fwriction

After a short hiatus, Story of the Day returns! Today, we have an excerpt from Joseph Boyden’s Through Black Spruce. Yes, he’s Canadian, but I won’t hold that against him (a today-only special). In addition to being an award-winning writer (Through Black Spruce won the prestigious Scotiabank Giller Prize), Boyden is also one of the most talented, caring teachers I have ever had the good fortune of meeting and learning from; I’d say he taught me much of what I know, but that would be doing Boyden a great, great disservice:

Soon as I forced the door open, the snow, it stopped falling. Like that. Like in a movie. And when the cloud cover left on a winter afternoon a hundred plus miles north of Moosonee in January, the cold came, pre- sented itself in such a forceful way that I had two choices.

The first was to assume that the cold was a living thing that chased me and wanted to suck the life from me. I could get angry at it, desperate for some sense of fairness in the world, and then begin to panic.

Or my second option was to make up my mind that the cold, that nature, was just an unfortunate clash of weather systems. If I made my mind up this second way, that the physical world no longer held vengeance and evil just beyond the black shadow of spruce, then I’d try and make do with what I had. And when I realized what an idiot I was for ending up here all alone without the proper gear—just a jean jacket with a sweater under it and running shoes on my feet—I’d get angry, desperate for some sense of fairness in the world, and begin to panic.