The Great Escape
Bradford Angier's One Acre and Security was
first published in 1972, and is now available in an
attractive reprinted version from Wisconson's Willow
Creek Press. The book covers, albeit briefly, everything
from building your own log cabin to organic gardening,
growing and selling herbs, keeping bees, raising livestock
and raising "Fish, Frogs and Turtles for Profit, Food
and Fun," as one chapter title declares.
Readers picking up the book for the first time in the
early 1970s probably had somewhat different assumptions
about the book than readers of the reprint might today.
Angier was well-known to anyone who was interested in
wilderness survival, a movement that pre-dated the back-to-the-land
surge and was at least as eyebrow-raising, and was one
of its most-published voices for two decades. Beginning
in 1952 with How to Build Your Home in the Woods,
Angier tapped the well of American hunters, disillusioned
veterans, misfit Eagle Scouts and modern-day Thoreaus
and built a career as an expert survivalist before the
word existed, and forged what would be a lifelong writer-publisher
relationship with Stackpole Books, a family-run Pennsylvania
publisher that had been printing books on hunting and
the outdoors since the 1930s. Angier and Stackpole both
found their mass audience with Angier's second book
in 1956, How to Stay Alive in the Woods, which
began running through a series of mass-market paperback
printings in the early 1960s and hasn't stopped yet.
New books continued to push his message through those
decades as sales of How to Stay Alive in the Woods
continued to climb. On Your Own in the Wilderness,
We Like It Wild, Home in Your Pack: The Modern Handbook
of Backpacking, Skills for Taming the Woods: A Handbook
of Woodcraft Wisdom, Being Your Own Wilderness Doctor
and more began appearing on the bookshelves of
mainstream America, manuscripts filed from the Canadian
woods outside Peace River in northeastern Alberta, Canada,
where he and his wife made their home.
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| One of One
Acre and Security's fine illustrations
by Arthur J. Anderson |
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In the early 1970s, his work began to shift from backpacking
and hunting guides to titles that explicitly promised
escape from contemporary, civilized culture. Amidst
a flurry of books about wild foods – one cookbook,
one field guide, and three dispiritingly similar general
texts – books began to hit the shelves that seemed
targeted to youth ready to throw out the baby, the bathwater
and the whole tub. The Art and Science of Taking
to the Woods (1970), At Home in the Woods: Living
the Life of Thoreau Today (1971), How to Live
in the Woods on Pennies A Day (1971), a hardcover
reprinting of How to Stay Alive in the Woods
(1971), Survival In Style: In Trouble or In Fun –
How to Keep Body and Soul Together in the Wilderness
(1972), and One Acre and Security offered
a promise that anyone with the courage, the drive and
the know-how could find independence, harmony and bliss
in the wilderness, "feasting free on wild edibles" far
from the civilization that so vexed them.
During that period, Angier also co-authored several
works of young adult fiction. Whether he was approached
as a consultant to authors working on wilderness stories
or approached childrens' writers to help turn his ideas
into fiction is unknown. What is clear is that he and
his authors found common cause in the subjects they
wrote about.
The first of these titles, The Ghost of Spirit River,
told the story of two children in search of some escaped
horses who encounter a supernatural force in the Alaskan
wilderness. The second, Far North (1970), more
clearly outlines Angier's self-assigned role as pied
piper to the nation's disaffected youth:
Nathaniel and Kimberly, brother and sister, sick
of the surfeit and the California suburban scene,
are runaways from affluence and from a father who
believed in regular jobs and a mortgage and four martinis
before dinner. He believed in good boarding schools
for his children, preferably at some distance from
home, and he believed in the Dow-Jones averages. Far
north in the vast spruce forests of the Canadian wilderness,
lives Uncle Seth, their father's youngest brother,
a UCLA dropout who went north to live the way he wanted
to, to hunt and fish and grow his own food. The two
months Nathanial spent with him the year before had
been the happiest time of his life and he was planning
to go back this summer, in spite of the job his father
had arranged for him. The birthday check from his
grandmother is his ticket for escape. Kimberly, no
outdoorsman, was equally determined to avoid the expensive
camp chosen for her.
That year marked Angier's peak output, with three books
published that year, followed by two in 1970 and two
more in 1971. (By my count, Angier published at least
ten books between 1968 to 1974 – and that was where
I stopped counting.)
After Survival In Style and One Acre and
Security, his writing hand slowed as he reached
for new readers with books on freighter travel and gold
prospecting interspersed with others on cooking "natural
meats" and medicinal wild plants. By the mid-1980s he
had authored nearly fifty books in a period of less
than thirty years, and he continues to publish occasionally
to this day. He has largely returned to the theme that
led publishers to dub him "Mr. Outdoors,"
publishing an Air Force Officers' Survival Guide
and Basic Wilderness Survival Skills, likely
a civilian-oriented revision of the same text, in 2002.
Next: Logsdon's
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