Guterson is the author of the best-selling novel Snow Falling on Cedars, from 1994. I haven’t read anything of his since then, but I stumbled upon This one from 2008 while browsing in our school library. Sometimes it’s refreshing to read a book that’s not on the new arrival shelf.

In the mid 1970s, two boys from different high schools in Seattle meet and form a friendship at a track meet running the half mile. John William Berry, heir to timber and banking fortunes attends a private high school, and Neil countryman, from a long line of Irish tradesman, attends public school. But they are both literary intellectuals and become wilderness hiking and pot-smoking best friends. 

Neil, the first in his family to attend college, embraces a traditional path, especially after meeting the woman who would become his wife. Whereas John William, ever the idealist, takes up the mantra, “no escape from the unhappiness machine,” dropping out of college, living in a trailer in the woods, and ultimately even giving that up in favor of a self created limestone cave in the South Fork Hoh. 

He will not live in the “Hamburger world,” where everyone is a sell out, but surviving alone in the remote wilderness with a roiling brain is not sustainable, even as Neil spends years trekking in food, supplies, and medicine to keep John William from starving, all the while honoring their blood pact of never disclosing his location. 

They stretch the boundaries friendship, commitment, and responsibility, ultimately leading to tragedy. But along the way, we readers get an intimate trek through mountains and forests of Washington and an intimate look into two very different lives of young men who want a meaningful life but seek it through very different paths. 

Excellent writing overall, though some side stories/back stories ramble a tad.