My Year Without Matches

I found Australian Claire Dunn's memoir, My Year Without Matches, on the shelves of the Athenaeum and the subtitle intrigued me: Escaping the city in search of the wild. 'The wild' is something I find powerfully attractive on the page -- in real life, not so much. Dunn herself was a burned-out wilderness and conservation activist when she committed to spend twelve months on a kind of wilderness retreat, a bit like Alone but with more supports in place, and a group of five others taking their own journeys alongside.

As any viewer of Alone will already know, living in the bush invariably becomes as much an inner quest as a physical adventure. At first Dunn struggles with the basics of building a shelter and especially wrestles with trying to make fire without matches (hence the title), to the point where she had blood blisters on both palms from rubbing futilely at the hand drill. She's also driven by mental demons, a constant fear of not 'doing it properly,' self-doubt and existential angst. It's these more spiritual struggles that dominate toward the end of the book, when Dunn has relaxed into the company of insects and snakes, not washing her hair, and sleeping on the ground. More problematic are her fluctuating relationships with the other participants on the course.

My Year Without Matches is a highly readable, relatable account of a spiritual quest that ultimately comes to rest in a realisation that simply being is enough. Fittingly, Dunn now runs nature reconnection retreats of her own. I love the idea of living so close to nature (Dunn vows to only eat meat she's caught and killed herself, and sticks to it) but I know the reality would defeat me, probably on the first night. The next best thing is reading about it.