Quince Mountain
Blair Braverman
The prologue to Blair Braverman’s riveting memoir, Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube: Chasing Fear and Finding Home in the Great White North, opens at a bonfire on a Norwegian fjord, where Braverman, an American and then 24, is drinking cider with the locals. “How did you find her?” someone asks the man who invited her.
“The hard answer,” writes Braverman, “stretched back 15 years and 4,000 miles, through blizzards and open tundra, smothering ice caves and the pulsing northern lights, many nights alone and some, unmercifully, not.”
Braverman’s book is the story of her quest to become “tough.” Before even starting college she signs up for a Norwegian “folk school” dedicated to teaching arctic survival, and she learns to drive dogsleds, enduring pain and sleeping outdoors in subzero temperatures. She spends two summers during college living on top of an Alaskan glacier (only accessible by helicopter) as a guide for a dogsled operator.
And she returns again and again to the tiny village of Mortenhals, in northern Norway, where she forges ties with the eccentric owner of a tiny “near-store” and inserts herself into the rhythms of a community she comes to think of as a second home.
Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube is great storytelling. Braverman’s love of the northern landscapes sparkles throughout, and her compassionate renderings of the people she grows to love are deeply affecting. As she recounts her adventures — inner and outer — she reveals a vulnerability beneath her tough exterior and a self-awareness beyond her years.
Surrounded by men and masculine culture, she wrestles with fear that her toughness, demonstrated by her actions, does not run deep enough to protect her.
On the scale of Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat Pray Love, and equally moving, Braverman’s memoir takes the reader on a journey to harsh landscapes where survival is everything. Along the way, Braverman provides glimpses of her future self. The stories are told largely in flashbacks, and it isn’t until late in the book when she begins to find a deep acceptance of the events that have shaped her life.
It’s a deeply satisfying experience when she finally explores her relationship with dogs, describing a dogsledding race in such exquisite detail that I found my pulse pounding.
In recent years, Braverman has taken up residence here in Wisconsin. She shares a farm with her husband, horses and a sled dog team, and she is training to race the Iditarod. I’m grateful to Braverman for eloquently describing what so often stays beneath the surface. And I’m glad she found home.
Blair Braverman reads from Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube at A Room of One’s Own on Sunday, July 24, at 2 p.m.
