminds one of the obstacles that are mentioned. Yes, they do. They surely do. Obstacles tend to be soft-pedaled, downplayed.
Obstacle: city boy Sam provides a Halloween feast for the precious woodland creatures. Well, the precious woodland creatures are wild animals, not quixotic animated-film sidekicks. The wild animals raid his lair for second helpings on the food. He must terrify them to evict them. That means scaring the skunk. (Skunks gotta skunk.) Under normal circumstances a skunked homeowner must discard the carpets, curtains, cloth furniture, clothing, and anything else than can absorb an odor. Sam’s winter foodstuffs should have been destroyed, his clothes and blanket ruined, and his lair rendered uninhabitable. He should have had to start over. Also, Frightful should have gotten sick; her reaction is not mentioned.
Obstacle: Sam gets close enough to a deer hunter to read his watch, but the hunter never sees him. The deerskin-clad boy swiftly climbs a tree to get away from the hunter, but the hunter never hears him.
Obstacle: Sam’s sloppy housekeeping attracts a forest ranger. Yet when Sam poaches five deer in a year—and three legitimate hunters report it—the rangers are nowhere to be found. When Sam collects firewood for the winter, no one notices those giant stockpiles either.
Obstacle: the ice storm is so bad that Sam finds little dead songbirds for days. Yet Sam is warm enough with one set of clothes and one deerskin blanket.
Obstacle: Sam runs out of greens and fruits before the end of winter. A mysterious fatigue descends, accompanied by joint pains and spontaneous nosebleeds. Conveniently, the falcon Frightful brings him the food that will heal him. (Rabbit liver, we are informed.) Conveniently, Sam knows to eat it himself instead of feeding it to her.
Any one of these obstacles could have ended his adventure, but all of them are intercepted before they can reach their logical conclusion. In other book reviews, the argument most frequently put forth is that this is a children’s novel. The hurdles are lowered so that a child can climb over them. Children would not need to hear an explicit and gruesome tale to grasp that Sam was really well-prepared, and even he almost failed. You, dear reader, are not prepared, and so you should not try. Therefore the tale mentions just enough danger, but keeps the fun. So saith those other book reviews.
(By the way, where’s the privy? In a novel that mentioned his fur-lined undies, it cannot be a matter of delicacy. The narrative literally included everything else. Well, except a dentist. Except mosquitoes.)
In the end, the most realistic obstacle to Sam’s success is Sam’s youth, his inexperience, and his own personality. Did we mention that Sam is underage? Very much underage? The reader learns that, even at the end, Sam never does get old enough to shave.
Sam seems strong-willed only in comparison to Frightful and to the natural world. Amongst humans Sam demonstrates a habit of yielding to louder conversationalists. He tends to answer truthfully—not that this is a bad thing, but being better at lying might have kept him free for another year. He is not a great judge of character. Thank goodness the people he meets are mostly harmless, because he only gets it right about sixty percent of the time.
No doubt this is why one chapter is titled “In which I cooperate with the ending.” One day Frightful sees another peregrine and tries to leave. The odds are one in two that it is a potential mate. Sam knows he is lucky that she obeys him and returns at his call. Only now does he comprehend the scope of his influence over her. Only now can he hear her speak in his dreams:
“You want to be found.”
This is a serious complaint. Sam has made Frightful unique. She has no territory. She never has been independent. She may catch the food, but she has been trained to eat only when her human feeds her. She is too wild to keep as a pet but she is too compromised to be set free. If Sam leaves the woods, what will happen to her? For the first time, Sam uses the word he should have known all along: “captive.”
Until that day, Sam’s purported reasons for running away mostly are attributed by others. The strawberry poacher says that Sam wandered into the berry patch because he is “confused” i.e., dim-witted. The forest rangers call him a Boy Scout™ who got separated from his scout pack. The townies call him a weirdo, “crazy.” The police call him a myth. The newspapers print all of these hypotheses, but not the one that Sam quips to a townie his own age:
“I’m doing research. Who knows when we’re all going to be blown to bits and need to know how to smoke venison.”
