Ruffles on my Longjohns

Ruffles on my Longjohns is the best read I've had for a long time. I heartily recommend it. Isobel Edwards has a great story to tell about her life in the rugged northwest and she has the talent to write about it in a way you feel you're there with her. It's a shame she has apparently written only this one book. Buy it and enjoy it! Gordon Padwick

RUFFLES ON MY LONGJOHNS begins in 1932 as Isabel Edwards leaves Portland, Oregon with her husband Earle to homestead the valley of the Atnarko River flowing through the coastal mountains of west central British Columbia. Used to city life, young Isabel must adapt to a world without electricity, indoor plumbing, central heating, regular mail service, roads, female companionship, immediate medical care, and contemporary conveniences of any sort. She and her husband build cabins, barns, fences, boats, spinning wheels, stoves, heaters, saddles, wells, and animal pens. Food not grown or hunted locally must be brought in by packhorse over many miles of rough terrain. One endures mosquitoes, floods, bears, wolves, snow and freezing cold. And no, one just can't jump into the SUV and drive down to the local Wal-Mart.Recently, PBS television aired a series entitled "Frontier House" in which three American families volunteer to re-create life as homesteaders in Montana of the 1880s. For several months, they sampled exactly what the Edwards lived for real for years, but did it with much more whining. What's remarkable about Isabel's narrative is the matter-of-fact good humor in which she tells it. Perhaps it's because it was written many years after the fact (1980), and time mellowed memories of what must have been an incredibly exacting experience. One can only admire the stamina and fortitude it must have taken to build a life under such conditions. (Hey, I start complaining when the Sunday paper isn't delivered on time!)RUFFLES ON MY LONGJOHNS seems much longer than its 297 paperbacked pages. Perhaps it's the typeset. In any case, it's a darn good yarn. And if anybody still believes such a life is glamorous, consider the following passage in which the author describes rescuing a pig during a flood."Racing back to the house, I found Earle sloshing around in the flooded pen, trying to catch her. Between us, we cornered her, and carrying her upside down by the legs, she wriggled and twisted and screamed as though she were being murdered. Halfway across the disintegrating bridge she had a spurting, fluid bowel movement all down the front of my dress."Try that next time you take the kids to the petting zoo.

It was an interesting story of how the simple ideas in life can so easily become the reality of your life. The idea of any one nowadays picking up everything and moving to a place where there is no real outside contact, and that contact that there is, is very reliant on the weather and if the single party phone line is working, just seems absurd to today, where if the power goes off we all feel helpless to do any thing