One of the good things about homeschooling my kids was that I sort of taught myself how to become a teacher. I never wanted to teach other people’s kids but I loved mine enough to give it a shot. Lucky for me, there were a lot of people who paved the way ahead of me and freely passed out the keys to providing kids with a decent education.

Of course, I have always thought that books were pretty foundational. Not necessarily textbooks, which while providing a framework for progressivity, could also be like eating dry toast for breakfast. Every. Day. How happy was I to learn that much of what we had to cover in Social Studies or Language Arts or Science could be found in Living Books. Meaning real stories written by real people. Even Math could be dissected by picture books and History plumbed with a great novel.

My love of literature started a long time ago in the basement of our farmhouse where an odd assortment of books had collected on the shelves. There were outdated textbooks, some Pulitzer Prize winners, MAD magazine digests, and the first kid’s books I knew. I suspected that The Cat in the Hat Comes Back was a sequel by its title, but as it was the only one we had, it was the only Dr. Suess that I knew. Homer Price, The House at Pooh Corner, The Middle Sister, The Big Wave, The Magic Tunnel populated the shelves, as well as a few of the Thornton W. Burgess, Nancy Drew, Trixie Belden, Hardy Boys and Donna Parker series.

The only library in our little town was in the Derwent school and because I showed so much enthusiasm for reading, the librarian soon let me look at the book catalogs that came across her desk and asked for my suggestions when it came to spending your hard-earned tax dollars for our little library collection. How cool was that?

What I didn’t realized was that some of the best descriptions, especially for books that graced the covers of the catalogs and the tops of the pages, were for award winning books. I never paid attention when I was in school to the gold stickers that were on the front of Really Good Books: the Caldecott Award and the John Newbery. Fast forward to the early 2000s, when I started reading How to Homeschool books in earnest, I discovered that there were many more of these magical lists, these Good Books that would not only entertain me my children, but teach them Very Good Things, too.

Hatchet by Gary Paulsen was one of those Good Books. Between the lines of a story of parents getting divorced, the protagonist Brian Robeson boards a plane at the beginning of summer break to go see his father who now lives in Canada, somewhere remote enough that a two-seater plane is the method of transport. As if just being a zit-spackled teenager caught in between your parents isn’t bad enough, Brian’s pilot suffers a heart attack and they plummet to the ground to their death. The End.

Just kidding. Brian (but not the pilot) survives the crash and he is pitted against the wilderness, desperately trying to stay alive until somebody can find him, like a needle in a stack of needles. All The Bad Wilderness Things happen to him: hunger, cold, rain, mosquitoes, moose attacks, nightmares about the dead pilot coming to get him, but somehow Brian uses his wits to figure out How to Do Everything With Only A Hatchet.

The Hatchet was a gift his mother gave him before he left which he luckily wore on his belt, surviving along with Brian when the plane, dead pilot and Everything Else That Would Have Been Useful wind up at the bottom of the lake. It turns out to be the key to everything in Brian’s survival.

Brian’s story – parts of which are based on the author’s real experiences living rugged in the bush – was so “enchanting” to Paulsen’s readers that they wrote to him and demanded: More Brian! And so Paulsen gave his adoring public more. The Hatchet series includes The River, Brian’s Winter, Brian’s Hunt, and Brian’s Return, all nice neat little books that you could read in a few hours or find as an audiobook at your local library read by Peter Coyote.

With the Brian books, I can vicariously survive with him in the woods because I have no intention of EVER getting stranded in the wilderness, in Vermilion Provincial Park or even in my backyard. I’m not exactly what you would call a gamer when it comes to the Great Outdoors. I prefer My Outdoors to be 20 above and wind-less, with a cooler of hot dogs and coolers on the deck and a warm bed awaiting me inside four walls. With electricity. And bug spray. No moose.

But.

The Brian Books remind me that with a little bit of ingenuity, we humans can survive a lot, almost anything really. We only need to look back at the last few months when we were first tossed into the COVID-a-tron to know that we can put up with a lot. And sometimes the way to get through the next unknown is to remember what you have already done. Brian, via Paulsen, returned to the woods again and again, because he knew he COULD do it again. And the last time, he did take bug spray.