Arguably Sam is just teasing. Tom “Mister Jacket” Sidler ridicules Sam up one side and down the other, after all. Still, Sam’s joust with Mister Jacket was his choice. He even adds that this is normally how he makes friends. But Sam never sought out Matt, and Sam never was master of that situation.
“You want to be found, or you wouldn’t have told him everything.”
The “everything” is told to Matt Spell, an aptly named character. And it really is as if Sam falls under a spell. The cub reporter runs circles around Sam. Whether Matt will grow up to be a real-news reporter or tabloid reporter is too soon to say. (One suspects he will work for the tabloids: no reporter worthy of the name would betray his source. Also, Matt promises not to reveal Sam’s name but makes no similar promise about unleashing at least twenty photographers.)
Note that even Sam finds a clue in a clue field, noticing that Matt’s “frozen” hands aren’t too frozen to write down everything that Sam is saying. How convenient that a freezing, starving tourist—who happens to be an aspiring reporter—just happens to freeze and starve and “get lost” on that one mountain, of all mountains, when Sam almost loses Frightful, of all days. If Sam did not fully grasp the word “captive,” he will experience a certain education now.
Which is what makes Matt Spell a capable interrogator. He overshares until he gets a response. “Matt told me about the trouble in the Middle East, the trouble overseas, and the trouble in the South.” (The novel was published in 1959, after all.)
(As it happens, in this year 2023 the “the South” still is in the news. It is not limited to the southern USA, but those are the USA states which currently have the reputation for making the most noise. The novel My Side of the Mountain itself initially was rejected for publication because of its subject matter. Presently, some USA libraries are facing pressure to censor their collections or to be defunded. The actual subject matter being challenged for censorship changes from decade to decade; in 2023, and especially in the USA South, from month to month. Consult the “American Library Association” or world news if interested.)
All of this world news restores Sam’s (over)confidence that running away was a good idea. He has been happier without hearing the world news. And now Matt asks, why did Sam do it? Why did he run away?
“This all proves my point. People live too close together.”
Yes, but why did you run away?
“I wanted to do something different.”
Yes, but why did you run away?
“I don’t like to be dependent. Particularly on electricity, rails, steam, oil, coal, machines, and all those things that can go wrong.”
Yes, but aren’t you lonely? Why did you run away?
“I haven’t had time for that for a moment since I got here. Besides, there are people in the city who are lonelier than I.”
Yes, but why did you run away?
“Some men climbed Mount Everest because it was there. Here is a wilderness.”
Yes, but why did you run away?
[Shut up! Go away! Leave me alone!]
See, now, if Sam had put a whole lot of Gone between his interrogator and himself from the start, it would have ended as a very different novel. Meanwhile, let the Gentle Browser contemplate how intense Matt Spell, Cub Reporter, will be when he gets some actual training. (Sam doesn’t even have the strength of will to kick him out of the house. Matt stays with him for another week!)
Compare this relentless examination to the long and silent patience of Bando, in reality a college professor who teaches English language and literature. He nicknames the runaway youth “Thoreau,” not mentioning that he, Bando, has read the ending of many books. He never tells Sam that the adventure will end until Sam begins to suspect the ending for himself.
One day Matt and Bando decide to build “guest houses” for, well, guests. The narrative is silent as to which guest thought up this nifty, spiffy, swell idea. It says only that “they” decided it, started it, and finished it. It says that Sam merely helped them.
“Why didn’t I cry, No? What made me build a city in the forest? Even though I know what it means. I seem to have an address now. A guest house meant that I was no longer a runaway. I was no longer hiding in the wilderness. I was living in the woods, like anyone else lives in a house.”
It is … ordinary.
