Northern Lights & Shadows: Sixteen Years in the Alaska Bush

Lee Basnar
Booklocker (2005)
ISBN 9781591137788
Reviewed by Joanne Benham for Reader Views  (08/06)

Ever since I read Jack London’s Call of the Wild when I was a child, I have been enamored of anything to do with Alaska.  If a book is set in Alaska, I’ll buy it, more for the background and how people live than for the storyline.

Lee Basner was born in Vermont and in his early childhood developed a fascination with the Alaska Territory.  It took him thirty years, but he finally achieved his dream of living in the far North.  Sick with guilt over the men under his command who never came home from the Vietnam War while he made it through, Lee retired from the U.S. Army as a major at the age of forty-two and he and his wife Joan built a log home 200 miles from Anchorage.  They moved in during a March blizzard and lived there for the next sixteen years, pitting themselves against the worst Alaska could throw at them and surviving to tell the tale. 

They had no indoor plumbing, self-generated power and no telephone for the first years.  Clothes were washed in a wringer washer and hung outside to freeze, after which they were brought inside to thaw in front of the wood-burning stove, the only source of heat.

Balanced against these inconveniences was wildlife at the door, breathtaking scenery and the chance to really live their own lives as they wished, with no one to tell them what to do. 

Filled with anecdotes of their daily life from the mundane, like digging a trail to the outhouse, to the poignant such as a herd of caribou caught in an avalanche, many of them killed and injured while Lee was unable to reach them to at least put them out of their misery, I was unable to put the book down.  I even took it with me to read while I waited in line at the bank.  I loved this book.  It’s a real keeper.

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