Hi Dick,
As you can see in the attached pic, I took your book with me recently on an overnight camp in Black Ridge Canyons Wilderness Area nearby my home, and it joined me at my campfire in the morning while I sipped coffee and watched the day come alive in the canyon country dropping away at my feet, a place as empty and as full as the territories you have visited and written of.
It’s an extraordinary book, recounting the extraordinary path you boldly chose for yourself in your 50s and beyond, and I am glad to have been experiencing the journey with you through its pages. I appreciated – and recognized – the stages of the adventure that you relate: inception, preparation, trepidation, setting out, mishap, recovery, exaltation, and most of all the experience of the fullness and beauty of the wild world. I
just wanted to drop you this note to say thanks!
& Non-fiction Editor Deep Wild Journal
“I absolutely loved Dick’s book!!!!
As I continued reading, it became amusing to me that book was entitled Solo because I
envisioned his canoe being PACKED with readers going along for the ride!!
His book has so many layers. Dick thoughtfully and calmly navigated each physical
challenge surviving in concert to his surroundings.
How I wish the world could deal with challenges with such respect of others and this
planet.
When Stephen Sondheim wrote that each of us has to go “Into the Woods” in order to take a journey of discovery, Dick Anderson had not yet written his deeply personal Solo. Anderson has taken just such a trip for us, bravely venturing not only into metaphorical woods, but very real and remote ones as well. In the pages of this beautiful book, he brings back for us to re-live alongside him, the majesty and awe, the challenges and rewards, the dangers and delights of going it alone into the unknown and unexpected. As is the case with any such adventure, his most unexpected discovery was himself.
— Fred Wistow, Author
My dad was Canadian, and I spent my summers on the lakes of Ontario camping and
fishing and hiking.
You in your writing were able to take me along with you.
I was on your shoulder seeing and feeling it all.
I have so much respectful your desire to be in the wild alone, “Solo.”
