Anne LaBastille spent most of her adult life in a forest cabin, far away from human settlements. By fulfilling her teenage dream, she has proved that it is possible to coexist with wildlife without trying to tame it at all costs.
I look at the photographs: in the foreground there is a woman and a dog. The woman is standing by the jetty in the water, washing her fair hair, suds running down her face, her eyes closed. The dog stands over her, its shaggy body taking up almost half the frame. The caption to the photo reads, “Pitzi licks the shampoo from my head, savoring the suds.” A dark patch of the forest fills the background. In another photograph, the same fair-haired woman is chopping wood, axe in hand, a mountain of logs grows around the stump. A cabin can be seen in the background. More black and white photographs show the same person: carrying a large rucksack as she walks uphill, hugging a white tree trunk, bathing in a stream, cooking over an open fire, driving a snowmobile, sailing a canoe on a rough lake.
Widening the Canon
It is nice to look at these photographs as I sit in a warm room, wrapped in a blanket, a mug of hot tea in hand and think to myself: I would love to live like that, too—in the forest, away from people and their intrusive presence, no alarm clocks in the morning, no complaints of superiors at noon, no arguments from a dissatisfied family in the evening. An escape from civilization and a return to nature is a recurring motif in art and literature. Many people dream of it, but few actually do it. The latter are typically men, often white and representing Western culture, such as Henry David Thoreau, author of the celebrated book Walden or Life in the Woods. More recently, Christopher McCandless’ solitary, months-long, tragic trek across the United States was described by Jon Krakauer in Into the Wild, and the film based on the book quickly gained a cult following.
The woman in the photos—chopping wood, bathing in a stream, and driving a snowmobile—is Anne LaBastille. For more than thirty years (with brief interruptions for scientific research and guiding trips) she lived in the wilderness, in a log cabin in the Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York, without electricity or running water and, most importantly, without any family support. Thoreau spent two years in the woods, while friends helped him financially and his mother did his laundry and cooked. Generally, people think that Thoreau was on his own, immersed in nature and his own thoughts. Meanwhile—as the journalist Kathryn Schulz points out in her article “The Moral Judgments of Henry David Thoreau,” published in The New Yorker—when the writer took up residence in a cabin by Walden Pond in 1845, the area was already a popular picnic spot in summer and frequented by ice-skating enthusiasts in winter
The suburban railway tracks to Boston ran about five hundred meters from his cabin, so Thoreau could hear the whistling of the locomotive and the clatter of the train wheels. An escape from civilization? Rather, existing on its fringes, in the rather comfortable position of a critic of technological progress and the nineteenth-century social order, reliving personal insights against the backdrop of a picturesque landscape in a shirt freshly laundered by his mother. If it weren’t for the rise of counterculture in the 1960s, Thoreau might have fallen into obscurity. A century later, American youth saw him as almost iconic, a symbol of uncompromising individualism. They wanted to lead simple lives in proximity to nature, just like he did. Few people at the time realized that Thoreau could only afford this lifestyle because he was supported by others, whom he rarely mentioned in the pages of his books— or didn’t mention at all.
Of course, Thoreau lived in a different time than LaBastille, and it would be unwarranted to argue whose existence in the wilderness was more authentic or who managed to live closer to nature. After all, this is not a competition along the lines of “whoever gets deeper into the forest and adapts to the Spartan conditions more quickly will write more about their experience.”
“The canon of environmental literature must widen its aperture to include more work from women, people of color, and gender-nonconforming writers. The white-male-against-nature narrative has played out horribly. We have seen what has happened when the last big game are hunted and stuffed, the great old forests logged, Everest is polluted with bodies and plastic, and shorelines have been developed. The outdoorsman protagonist has become the antagonist. We need new narratives. We need a different kind of hero,” Megan Mayhew Bergman, an environmental journalist and writer, wrote in the article “Adventuring While Female: Why the Relationship Women Have with Nature Matters,” published in The Guardian. Could Anne LaBastille become a “different kind of hero”?
