‘The Barrens’ is local dad and daughter’s novel of love and drama in the Canadian Arctic

Mary Ann Grossmann, Pioneer Press
·9 min read
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I saw the red of Holly’s vest. I saw her shoulders and wisps of hair flowing from the back of her head. The current didn’t pull her into the eddy, and I ran back to shore and followed as she drifted downstream and then slowly came to a stop. I waded in and staggered through the river, my thighs pumping against water, my feet finding purchase on the rocky bottom. I slipped on a rock and submerged into the cold water, then stood and kept moving until I was at Holly’s side and had a hand through the armhole of her vest. I turned her over. Bloody lacerations covered the side of her face like claw marks. She wasn’t breathing.” – From “The Barrens”

Kurt Johnson and his daughter, Ellie, have always been close, sharing Minnesota sports like canoeing and skiing.

Now they’ve partnered on their debut novel, “The Barrens,” about two young women on a canoe trip on the remote Thelon River in Canada’s Northwest Territory. It’s an exciting coming-of-age tale of courage, love and the power of storytelling.

“I grew up on the water,” Ellie says over coffee with her dad at St. Paul’s Cafe Latte. Their affection for one another is obvious as they toss comments back and forth.

“I was three years old the first time I was in a canoe,” Ellie continues. ” I was 13 when I took my first trip, seven days on the trail in the BWCA . This book is my homage to my relationship to the North Woods.”

“The Barrens” is based on Ellie’s adventures paddling the rapids-strewn Thelon (THAY-lon) in 2016 with three other women. The journey took them through 450 miles of the uninhabited Barren lands of subarctic Canada, a region so remote they didn’t see another human being for 45 days.

Kurt explains their partnership: “I wrote this book, but I couldn’t have done it without knowing Ellie’s experiences. So her name is on the book as co-author.”

In the novel, Holly and Lee are lovers who embark on the river journey because Holly, who has done it before, wants to show Lee the beauties of the treeless landscape.

Kurt doesn’t waste any time beginning the story with tragedy. Holly falls off a cliff and lands in the rapids far below. Lee is not an experienced canoeist, and when Holly dies (this is not a spoiler), Lee vows to bring her lover’s body home to her family. Without a satellite phone on which she could call for help, Lee has to carry Holly’s body and a backpack across rough portages. She gets stronger as she paddles all night, submerging Holly’s body in the icy waters during the day to keep it from decomposing.

A NOVEL IS BORN

Kurt Johnson spent his childhood summers on an island in Burntside Lake northwest of Ely, first with his parents and later with his wife, Stephanie Hansen, and then Ellie.

The family lived in Highland Park until a few years ago when Kurt and Stephanie moved to Golden Valley. “But we’re still St. Paul people,” he quickly adds.

Ellie, 23, attended Highland Park High School, then spent two years at the University of Vermont in Burlington. She graduated from the University of Minnesota in 2019 with a degree in English. She and her partner, Kate, just moved into a house on St. Paul’s upper West Side.

Kurt, who sold his printing business seven years ago, had always wanted to write. This itch grew stronger when Ellie was at the University of Vermont and told her dad she had a short story writing assignment. He suggested she write one based on her Thelon trip.

Ellie’s answer: “Dad, why don’t you write it?”

Kurt began the novel during a year-long class at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis taught by Minnesota Book Award winner Peter Geye.

“Kurt impressed me from the first word of his first read,” Geye recalled in an e-mail. “He had a grasp of voice and pacing that I found exceptional, even in early drafts. That’s the hardest thing to teach someone. He was an eager learner, and he worked on his craft with a passion and perseverance that often distinguishes the writers who get published from the writers who don’t. When I read ‘The Barrens’ a couple years after he finished that class, I was spellbound in a different way. The voice and pacing were still there in abundance, but so too was a story that seemed entirely out of time, and still somehow timeless. I told him this was the book that would get him published. I’m excited for the rest of the world to read it.”

But the story didn’t come together right away. Kurt needed dialogue and an emotional arc, which meant he had to explore the relationship between the female characters and tell their back stories.

In the book, Lee calls Holly a “storyist” and as Lee paddles alone she tells herself stories, recalling her childhood with her father, Jake the Snake, a great character who has a serpent tattooed across his back. Jake’s an eco-anarchist who taught Lee to live off the grid. It was his tutorship about hunting, trapping and being self-sufficient that helps Lee when she is alone in the wilderness.

“My mother lived in Nebraska near a guy like this who was living off the grid,” Kurt recalled. “It was a dichotomy. He was an angry eco-anarchist, but he’d gone to Harvard.”

Kurt, who describes himself as a “straight, white guy,” knew that if he was to write an honest book about young gay women, he and Ellie had to have some serious conversations about her relationships. He wanted Lee, his main character, to be “Ellie-ish.”

“No parent wants to know about a child’s relationships,” Kurt says. But he and Ellie agree that their discussions over beer and drinks made their bond stronger.

