Living High: An Unconventional Autobiography

by June Burn

Book by Burn, June

Genres: Memoir, Autobiography, Nonfiction, Biography

292 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 1992

Reviews

[Jo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved this book
Love this area of our planet.
Recommend it highly
Then go rowing.

[Taylor Clark · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked up a copy of "Living High" at the Patos Lighthouse, a place in the far upper left hand corner of the continental US, and accessible only by boat. The book was there because it is of local interest: it is about a family that lived for years on some of the most inaccessible of the San Juan Islands. This is an interesting account of someone who lived life differently, and made it work. Recommended reading for anyone considering an alternative life style. A sweet memoir.

[Shannon Blazina · Rating 5 out of 5]

First, keep in mind that this book was written nearly 100 years ago. Second, the title may be misleading in today’s vernacular. This is the story of a woman and her husband who are the last homesteaders in the San Juan Islands in Washington State. The title reflects the fact that they lived well with very few material possessions. I love a good memoir and happen to be from Washington, so I found it fascinating!

[Vicki Bahls · Rating 4 out of 5]

Old book recommended in Dear Fahrenheit 451. Very good autobiography of a family in the 30's who decided to retire at their young age and work to maintain a family at an older age. They took off and homesteaded on Puget Sound Island--then got a job as teachers in remote NORTH Alaska on the Bering Sea. Then they had kids and began treks across America with no money. One sang songs and passed hats around and the other wrote for newspapers and stories etc. Very good descriptions of snow and weather in a lot of these places. I liked it.

[Jeri Schille · Rating 3 out of 5]

A quirky biography of a couple who raised two boys on an island in the San Juans, Bellingham, among other places....It was interesting to read what life was like in the San Juans were at that time. But also the charm of the book is in reading of their adventures, their travels and how they got by on very little money. Interesting people....

[Zach · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked this up randomly in a used book shop on Lopez Island. Burn's story about living a counter-cultural life in the 20's and 30's--much of it in the Puget Sound, where I live--is an inspiring one. I hadn't run into a story about an itinerant lifestyle before On the Road. And, historically, the Burns had a big impact on the area, with a couple of their cabins standing for decades on the WWU campus. They had some truly wild adventures and travelled across the country several times.

But what I realized reading the book is that there are no hippies or counter-culturals who don't have a good amount of capital. I had romanticized islands like Orcas or Lopez as places where people who didn't fit in found a home, but really they have always been places where people who could afford to went. Burn talks about having no money throughout the book, but the first story is about how they got an island for free. In the second story they make out with around $75k teaching Yupiks for a year. They were basically house-flippers, buying under-valued land, throwing up a couple cabins, and then selling or renting out the property (all the while railing against logging practices in the PNW). For almost 10 years they got corporate jobs and made roughly $150k / year today while the kids were young. These were two university graduates with a lot of options during the post WWI boom period.

We do need more stories like this today, when wealth is valued above everything else. The Burns gave up cushy jobs and did interesting things with their lives. They did romanticize being poor. But I think that is better than romanticizing being rich.

[Belle Meade School]

920

[Cathy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a great description of life before and after the war of living of the land with a high interest and education of life.

[Seth · Rating 5 out of 5]

[Cross-posted at https://closemindedpodcast.com/book-r...]

If you're looking to read something that generates powerful feelings of nostalgia and wanderlust, this is the book for you. The story of June and Farrar Burn is incredible. Our culture has changed so much since the 1920s and 30s; no longer could you traipse all over the country with no money, jobs, plans or possessions, and not just survive but thrive, relying on the goodness of strangers, the opportunity for short-term and immediate cash-paying work, and the rural countryside to provide sustenance for days and weeks at a time. Yet that is exactly what the Burns did, and for years. They intentionally lived in such a way as to never become reliant upon material things, to always be ready at a moment's notice to start a new adventure and follow the desire to explore.

Although the Burns wandered far and wide--from homesteading a tiny and previously uninhabited island, to spending a year teaching remote Eskimos in Alaska, from living out of their car while driving all over the USA, to living in an apartment in NYC--their home base ever remained the Pacific Northwest, specifically Bellingham, Washington and the beautifully rugged San Juan Islands. I spent much of my childhood in both those places, so the nostalgia was powerful and ever-present. It was sheer delight to flip back and forth from the prose to the map inside the front cover, following their adventures and comparing the details to places I know personally. Countless times while reading I pulled out my phone to swipe myself around the satellite imagery of Sentinel Island, Waldron, Orcas, and Bellingham, visualizing the locations of the story.

And yet. I felt a deep loneliness throughout the second half, and at the end. There was very little recounting of deep relationships they built with friends over the years, or of any rooted community within which they flourished. And there was virtually no spiritual content, beyond some light insinuations that the author was above anyone they met in their travels who express concern over their eternal souls. Their love for, and deep enjoyment of, the beauty of the natural world is tangible and infectious; I felt a deep connection over that shared joy. Yet to lack a corresponding recognition of the Creator is a saddening miss. Now, it could be that "Living High" purposefully limited its focus to just the details of the adventures and the Burns' creative attempts to meet their basic needs. Perhaps they were indeed spiritual creatures who recognized the truth, and it was just beyond the scope of her writing for this particular book.

I intend to read more about the Burns. They produced their own newspaper, The Puget Sounder, for a few years, and June had a regular column with The Bellingham Herald. It will be fun to track those down. What I do know for certain is that reading Living High has swelled an already existing longing to spend time in the PNW again, and to share it with my wife and kids. One day.

[Sharon · Rating 2 out of 5]

A fairly interesting account.

[BowbytheBay · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating book about a family living in the Pacific Northwest. The parents choose to live without many amenities so they don't work much (conventional work). They do experience nature a lot!

[Chris Keefe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Where has this book been all my life?!

[Jean Z]

Very interesting

[Bob-in-Ecotopia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting from the perspective of Northwest History and the San Juan Islands in the first half of the 20th century and what little is really to live on.