Dorthy's Basket: great stories of courage when yours is lacking

6 survival books & one New Yorker article to fortify your soul.

Dear Companions,

If you are stuck in bed, trapped inside a body that doesn't cooperate, suffering from a broken autonomic system, it’s best to immerse yourself in a story that can whisk you away to the Healingvrse so realistically…

so quickly…

that you may feel the wet atmosphere of a maiden voyage on your lips or taste the sweat off the brow of the determined minds, within moments.

As you submerge yourself, an impenetrable force field envelops you and your problems become distant echos, so you plunge deeper into the pages.

When you return, you are simply not the same, and you find that being someone different is the best medication you can take.

I am speaking specifically of adventure stories. Of course, there are the inestimable stories of survival, like Primo Levi’s account of the Holocaust in Surviving Auschwitz, or Kolyma Tales of the Gulag by the lesser known Varlam Shalamov, but these stories while equally important have a different effect on the soul. They are for a different part of the Healingvrse.

Stories depicting man versus nature seem to carry less poisonous side effects compared to narratives centered on man versus man, despite their suffering and intensity. Therefore, from a purely escapist and inspirational perspective, they are a handy antidote.

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You may well remember the movie but Sebastian Junger’s Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men at Sea goes deeper, technically, into the events leading up to the death of fisherman of the Andrea Gail who disappeared in 1991. It also portrays the stories of those who survived, and the coast guard jumpers who dropped into the angriest ocean on record to save them. This book was impossible to put down—from the detailed explanations on meteorology, boat science, fishing life (did you know a severed mako head can bite?), and drowning, to the human traits that drive people to do the insane. And the heroic.

Below is an excerpt on John Spillane, one of the Air Force Jumpers who leaped out of a ditched helicopter and survived in the storm-tossed ocean.

According to people who have survived long falls, the acceleration of gravity is so heart-stoppingly fast that it’s more like getting shot downward out of a cannon. A body accelerates roughly twenty miles an hour for every second in its air…Spillane doesn’t remember the moment of impact, and he doesn’t remember the moment he finally realized he was in the water. His memory goes from falling to swimming with nothing in between. What he understands is that he is swimming, that is ALL he understands —he doesn’t know who he is, why he is there, or how he got there. He has no history and no future; he is just a consciousness at night in the middle of the sea.

I just started The Indifferent Stars Above but picking it up right after The Perfect Storm is what drove me to write this post. It’s about a group of early settlers who travelled by wagon to California. They end up spending the winter in the Sierra Nevada Mountain range, resulting in most extreme survival tactics. Theirs is considered to be the worst disaster of the overland migration to California. Written from the perspective of a 21-year-old woman, I wondered, if living today instead of 1846, would she be suffering from Long Covid.

I wrote about Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder in two prior posts. It is the most recently written book on this list of survival. If it were not based on so many first-hand accounts, it would be hard to believe.

To round this list out I just ordered Endurance, about Shackelton’s 1914 voyage to the Antarctic, just because it is the seminal story in this genre. Wall Street Journal calls it the best adventure book of all time. I vividly remember reading this New Yorker article about Henry Worsley, who traversed the same terrain in 2015.

The man felt like a speck in the frozen nothingness.

If you liked these suggestions, you might also like this one about artists like Proust, Renoir, Matisse, who created legendary works of art despite being in the throes of illness or disability. 

With Much Love from the Healingvrse,

Rebecca