I thank my indefatigable editor, Peter Carver for, as usual, helping me find the fire behind the smoke of my early drafts.
Many thanks to Sharon Fitzhenry, Richard Dionne, and all the skilled crew at Red Deer Press and Fitzhenry & Whiteside for supporting this book from start to finish. And to the Canada Council for the Arts whose generous financial support made this book possible.
Finally I offer a sky-high thanks to my wife Brenda for your fine-tooth combing of the manuscript and your unflagging support of my writing habit.
Interview with Jamie Bastedo
Selfie taken near the summit of Cuba’s highest mountain, Pico Turquino.
Why did you want to tell this story? Where did it come from, in your mind?
All of my novels are fueled by my love of adventure. But behind each book is some Big Theme that I’ve been chewing on and want to explore through the power of story.
The Big Theme behind Cut Off is teen cyberaddiction—young people getting so hooked to the online world that normal relations with the “real” world suffer—friends, family, school, health, basically everything.
As much as I depend on digital devices to do my work as a writer and stay connected with friends and family, I believe most of us who use these tools succumb now and then to using them compulsively. Gotta check my email for the tenth time today, I better send that text right now, etc. etc. In that sense, many of us sit somewhere on the cyberaddiction spectrum. What’s it like to slide to the darkest end of that spectrum? What kind of forces could drive a person into cyberaddiction? How does one escape it? These are some of the questions I wanted to explore in this story.
Your own experiences in Latin America and in the Canadian North obviously inform the story. To what extent did you see the Guatemalan part of the story—the description of the Canadian gold mine for example—as containing a political message?
Soon after I started this book, my wife and I took several months off to live and travel in Central and South America. We spent two of these months studying Spanish at a school in Indio’s hometown of Xela (aka Quetzaltenango) in the western highlands of Guatemala. The school taught much more than Spanish verb tenses and vocabulary. It also offered amazing field trips aimed at exposing foreign students like us to the social, economic, and political realities of Guatemala.
Besides visiting farms run by war refugees and the mountain camps of ex-guerrillas, we took a tour of a Canadian gold mine. And, just like Indio’s tour, the focus was on the perspective of neighboring villagers, not the miners themselves. What happens in the “Eldorado Mine” chapter of the book is basically a fictionalized version of what I saw and heard during our own field trip—including Diadora’s sorry tale.
During our travels we also visited the homes of wealthy Canadian “expats” who managed other resource development projects across Latin America. Like Indio’s father, they lived in grand, heavily guarded homes, married local women from the host country, and were raising children of mixed Canadian and Latino blood.
Were these dimensions of my story added as a political statement about Canada’s role in foreign resource development? Not exactly. But, as a writer, I know a good story when I feel it. That unforgettable field trip to the gold mine, and my experience of the cushioned lives of expats moved me deeply and raised many questions about what I had witnessed. Writing helps me process these experiences without necessarily seeking answers.
Indio’s addiction to the Internet is partly a consequence of stresses in his earlier life. Do you think most addictions have that characteristic—of springing from pre-existing tensions in the life of an addict?
My original idea for this story was to follow a “screenager’s” plunge into cyberaddiction and his ultimate rise out of it through a wilderness adventure therapy program—basically a story about addiction and redemption. That seemed to me to be a solid stage on which to build my tale. But a casual conversation with an addictions counselor told me that I was missing a key plank in my story platform. He told me, “Behind every addiction is a childhood trauma.” As the character of Indio grew, I realized that understanding the roots of his cyberaddiction was extremely important to the story.
So I asked myself, “What trauma did Indio suffer as a child?” After much scribbling and brainstorming I discovered that Indio was a gifted guitarist oppressed by an overbearing stage dad, kind of like Michael Jackson and many child prodigies before him. My own love of classical guitar and many rich experiences in Latin America allowed me to add color to this part of his story. This central trauma became the third plank of my story platform, as reflected in the three parts of the novel—oppression in Guatemala, addiction in Calgary, and redemption in the northern wilderness.
The experience Indio has in the wilderness is based on actual real-life addiction rehab programs. What can you tell us about these programs?
Mainstream approaches to treating teen addicts might include a mix of counseling, psychotherapy, medication, or live-in rehab programs. Wilderness therapy is another very powerful option, often chosen in cases like Indio’s, where more common approaches seem to have failed.
