In the Wake of the Jomon

All you need to do is look at the map on the first couple of pages. Once you realize that Mr. Turk sailed/paddled this entire thing with only one or two others, you will have to read about everything he went through to do it. He lives quite the opposite life of most of us, truly accomplishing a feat that shouldn't be humanly possible. And he does it all to prove that the Jomon did it to come to America.

Rebeccasreads highly recommends IN THE WAKE OF THE JOMON for those armchair travellers who love to follow in the footsteps of our ancestors in modern treks. In 1996 a 9,500-year-old skeleton, Kennewick Man, was found beside the Columbia River, galvanizing anthropologists with the possibility that prehistoric humans reached North America from Asia by crossing the ocean in small open boats. I first got on board with Jon Turk as he paddled around this blue marble & its COLD OCEANS. Now IN THE WAKE OF THE JOMON, we follow a specific route historians say an ancient people in pre-historic Japan took in open rafts or canoes, over the course of generations around the northern Pacific Rim, up modernday Russia, over the Bering Sea, along the Alaskan archipelago & south into America. Always filled with intimate details of the characteristics of the sea, the absurdity & frustrations of world bureaucracies, the meeting of cultures, as well as the effort to undertake the kinds of expeditions Jon Turk favors, IN THE WAKE OF THE JOMON will cast you adrift in both history & philosophy, as well as drenching you with the thrills & spills of a dangerous & beautiful journey. For all Readers who yearn to go down to the sea & muck about in boats, in far away places.

By Bill Marsano. "In the Wake of the Jomon" starts poorly--too much prattle. In 1996 a couple of collegians frolicking in/near/around Kennewick, Washington discovered the skull of a fellow soon to be called Kennewick Man. He was a Jomon, one of a Stone Age tribe from 9,500 to 20,000 years ago that had settled in, of all places, Japan. How came he to Washington? Turk thinks it possible he came not by the Bering Land Bridge but by boat. The Land Bridge explanation for early immigrations is, it seems, a little too simple. Fair enough--we need this background. The irksome part is the relentless blue-skying about WHY. Were the Jomon fleeing hunger or enemies? Misfortune or mayhem? Or were they (drumroll, please!) fired by man's inborn spirit of adventure? I can put up with a certain amount of this but not too much, which is what Turk has on offer. So much so that toward the end, when he actually produces something more interesting on the subject, I almost missed it, having long since become used to skimming. But all right--that's the worst of it, and not really so terrible, just an irritant that made me want to yell "Shut up and paddle!" every so often. When Turk gets the show on the road he begins producing a very fine book. It follows the old Kon-Tiki routine, and a good one it is: tracing the presumed route to turn speculation into plausibility. It offers many possibilities and he makes the most of them. Turk plans to sail from northeastern Japan to St. Lawrence Island, Alaska. His is no National Geographic expedition, where suffering means only having to load your own film. He has three tiny Wind Riders (plastic trimarans) donated by the manufacturer, some Gore-Tex, some Polartec. He's got his skillful accomplice Franz and a Russian translator, hired over the internet, who proves to speak almost no English and whose experience of water is confined to bathtubs. He cracks and splits after a week. I don't want to spoil this adventure but must give a few details beyond the murderous shear waves and the killer surf and the whirlpool so wide Turk didn't recognize what it was until he was in it. So: Only a third of the way along, safety and sanity dictate quitting and returning next year. Round Two is much the best part. Now Turk sets out with his wife, Chris, some Prijon Kodiak kayaks and, best of all, a translator who speaks more than one language. This is Mischa, an unlikely but utterly wonderful hero. He joins the expedition knowing that survival at sea is unlikely (he too has no boating experience) but that death ashore is certain: His stressful and ulcerous office job will kill him, literally, unless he escapes to what he calls "the wild nature." Putting his ego in a shoebox, Turk lets Mischa have the stage, for it is Mischa who earns it, who won't give up; when even Turk knows it's senseless to go on, Mischa simply won't be stopped. "Labor and defend," he cries, loosely translating an old Soviet slogan while launching into nightmare. "We must

There I was hunkered down in the Aleutian islands, weathering out yet another Bering Sea storm, when Jon Turk's book 'In the Wake of the Jomon' showed up in my mailbox. For the next twenty four hours, as the willy-wa winds howled and the sea roared, I was held hostage deep within the pages of Turk's epic and Homeric-like book. This book is one of those rare and special gifts, that appear from time to time, which are so captivating that it is nearly impossible to put them down. Between the pages of Turks book I could feel the Bering Sea on my face, breath of a walrus, the anxieties and joys of adventure, bone tired limbs, kamuj spirits, as Turk journey's in the ancient wake of the Jomon people and their migration from Japan to North America. While the majority of people follow the pragmatic path, Turk follows his dreams. He is honest, Intelligent, spiritual, hard-core, truly one of the greatest adventurers of our time, he is what the Russians call a puteshetvenik (a wandering story teller, one who carries the news, links cultures, and transfers technology.) On his quest to follow the migration of the Jomon and his own soul, Turk introduces us to reindeer herders, vodka drinking bureaucrats, a shaman and healer, Kamchatka hunters who face bears in hand-to-hand combat, pods of Killer whales and Sea lions, the authors own fears, and new revolutionary ways to view human development. Turk tells us that the original migrants, the Jomon, might have been driven by romantic or spiritual motives or by a plain old fashion love of adventure. Like Turk, maybe the Jomon were simply eccentric maverick seekers. This book has been carefully crafted, is intelligent and insightful, can be enjoyed by all, and is one of the wisest and thrilling, adventure stories ever written. 'In the Wake of the Jomon' made me feel like getting up off my couch and doing something wild and extraordinary, it made me feel alive. Anxiously awaiting Jon Turk's next dispatch from the field. Robert Torkildson Dutch Harbor, Alaska

Jon Turk's small boat crossing of the North Pacific is one of the most gripping adventure stories I've ever read. "In the Wake of the Jomon" also takes the reader back into the Stone Age to glimpse the inner urges that propelled our ancestors into the unknown. In looking backwards we find that we are looking inwards at ourselves. Finally, Jon paints a fasciniating tragic, yet oddly comic view of a modern frontier in the Russian Far East. A terrific read!