I Am Still Alive

The narrative shifts to the past and describes Jess’s journey to meet her father. After over 10 years of no contact, Jess studies his photograph and memorizes it on the flight to Alaska. When she gets off the plane, a gruff-looking man named Griff is waiting for her and takes her to see her father. Griff walks quickly, making it difficult for Jess to keep up; she still deals with a leg and foot injury from the car crash that killed her mother. Griff apologizes when he realizes that Jess is lagging behind. Jess feels awkward about discussing her disability, so she just brushes his apology off. Jess feels like something is amiss but has no real option other than to go with Griff, who drives her away from town and into the wilderness. They stop for a bear along the way, and Griff makes a joke that has Jess laughing for the first time since the accident. She looks down at the road and sees that it is “pocked and cracked” (8) much like the skin on her body after the car glass impacted it. Griff notices how few belongings Jess has—she packed away most of her things in storage before she left.

The narrative shifts to the present moment. Now stranded and alone near the ruins of her father’s cabin, Jess thinks about Griff and believes that if anyone will come save her, it’ll be him. He is the kindest person she knows, but also one of the strangest. Jess finds that she spends most of her time thinking about the people she misses, including her parents and friends.

Jess awakens on the shore of the lake after her father’s cabin has burned down. Her father has been killed, and she is now alone with his dog, a part-wolf, part-husky named Bo. Jess feels numb and unable to grieve her father’s loss, but she knows that she must take immediate action to survive. Jess tries to remember what her father taught her about survival in the wilderness, but at the time, she was so angry with him for leaving her and her mother that she hardly listened. Jess does recall her dad telling her to build a shelter first, then find water, then food, then build a fire. Jess makes it her mission to start building a shelter big enough for her and Bo. She has her clothes and bag, a few cans of food, a rifle, a bow and arrows, and her painkillers. Jess takes one to relieve the pain in her leg so that she can start building a lean-to. She forces herself to feel fear, screaming, “I AM GOING TO DIE” (16) in order to find the motivation to get up and move. Her leg is still in pain; she injured it again when she dashed away from the cabin the night before. Now, she knows that she likely risks further injury by walking on it, but she has no choice.

The narrative shifts back in time to detail Jess’s arrival in Canada. Jess and Griff drive to the Canadian border, where Griff is questioned about why he’s with someone else’s daughter. Griff lies and claims that they’re just visiting friends, and Jess isn’t given any information about why her father is living in Yukon, Canada, rather than in Alaska. She and Griff drive to an airfield, where they get into a small airplane to fly the rest of the way. Jess’s mother was a pilot, and Jess was already in training to get her own pilot’s license, so she feels fully comfortable in the small plane. However, her tranquility turns to fear and dread when she sees the small cabin on the lake, her father, and his large, black dog. Jess thinks back to before her mother died and remembers worrying that her mother would have a plane crash; Jess’s mother always assured her that safety checklists were the reason flying was so safe. Instead, Jess’s mother died in a car accident that Jess herself barely survived. The chapter ends abruptly.

Jess apologizes for ending her last entry in the middle of a thought, explaining that she heard growling somewhere outside. She tries to remember what she was thinking about.

The narrative describes Jess’s time with her father in the wilderness. Jess’s dad calls her by her first name, Sequoia, which she hates because it means nothing to her. She corrects him immediately, and he tries to keep the mood light by changing the subject. Jess questions her father about living in Canada, and he admits that he is there illegally. Jess gets nervous when Bo starts barking loudly at her, and when she voices her concern that he will jump on her, her father makes a joke about it. Jess can’t believe how oblivious he is to her constant fear of injuring herself again.

The narrative returns to the present. Jess makes her way painfully toward a large boulder at the edge of the forest and determines that it will make a perfect base for a lean-to. She gathers logs, cutting the large ones into smaller pieces with her hatchet. She devises a way to move the heavy logs despite her physical limitations and remembers her physiotherapist’s advice to take things slow. Jess feels the pain in her leg getting worse and knows that there will be consequences for her increased activity as she struggles to build the shelter. Jess sits down and puts her arm around Bo, thinking of something her father said about surviving in the wilderness: “If you can’t be strong, you have to be smart. And smart is better than strong, out here” (35). Jess considers her next move. She has some food and a partial shelter, as well as water from the rain, and she decides to make a fire.

Jess walks back to the cabin to search for tools and matches. Bo walks with her for support. Looking through the cabin is painful, but Jess forces herself to search the remnants of the home that her father built. Jess finds the head of an axe, charred but functional. In what’s left of the shed, she finds empty jars and fills them with lake water. She sees fish in the water and realizes that she has a food source, and she also finds a canoe with a first aid kit, a tackle box, and a rope. Jess looks across the lake and wonders if she can make her way to people somewhere on the other side. She starts to feel optimistic about surviving.

Jess remembers the three months she spent living in foster care while social services found her father. She lived with a grumpy old couple and two other children, one of whom bullied her. The other was a six-year-old girl named Lily whom Jess decided to protect and soon became close with.

Jess thinks about the morning of her arrival, when she decided that she would leave with Griff. She ate dinner with Griff and her dad, feeding some to Bo, and then went to bed. When she awoke the next morning, Griff was already flying away, and Jess realized that she was stuck at the cabin.

Jess knows that she can’t carry her duffel bag with the weight of the new supplies, so she hitches it up to Bo after a gentle negotiation. Bo pulls the bag back to camp just as Jess pulled the log the previous day. When Jess reaches her shelter, she is too tired to get up again. Feeling foolish, she realizes that she got everything she needed to make a fire, except for the wood. She snuggles up next to Bo, hoping that he will keep her warm for the night. Jess tries to come up with a plan to find somewhere with people.

The narrative shifts to Jess’s past experiences with her father. He tries to keep a positive attitude despite Jess’s negative mindset about living with him in the wilderness. She is shocked to realize that she will sometimes be left alone for weeks whenever he goes hunting, and she decides that she has no choice but to learn survival skills. Jess’s dad shows her everything in the cabin, then takes her out in the canoe and shows her how to fish. Jess manages to catch a fish with her dad’s help, and it becomes their supper that night. Bo and Jess become friends quickly, but the tension with her father is still high. Regardless, he gets Jess to help collect firewood and then teaches her how to make a fire using steel wool and kindling.

The narrative returns to the present moment. Jess wakes up half-drenched and freezing and slowly changes into dry clothes. She knows that she has to get a fire going soon, and she takes one of her painkillers in the hopes of being able to get up and gather firewood. Jess thinks about her physiotherapist’s advice to always have a plan and a goal in mind. Jess’s goal is to survive and to find a way to get rescued. She also has a third goal, but she doesn’t yet say what it is.

The narrative shifts back to Jess’s time with her father. After supper, Jess’s father explains how to avoid wild animals like moose and bears and how to use the traps. Jess cannot stand the idea of killing an animal herself. When Jess’s father warns her to alert him if any plane other than Griff’s comes in for a landing, Jess is unsure of what to think, and her father refuses to explain further. Jess looks at a picture of her mother, hoping to feel comforted. Later, Jess’s father shows her the bow and arrow, a tool that Jess is already skilled at using. Seeing it ignites some excitement in Jess for the first time since her arrival. When she asks her father why he left the family, he explains that he couldn’t ignore his need to be out in the wilderness. He tells Jess that she will understand as she spends more time in the wild, but Jess feels as though she will never be able to comprehend why he would choose nature over his own family.