While not set in the Southwest, My Side of the Mountain is a timeless tale of wilderness survival, resonating with its readers across the world, Catskills to Cascades and on to the Carpathians.
Sam, who lives in an overcrowded apartment with his family in New York, runs away from home to live in the Catskills wilderness with his father’s blessing. Sam recounts the early days and what survival skills he had learned, from both the library and experience. Honestly, when this book was published in 1959, I wonder how many young readers decided to run away themselves! While Sam’s story does hold its trials, how many 12-year-olds read this and used it as a “how to” book? The reader learns about all sorts of wild foods, where to find them, how to cook them, how to build traps, how to tan hide, and more! It’s Back to Basics for kids: Equal parts instruction manual and dreamscape!
It’s probably a good thing I hadn’t discovered this read as a kid, because I was already a pretty confident wild child of the mountains! My dad often took my brother and I on hikes and pointed out what was edible and other activities an Eagle Scout might do with children – and I’m extremely proud to say my son picked his first wild strawberries before he was 2! Additionally, growing up in a tiny mountain town, my best friend and I had the run of the wild – we’d climb trees (well… she would. I’m scared of heights!), host fairy tea parties (we did partake in yarrow tea, of course..… it’s disgusting, by the way), hunt for dragons, and risk giardia on a daily basis drinking from the local river and streams in the area. Much like Sam in My Side of the Mountain, when we had the opportunity to go to the Rio Grande, we liked to hunt for crayfish and watercress at the mouth of a stream..… we may have even tricked her little sister into eating juniper berries (they’re safe, just extremely aromatic and piney!). If we had read this book as children, I can’t imagine what other adventures — and misadventures – we would’ve found within its pages. We would’ve been bonafide survivalists!
While I could go on and on about running amok in the wilderness of my childhood, that’s not what this post is about. However, it is what this book evokes – a sense of adventure, and even nostalgia, although we did not experience it as Sam did. His story is easy to read and understand, full of fun adventures, and he adapts easily to his new normal in this fictionalized “survival is so easy a 12-year-old from the city could do it” wilderness. Jean Craighead George did a wonderful job breathing life into her story and Sam’s survival, and much as her protagonist spent a lot of time in libraries for research, it seems like she must have as well. Just allow for some suspension of disbelief that a young boy’s family didn’t come looking for him for months or that most of Sam’s problems were solved before bedtime – that’s part of the charm! The cozy timelessness allows the story to be subtly tangible, and the comfort of your couch becomes Sam’s deerskin bed and your Sleepytime tea is the perfect pairing for his acorn pancakes.
This book has served as a gateway to the wilderness for many in their youth, and calls to its readers “come see for yourself!” If you didn’t read it as a child, I encourage you to as an adult, and if you did, I encourage you to read it again, it just might recapture your youthful sense of adventure. I leave you with a question: what books inspired adventure in you as a child?
“And that ended it,”
Mountain Girl
Mountain Girl Goes 
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