Adrift at Sea, Lost on Land: A Tale of Survival and Discovery in the Alaskan Wilderness

On a sunny afternoon in the fall of 1920, the young Will Pruitt sets off in a small skiff from his town’s dock in southwest Alaska to go fishing. His boat is soon carried away by a sudden storm blowing in from the ocean. He is saved from certain disaster by Tom Jackson, one of the town’s native Alaskans, who is motoring back to town in his fishing boat to escape the approaching storm. However, Tom’s sturdy boat soon runs into trouble . . . and thus begins an adventure that Will—and the reader—will never forget. This story captures the power, danger, and beauty of a remote wilderness, while exploring our fragile relationship with those few parts of the world that are as yet untouched by civilization.ROBERT A. DAHL (1915 – 2014) was a world-renowned scholar of democratic theory who served for many years as Sterling Professor of Political Science at Yale University. At the age of 10, he moved with his family from a small town on the plains of northwestern Iowa to Skagway, Alaska, nestled between the mountains at the northernmost end of the Inside Passage. Beginning in his early teens and continuing for the next two decades, he explored the wilderness outside his front door with his two brothers whenever he was not in school, working on the docks, or maintaining the tracks of the White Pass Railroad. He cherished his memories of growing up in Alaska for his entire life, and he wrote Adrift at Sea, Lost on Land at the age of 85 as a testimony to the land and sea that he loved so much.