Independence Day
“You must leave before the Fourth of July” was the ultimatum given to Anne by her husband. Their marriage of several years was just coming to an end; They rented out cabins and organized trips for nature lovers in the Adirondack Mountains. This was her teenage dream come true, a dream her parents (her mother a professional pianist, her father a professor of linguistics) had tried to convince her not to do. Ever since she can remember, she wanted to live in the forest, preferably in a cabin like Thoreau’s. She dreamed of camping in the wilderness and hiking the mountain trails. She longed to be involved in nature conservation and animal observation. On the surface, she had it all. However, she felt that reality stifled her like an uncomfortable pair of shoes: you can walk, but it’s no fun. At the time, she was trying to please others. She guided tourists to the mountains and ensured that their time in nature was memorable. Then she cleaned rooms and bathrooms, chopped wood, cooked, looked after the staff. Private life and work merged into one, and this did not help her marriage.
In less than two months, Anne had to find a new home and a new job. “I did not have anywhere to go”—she recalls in her book Woodswoman, published in 1976, which opens a four-part series about her life in the wilderness. Family members were either dead or scattered across the US, so she couldn’t rely on loved ones. She was afraid of homelessness and wanted a place to stay, but on her own terms. This meant peace and quiet, staying away from people but as close as possible to animals. Intuition told her that she should build a log cabin in a remote part of the Adirondacks. A return to nature, she felt, might help her deal with the despair she was overcome with as her previous life began to unravel. She bought a plot of land at Black Bear Lake (in fact, the real name is Twitchell Lake—Black Bear Lake is what Anne called it in her books).
There she built the home, which is described in detail in Woodswoman. Anne’s plot of land was nine hectares, and she bought forty-five logs from a local sawmill (she did not want to cut down a single tree on her land), for which she paid six-hundred dollars including transport to the site. Two carpenters helped her with the work, while she drew on Calvin Rutstrum’s book The Wilderness Cabin. Her meticulous descriptions in Woodswoman are more than a mere compendium of practical knowledge about building a cabin in the wilderness and living without access to electricity or running water. Beneath the dry facts lies another layer: the process of forming one’s own identity. By building the house—which she would later call West of Wind—Anne was creating herself anew. “In a world where millions of people live in cities and suburbs, renting small spaces and owning nothing, I feel that owning land is a priceless gift,” she writes in Woodswoman. Anne moved into her newly built house on July 4, 1964, Independence Day. In the book, she calls it “The day of personal liberation.”
“I finally had my own home, with doors I could open or close to the world, and windows with a beautiful view. I had four well-insulated walls and a solid, sloping roof. The floor was flat and even,” she writes. Inside: a mezzanine, kitchen, bed, table, desk, sideboard, bookcase, wardrobe, chair, rocking chair, lamp, and fireplace. Hand-woven traditional carpets hung on the walls, a reproduction of van Gogh’s The Starry Night above the bed. All this on just under 13 m²; The space around the house is its extension. The distance to the nearest dirt road was 2.5 km, to the nearest permanent settlement, Hawk Hill, 8 km. Admittedly, there were holiday cottages on the lakeside, but they were only occupied during the summer.
After the season, three people stayed at the lake: Anne and an elderly couple—her remote neighbors. Each morning, as she stepped out onto the veranda to drink a cup of strong coffee, she admired the 24,000 km² of wilderness stretched out all around her—this is the size of the Adirondack Park, created in 1892, whose total area is larger than Yosemite, Yellowstone, Glacier, and Grand Canyon parks combined. It includes most of the Adirondack Mountain range, with the highest peak of Mount Marcy rising 1,629 meters above sea level, more than two thousand lakes and ponds and extensive wetlands. Less than 130,000 people live here permanently, in the summer the population grows to two hundred thousand.
