John Bragstad spent a career working as a licensed Marriage and Family therapist in Canada and in the U.S. He has also served as a canoe guide in the BWCAW, and taken canoe paddles deep into the Canadian wilderness. In this book, John captures the sights, sounds of the outdoors, crackling fires and star-filled night skies, the cold sweat from a long winter trek, relating what he experiences with what he has learned as a counselor. It’s a great read. Staff photo/Brian Larsen
What do you do when you can’t find your bearings in the woods? Why you use your compass to put you back on course and go about your merry way.
For John Bragstad, the woods, water, plants, animals—the whole of nature—is his compass, and he captures it beautifully in his thoroughly terrific book Compass Season: Find your bearings through nature’s inspiration.
A quintessential poet, John’s prose comes through on each and every page.
Not only does John bring nature into your living room or favorite reading hideaway, he also threads stories about the pickles, problems, and plights of people, intertwining their predicaments with lessons learned in nature, and if no immediate solutions come forth–and sometimes they don’t– it’s a soothing journey that heals.
Quotes from Robert Service, Sigurd Olson, Aldo Leopold, Jack London, Henry David Thoreau, Jim Brandenburg, Don Ian Smith, and many other notable outdoor writers are woven through the text. Fans of those authors will enjoy the way Bragstad inserts a quote here and there to help set a tone, or tie something up in his varied vignettes that touch all four season of the Northland.
From the text:
“Here in the country of the wolf, fox, moose, lynx. Here is the land of the long silences that imbue the BWCAW with only one aspect of grandeur.
“In modern times we have lost this primal connection to the land, and with it, a sense of humility about life. We form it, shape it, design our existence to our specifications on freeways, something placed on-order, waiting in line or at a traffic light.
“But to be genuinely humble, to feel small is not something in life we routinely experience. We put ourselves at the center. This is a very different relationship with the world than those who have, for millennia, lived in concert with nature.”
A passage about December, and life, really hit home.
“In the doldrums of December, I should also light a fire, on the twenty-first to remind me I’ve made it. While it is not perceptible yet, minutes will accumulate each day and the promise of lengthening hours is inevitable and a certainty. If I wait it out, it will come as sure as the dawn of every new day.”
John has led an adventurous life, spending 25 years as a marriage counselor and several years working as a canoe guide while living in the U.S. and Canada, and he shares it graciously with the reader. Today he lives in Cook County with his wife and his dog named Jack. He is also the father of Alice Heeren, and father-in-law of Baiers Heeren.
The book is 214 pages long, well sourced, and is easy to read in one sitting or, you can read chapters in season or out of the season they were written for and be blessed.
Published by Birch River Books, Compass Season can be purchased locally at Drury Lane Bookstore, Lake Superior Trading Post and Birch Bark Books and Gifts. It can also be found online at birchriverbooks.com
For fans that enjoy great writing, especially of the Northland, this would make an excellent Christmas present.
Leave a Reply