Ellie recalled coming out to her family in junior high and in her freshman year at Highland Park High, although her classmates had suspected her orientation. “The way I was and presented myself made the decision for me,” she says.

They had a bit of a tussle over whether or not the women in the book should fall in love during their canoe trip. Kurt thought that would add drama, but Ellie nixed the idea.

“A long canoe trip is not conductive to exploring lesbianism,” she says dryly. “You’re too tired and never being alone breeds a lot of contention.”

When Lee finally brings Holly’s body home, she learns that Holly’s parents didn’t know their daughter was a lesbian. They thought Lee was a boy. Their acceptance of, and love for, Lee is one of the novel’s most touching scenes.

BEAUTY AND DANGER

Besides telling the human story, Kurt wanted to capture the magic of being on the Thelon as Ellie described it to him — the clear water, historic campsites dating hundreds of years before the Inuit arrived.

She told him how you might come upon a human skull, since the permafrost is too deep to bury bodies and rocks are heaped on corpses. Or you paddle around a bend and see a grazing moose.

There’s danger on the Thelon too, including whirlpools Ellie describes as “big as a bus” that have to be run in the canoe or bypassed with a portage.

“It’s all about communication,” she says about group decisions among canoeists. “If one person is uncertain you do not try the set. You portage.”

At Hornby Point, death came in 1927 to Englishman John Hornby and two other men who starved to death. Hornby prided himself on surviving with a minimum of food staples and equipment, and when his party missed the annual caribou migration, there wasn’t enough food to get them through the winter. Travelers can still see the old logs that made up the cabin’s walls, and the crosses marking the men’s graves.

Grizzly bears can also cause big trouble.

“I prefer interaction with grizzlies from the boat,” Ellie says. “They can be territorial and dangerous.”

She saw the damage powerful grizzlies can do when she was equipment manager at Camp Widjiwagan and handled returned tents with ripped-up canvas and tentpoles bent by a bear’s sharp, four-inch long claws.

In one exciting scene in the novel, Lee chases a bear, eight feet tall when he stood, that has her backpack in its mouth:

“...He kept coming. Then the bear made a quick charge, legs and feet in full gallop. For that split second, I froze, ready to be mauled. The bear stopped suddenly, maybe now as scared of me as I was of him, confused. I threw the rock in my hand and it landed on his snout.”

In a foreshadowing of what will happen on the river, the float plane pilot who drops Lee and Holly off at Lynx Lake, the Thelon’s headwaters, is worried about their lack of preparation. They didn’t check in with the Mounties, which was a requirement, and they didn’t bring bear spray.

“Lee and Holly’s biggest problem was they didn’t bring an emergency satellite device,” Ellie says. “They only had a personal device that was smashed in Holly’s fall. And they should not have been going in one canoe.”

SETTING A FASTER PACE

After Kurt finished “The Barrens,” he faced the problem most authors have — finding an agent.

“I got an agent but she got cold feet after I rewrote the book eight times for her,” he recalls. “But that rewriting helped make it more emotional, faster-paced, exciting.”

Ellie puts in: “More cinematic.”

By the time another agent picked up the manuscript, it was as ready as it could be.

Kurt was proud to write in his pitch letter to publishers: “This is the first wilderness adventure tale I know of that explores themes of gender identity and sexual orientation, juxtaposed with gritty survival and tragedy.”

READING FEATURES LOCAL CELEB

How did Kurt Johnson persuade Stephanie Hansen of myTalk Radio to do a dramatic reading from “The Barrens” during Wednesday’s launch? Rather easily, since she’s his wife.

Hansen, who her husband said “is not very big on camping” is probably too busy to even set up a tent. She has been partnering with Stephanie March to bring listeners up to date about the latest restaurant, food and other happenings in the Twin Cities for more than 13 years. She’s worked in advertising and marketing and in 2005 started her own online printing and marketing company, Printz.com, which won her the Women Business Owner of the Year award. She writes a food and lifestyle blog (stephaniesdish.com) and hosts a weekly podcast on Hubbard Broadcasting PodcastOne, as well as producing her own podcast, MakersofMN. And she’s on the weekly radio show Stephanie’s Weekly Dish. Hansen spends summers at the family’s Burntside Lake island cabin where she is writing “True North Cabin Cookbook,” to be published in fall by Minnesota Historical Society Press.

WHAT: Kurt Johnson and Ellie Johnson celebrate the publication of “The Barrens: A Novel of Love and Death in the Canadian Arctic”

WHEN/WHERE: 7 p.m. Wednesday, May 18, LUSH Lounge and Theater, 990 Central Ave. N.E., Minneapolis

PROGRAM: Introduction by Minnesota Book Award winner Peter Geye, dramatic reading by Stephanie Hansen of MyTalk 107.1 Radio, authors interviewed by Lori and Julia of MyTalk.

ADMISSION: Free, RSVP required at magersandquinn.com

PUBLISHER/PRICE: Arcade Publishing ($26.99)

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