All Sam knows is that the word “ordinary” hurts him some way, somehow. (Like Claudia Kincaid, again this theme that the runaway perceives trying-and-failing as a character flaw, rather than, say, not trying.)
As regarding the second objection—that the adults in this novel are too uninvolved—this is true, but suspension-of-disbelief is required to permit the adolescent quest. Parenting styles vary. Parental trends fluctuate. There are “uninvolved parents” and “helicopter parents.” There are “free-range parents” and “My beloved smother.” (The website “TV Tropes” has detailed examples of all of these. Warning: time sink.)
Still, the parenting style of the Gribleys doesn’t explain the silence of Tom “Mister Jacket” Sidler, or the silence of Bando the college professor. Much like JCG herself, the characters Dad and Mom and Bando and Mister Jacket let the young Sam live out his dream as their surrogate. As long as this Thoreau-on-Walden experiment, this fine fancy, remains a secret, then they can close their eyes to the reasons that they don’t all desert their posts and do the same thing for themselves.
So why don’t they interfere? Perhaps it is because the novel was published in 1959 and, as we mentioned, the year 1959 was not The Good Old Days for everyone. Quite aside from “troubles in the Middle East, overseas, and the South,” it was the year that the Soviet Union placed—crashed, really—the first man-made object on the Moon. (I.e., they could reach anyone, anywhere.) It was the last great gasp of polio (the epidemic that could reach anyone, anywhere), complicated by the theft of vaccines. It was the debut year of the series The Twilight Zone and the film adaptation of Nevil Shute’s novel On the Beach. It was the decade of fear of imminent thermonuclear destruction, so unfathomable and raw and new that the term MAD (“Mutually Assured Destruction,” in 1962) had not even been invented. It was an era in which school-aged children practiced Civil Defense Drills called “duck and cover,” in much the way that school-aged children in the 2020s practice “active shooter drills” and COVID-19 could reach anyone, anywhere. In both eras, children looked to their left, looked to their right, and someone they knew was gone. These piercing moments in history can imprint themselves upon a child in their formative years. Sometimes their adults even notice.
Or maybe Sam’s adults do not interfere because of their own imprinted memories of their own piercing moments of history. Dad and Mom and Bando all grew up in the Great Depression and World War II. They may not have had a golden summer of childhood themselves. Why did the adults let Sam Gribley, Jr. spend thirteen months living in the woods? Maybe, just maybe, for a reason he said himself: just in case he wouldn’t live to grow up. They all knew someone who didn’t. We all knew someone who didn’t.
Or we could return to Sam himself. Sam is no survivalist in the 21st Century sense of the word. He does not reject humanity or anyone in it. He notices problems but does not despair. He feels no anger, harbors no darkness. He welcomes his guests with a trusting soul and a generosity of spirit; and if they prove unworthy of his friendship, well, that’s on them. But Sam also is not a hermit in the First Century sense of the word. He is not seeking to be closer to God, never mentions God or faith. He is not waiting for a Rapture; he thinks his version of escape is enough for him. He thinks he can have a happy life here and now, if he just works for it.
Sam is a naturalist, a Romantic in the English language-and-literature sense of the word. As to the motives of his parents, the narrative is both complex enough and spare enough to support multiple interpretations. So in almost all of those interpretations, maybe the adults decided, Let him be. He’s not hurting anyone. Let him have this one thing. Let him have it.
But of course Matt Spell casts a spell to break the spell. The cub reporter reports the man-cub. As Dad explains, the experiment must end because it has hurt Mom’s feelings.
“You see, a woman lives among her neighbors. She got awfully mad at all those newspapers inferring that she hadn’t done her duty. She took all those editorials personally. The nation became her neighbors. And no one, absolutely no one, is going to think that she neglected you.”
Note that it wasn’t because his family missed him and could no longer bear to be apart from him. (He never calls; he never writes.) Note that his family did not collect him in the belief that it is best for him. They collected him because it was best for them.
