174 ■ FLOWdressed impeccably every evening in their lonely outposts, Dorothy also
has learned that to keep control in an alien environment one must
impose one’s own order on the wilderness. The long evenings are taken
up by reading and writing. Books on every imaginable subject line the
walls of her two cabins. Then there are the occasional trips for supplies,
and in the summer some variety is introduced by the visits of fishermen
passing through. Dorothy seems to like people, but she likes being in
control of her own world even more.
One can survive solitude, but only if one finds ways of ordering
attention that will prevent entropy from destructuring the mind. Susan
Butcher, the dog breeder and trainer who races sleds in the Arctic for
up to eleven days on end while trying to elude the attacks of rogue moose
and wolves, moved years ago from Massachusetts to live in a cabin
twenty-five miles from the nearest village of Manley, Alaska (population
sixty-two). Before her marriage, she lived alone with her hundred and
fifty huskies. She doesn’t have the time to feel lonely: hunting for food
and caring for her dogs, who require her attention sixteen hours a day,
seven days a week, prevent that. She knows each dog by name, and the
name of each dog’s parents and grandparents. She knows their tempera
ments, preferences, eating habits, and current health. Susan claims she
would rather live this way than do anything else. The routines she has
built demand that her consciousness be focused on manageable tasks all
of the time—thereby making life a continuous flow experience.
A friend who likes to cross oceans alone on a sailboat once told
an anecdote that illustrates the lengths to which solitary cruisers some
times have to go in order to keep their minds focused. Approaching the
Azores on an eastward crossing of the Atlantic, about eight hundred
miles short of the Portuguese coast, and after many days without sight
ing a sail, he saw another small craft heading the opposite way. It was
a welcome opportunity to visit with a fellow cruiser, and the two boats
set course to meet in the open sea, side by side. The man in the other
boat had been scrubbing his deck, which was partly covered by a foul
smelling, sticky yellow substance. “How did you get your boat so dirty?”
asked my friend to break the ice. “Well, you see,” shrugged the other,
“it’s just a mess of rotten eggs.” My friend admitted that it wasn’t
obvious to him how so many rotten eggs happened to get smeared over
a boat in the middle of the ocean. “Well,” said the man, “the fridge gave
out, and the eggs spoiled. There hasn’t been any wind for days, and I
was getting really bored. So I thought that instead of tossing the eggs
overboard, I would break them over the deck, so that I would get to
clean them off afterward. I let them set for a while so it would be harder
to clean them off, but I didn’t figure on them smelling so bad.” In