DENISON'S ICE ROAD

by Edith Iglauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1974

There are indeed strange things done in the midnight sun. Every year John Denison and his workers plow a road across the lakes connecting Yellowknife to Port Radium in the Northwest Territories -- a distance of about 325 miles. This is strange because the ice constantly breaks and vehicles fall through: the drivers keep one hand on the wheel, the other on the door handle, ready to leap. Iglauer writes of an incident in which a driver plummeted to a depth of forty feet and swam up to encounter a temperature of sixty below; of stranded workers who waited days for rescue, unable to sleep because they would freeze to death. She was so fascinated by the obsessiveness that would move a man like Denison to repeat this job every year -- in sickness or in health -- that she accompanied him, risking everything he did in his Sisyphean delirium (truck after truck was lost, then hauled out). The dangers proliferate: ""white-outs"" (zero visibility), riding brakeless (at 45 below, they just don't work). Many inhabitants of the Canadian north stand in awe of Denison's bravura (madness?): in the words of one Yellowknifer, it is ""heartscaring. heartbreaking."" Likewise the reader flinches when Iglauer says, ""How beautiful danger is! I hate it. I love it."" You may have to put on your long underwear and parka to read it, but you will not put it down until Denison finally completes his ice road. (To be excerpted in the New Yorker.)

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1974

ISBN: 1550170414

Page Count: -

Publisher: Dutton

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1974

Categories: NONFICTION