Erratic North: A Vietnam Draft Resister's Life in the Canadian Bush.

Joseph Jones is a reference librarian in the Koerner Library at the
University of British Columbia.

The subtitle of this memoir stakes out the ground for wide-ranging thoughts. Towards the end of the book, Mark Frutkin comments on his method: “Like a voluntary exile, a traveller without a home, I feel free to wander anywhere my interest or curiosity takes me.” He identifies with the glacial erratic boulders that inspire the main title.

In the summer of 1970 Frutkin immigrated to Canada from a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio. By the next summer he and some friends had gone back to the land on a 200-acre farm in rural Quebec. For the next eight years Frutkin lived in a garage-sized century-old cabin without plumbing or electricity.

Frutkin’s meditations—divided into 10 parts, and those parts into 60 titled sections—meander around the two pillars of subsisting on a farm and resistance to war (the Vietnam War provides a dominant specific).

Nature and rural life offer a basis for excursions into topics like water, growing food, bugs, gathering firewood, vehicle repair, winter, making bread, village drollery, snow and cold, wood stoves, outhouses, bears, and producing maple syrup. City boy Mark stuck it out for years as he picked up a lot of lore and many practical skills.

Frutkin’s account of resistance to the Vietnam War starts with his own emigration from the United States to Canada. He branches out to consider broader aspects like the Civil War draft, the self-immolation of Norman Morrison, and the memorial wall in Washington D.C.

His own experience leads him to research and to imagine the details of two other lives. His Jewish grandfather fled Belarus at the age of 18 to escape service in the Russian army. His Quebec neighbour refused conscription in the World War II era.

Raised a Catholic, of Jewish ancestry, and drawn to Buddhist practice, Frutkin imbues his material with transcendental shimmer.

His interweaving of disparate topics displays a mastery of transition.

The book is also notable for what has been left out, especially the details of a personal life that can only be caught in glimpses.