Wilderness survival books usually address emergency conditions of stranded hikers, skiers, hunters or accident victims. They focus on clothing, shelter, wood, food, the perfect knife, etc. All this can be practical but sometimes crude or full of bravado. Seldom are these books addressed to the conscious solitary. In browsing a handful of survival books, however, the fact that Alan Fry lives alone and once lived year-round in a tepee, in Canada, is notable, as is this passage from his Wilderness Survival Handbook, first published in 1958 when nobody else was making survival books a business or avocation:
When I go out from my camp on a very cold winter’s night [minus 50 degrees Celsius or -58 degrees Farenheit] to walk in the moonlight along the shore of a frozen lake … and I see the glint of moonlight caught by flakes of frost in endless sparkles over the perfect surface of snow that stretches nearly a mile away to the spruce forest bordering the distant shore, and when I look up and in the distance see a great mountain range gleaming in snowclad perfection by the light of this brilliant winter moon, when I have all this before me I all but burst with the joy of it.