Aussie ramblings in the Arctic.

This is probably the most obscure book that I've pulled from the shelves yet, having never heard of the title, the author or its subject matter. As the title implies, Cassandra Pybus' 2002 work The Woman Who Walked To Russia: A Writer's Search for a Lost Legend is just that: Pybus' attempt to track down one Lillian Alling, who reportedly walked across Canada's densest wilderness in the 1920s, all in an attempt to get home to Siberia. It sounds implausible, yet when Pybus hears of Lillian's legend, she immediately packs up and jets off from her balmy Australian home, meets up with a long-lost friend, and starts wandering through the wilds of British Columbia, the Yukon Territory and into Alaska.

Pybus' trek doesn't start out on a promising note, as she's unable to find much information on Lillian and her friend turns out to have changed drastically, a fact made all the more trying by the close quarters the two are forced to share. Pybus strays more from Lillian's story as the trail goes cold, instead weaving in tales of the Yukon gold rush, stories from the inhabitants along the way and overall impressions of a region that has become, if anything, more isolated in the decades since Lillian's feat. As Pybus crosses over the border into Alaska, she is nearly convinced that either the epic walk never actually occurred, or that time and imagination had added to the truth as to make it unrecognizable. But just as Pybus is about to leave the Arctic, she stumbles on a possible explaination that might provide a satisfying conclusion to Lillian's improbable walk.

I had pretty high hopes for this book, as it started out strongly enough. But once Pybus actually hit the trail, I started to lose interest. Much of this had to do with her personal problems with her traveling companion, and as I noted with Driving Mr. Albert, it's never a good idea to bring such emotional baggage on a trip, and a much worse idea to chose to write about them. Once Pybus is on her own, though, I still wasn't really able to muster up much interest in her travels, which seemed mostly intersted in the ordeal of Jack London during the gold rush, and the fate of those drawn to the wilderness (especially Chris McCandless, chronicled in Jon Krakauer's bestseller Into the Wild). I really only kept reading to learn more about Lillian, but the dearth of information on her is too frustrating for both author and reader. Overall, the premise was promising, but like much else in the forbidding wilderness Pybus crosses, The Woman Who Walked to Russia concludes with a great sense of emptiness and missed opportunity.