In the end, Sam has to return to parental supervision, has to return to school, has to eat delicious roast chicken from a grocery store, has to live in a house with roof and walls and doors (and ten other people), because his parents were publicly embarrassed. Not chased out of town—it is unclear if they were even identified by name—but embarrassed nevertheless. “Piling on” existed before Ye Olde Internette, young’uns.
The whole thing raises questions about how long Sam would have remained in the woods if his parents had not been denounced because he had not been caught. It is more than whether Sam is pliable around people.
“I decided that if my house was going to shatter, I’d just as soon be in it.”
(—On his fear of being crushed to death if he stayed indoors in an ice storm.)
Sam never would have said that before that first winter. Far from it; in his first summer, he considers abandoning his lair because a forest ranger lurks in the area. The earlier version of Sam just shrugs, saying with some pride that “I knew I could live anywhere. My tree was just a pleasant habit.” This later version of Sam feels some sense of being rooted, and it frightens him.
As the novel ends, we hear a fresh whimper of discontent from Sam. He wonders if he can run away from his parents—this time, without informing them—and sail the seas like Great-Granddad. The islands might be stimulating. He even calculates the distance to paddle a canoe across the Bering Strait. (Which, if he could have read Solzhenitsyn, Junior swiftly would be informed that a free spirit might not be happy in the 1959 Soviet Union.)
None of these, however, are plans. His parents have plans. And in this family, it’s the man with the plan who holds the day.
Sam’s dreams and his fate are an exercise in creative tension. A year of solitude was both too much for Sam and also not enough for him. Abram, later Abraham, bought the plot on which he was laid to rest, but never owned the land on which he lived; believed a promise, but did not live to see its fulfillment. Peter and James and John did not want to leave the mountain-top, but they had no choice; they had to live their lives. Whatever mountain-top experience Sam Gribley, Jr. was seeking, he couldn’t freeze it in time; he couldn’t hold on to it. But it wasn’t because it was not offered. Sam’s parents give him that opportunity. Here, let us build for each who are here. And suddenly Sam Gribley stops aspiring to Simon Peter and tries to turn into Peter Pan. No, I don’t want to grow up. Second star to the right, and straight on till morning. House? Parents? Chores? Nope. No, thank you. I gotta get out of here.
And then a Mom-shaped hug holds him fast, anchors him to his home, his place. And that’s it.
Highly recommended.
…
My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George (1919-2012). First published New York, c1959, and never out of print since.
A Newbery Honor Book and an ALA [American Library Association] Notable Book.
.Audiobook Edition on 4 Compact Discs. ISBN: 978-07887-95220. [New York]: Recorded Books, Inc., c1994. Narrated by Jeff Woodman.
A film version exists. Not seen, not reviewed. A transcript briefly was skimmed. Aside from the fact that Film Sam’s departure and return were entirely different, the book makes no mention of “algae.” Therefore we offer no suggestion regarding whether the 1969 film was good or poor, only that it was different. Algae, algae, algae, algae, algae. It’s not in there. Good scenery, we are informed.
The Craighead George family maintains a Parent/Teacher resource page called “Sam Gribley Day.” It also includes contact information for the Craighead George family. See https://www.jeancraigheadgeorge.com/samgribleyday-fieldtrip.html
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RELATED MATERIALS
See television series Starman, episode “Peregrine.” In 1973 the peregrine falcon was declared an Endangered Species. Although the population has stabilized, Sam Gribley, Jr. was luckier than he knew, to find one back then. He probably wouldn’t have found one today.
See also the documentary film miniseries “Alone in the Wilderness” starring Richard “Dick” Proenneke (1916-2003) of the Lake Clark National Park. Proenneke lived in the wilderness of Twin Lakes, Alaska for 30 years until his health failed. Gribley’s farm never existed, but this place does. And you can visit it.
{End.}
potluck2point0 