Unsurprisingly, Anne initially worried whether she would be able to survive the worst of it. By that, she did not mean the lack of running water—she quickly got used to cold baths in the lake. Long, candlelit evenings also had some charm, at least up until November, when Adirondack residents anxiously stared into the sky. The geese were flying off to the south. Many secretly dreamt of being able to fly away with them for the winter. To escape the darkness, the cold, and the worst of it—loneliness. This was the price the permanent residents of the park had to pay for living in the wilderness. Winter meant long days or even weeks spent alone in the cabin, waiting for the snowstorm to pass, the roads to be cleared, the phone lines repaired, the gusty winds to stop, waiting to get in a car and drive to the nearest settlement, without risking their lives, to look for another human being in the first bar they came across along the way.
Wilderness
This is why Anne tried to keep herself occupied all throughout the winter. She wrote a lot. She published sixteen books, of which the Woodswoman series sold a total of more than 100,000 copies (the last book in the series, Woodswoman IV, was published in 2003), about 150 newspaper articles, including for National Geographic, and twenty-five academic articles. She was also a photographer, a guide and—since a trip to Guatemala in the 1960s—a full-time conservationist. At Lake Atitlán, she observed the Atitlán grebe, a flightless bird first described in 1929. When she returned to the same spot a few years later, she discovered to her dismay that the population of this endemic species had dropped by half. This was the subject of her doctoral thesis defended at Cornell University. For nearly a quarter of a century, she fought a battle with the Guatemalan government to place the bird’s habitat under strict protection. The fight ended in temporary success, and in 1974 Anne LaBastille received the first of fourteen honors for conservation achievements—the World Wildlife Fund Gold Medal. Unfortunately, today, the species is considered extinct.
Until the end of her life, she remained a protector of rivers and lakes, an advocate for mosses and lichens, and an ambassador for wildlife. Her books are intimate records of the relationship with nature she established over the years. She watched porcupines from her cabin window. Sometimes an arctic hare or a raccoon crossed her path. Nuthatches, jays and tits flew to the bird feeder. A squirrel, lured by the smells, would enter the kitchen. Sometimes an American chipmunk would land on her back and beg for nuts. In winter, mice nested under the floorboards. Still, she realized that the animals tolerated her presence only because of easy access to food. Anne did not anthropomorphize nature, she did not try to tame wild animals. She wrote: “I believe that wildlife loses its dignity and, more importantly, its ability to survive in its natural environment when it becomes tame enough to accept food from humans.”
Living in the wilderness, however, was hardly idyllic. Until the end, Annie was never free of fear. She was afraid that if she had an accident, she wouldn’t be able to call for help, that she would freeze to death, or that her cabin would burn down. She often found herself in real danger—once, a bear came near her hut and wanted to attack Pitzi, her beloved German Shepherd.
Anne has consistently maintained her image of a hardy woman who can manage just as well, if not better than men, in the wilderness. During workshops at the Adirondack Center for Writing, she told aspiring authors that she never stepped out in public without her dogs, and always wore a red and black flannel shirt. Anne hid her date of birth—even her friends didn’t know exactly how old she was—as well as her place of residence, giving a fictitious name to the lake where she built her cabin. She didn’t want uninvited guests, but they found her anyway. They would tear through the Adirondack Mountains, even in winter, just to see this famous woman who lived alone in the woods. The publisher regularly handed her bags of fan mail. The cabin—her “cocoon” or “security blanket”—could no longer protect her. The noise and other pollution caused by tourists were affecting her more and more. After twelve years, Anne decided to retreat even deeper into the forest. She built a new cabin, even smaller than the previous one. She named it Thoreau II in honor of her master.
Strawberries and Basil
What Anne LaBastille feared the most never happened: her cabin never burnt down, she did not freeze, she did not die mauled by a large animal. Toward the end of her life, she began to lose her memory, was no longer able to function independently, and moved to a care center in Plattsburgh, where she died in 2011. Shortly before her death, a former friend visited her. They went out to the garden and ate strawberries, the juice dribbling down their chins and fingers leaving pink stains on their white clothes. Anne no longer remembered people, events, or places. Eventually, the names Thoreau II and West of Wind meant nothing to her. At one point, however, she began to talk about how much she liked the smell of basil from her own garden. For a brief moment, she was herself again—the woodswoman who told other women: “Remain strong and alert like a kestrel flying against the wind.”
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