Camp Lifeboat is based on real-life wilderness therapy programs that I researched for this book. One of the most important sources for me was Shouting at the Sky—Troubled teens and the promise of the wild, by nature writer Gary Ferguson. He describes how teen alcoholics, drug users, cutters, drop-outs, and runaways are thrust together with a team of therapists and guides in the red rock wilds of southern Utah for up to two months to “shake out their junk,” as Woody would say. Some of the characters Indio meets at Camp Lifeboat were directly inspired by the troubled teens portrayed in Ferguson’s book. Others sprang from young addicts I talked with during a visit to the Pine River Institute, a wilderness therapy program in southern Ontario. Another inspiration was Alberta’s Enviros Base Camp which runs a three-month adventure-based treatment program in the Kananaskis region.
You can drive down the Annie Lake Road off the Carcross highway and look for Camp Lifeboat. But you won’t find it—it doesn’t exist. What you will find, as Indio did, is a wild mountain landscape full of mysterious beauty that will tug at your soul. This story gave me a chance to write about one of my favorite places on Earth, the Carcross valley in the southern Yukon, where the North first cast its spell on me when I was a biology graduate student many years ago. Being a city boy from Ontario, that wild country and the challenges it threw at me had a huge and lasting impact on my life. This kind of personal transformation is at the root of any well-run wilderness therapy program—one cannot leave the experience unchanged in some positive way.
In this novel you suggest that an individual can best discover the essence of her or his character in a wilderness situation. Yet isn’t it true that most young people today don’t have the kind of access to the wilderness that Indio ultimately experiences?
I totally agree. In our heavily urbanized and digitized world it’s tougher than ever to connect with real live nature. That’s a big motivation for me as a nature writer. Besides, it’s an important part of any writer’s job to connect readers to amazing places, real or imagined, that they will never see. Living in Canada’s far North, I feel very lucky to be surrounded by wild landscapes like the ones described in Part III of the book—big beautiful lakes, wild rivers, virgin forests, and endless mountains.
The whole premise behind wilderness adventure therapy is that nature can, as Carrie says, “teach you about yourself, heal you, and yes, throw her curve balls at you.” It’s how we deal with nature’s curve balls—the challenges, surprises, and tough lessons it presents to us—that offers a fertile field for personal growth and self-discovery. My feeling is that you don’t have to be immersed in untamed wilderness for weeks and weeks, like Indio was, for nature to teach you about yourself.
Though the last part of the story takes place in one of the wildest parts of the planet, I purposely introduced several moments in earlier scenes where nature unexpectedly crashes into
Indio’s world. For example, when Indio hears “thunder ricocheting off the mountains that protect Xela,” when he visits his father’s gold mine and beholds a “bare naked mountain” stripped of all life, when he gets a “prickly feeling” looking for an elusive raven behind his Calgary home, or when he’s up on Nose Hill and finds the dead jackrabbit “skewered clean through by some kid’s arrow.” Such glimpses into the natural world lift a temporary veil on Indio’s small, lonesome life, and trigger a flash of connection to a much greater and more mysterious world.
Indio’s process of awakening to the “recharging” power of nature finds its most poignant expression while he’s lying on his simple “sky device” in the backyard of his Calgary home. I steered the story back to this non-exotic setting to show what a normal teenager Indio really is and to help “bring home” the possibility of readers making similar connections, literally in their own backyards!
You’re interested in the effect on Indio of being a celebrity—whether as a musical prodigy or as a prolific blogger. But isn’t it true that in the end that celebrity status doesn’t really have benefits for him?
Some wise Indian guru once said that all the pitfalls of human nature boil down to blindly chasing one or more of the “4 P’s” —Power, Profit, Pleasure, or Prestige. If we lump fame in the “Prestige” basket, it makes sense that Indio’s celebrity status doesn’t bring an end to his troubles.
At best, Indio’s fame is a double-edged sword. For instance, after viewing the flood of glowing feedback from the video his father posted after the Xela Christmas concert, Indio feels that, for the first time ever, a new door has opened for him. But soon after, his father “pulls the Segovia card” and Indio’s life only gets lonelier.
His life is a crazy ride from elation to depression, with little stability in between. Indio’s hunger for applause and public attention temporarily buoys him up, while masking the deeper love he feels for the music itself. That love is ultimately suffocated by his father’s heavy-handed control.
It’s the same story with Indio’s blogging fame. This fame brings Indio great gifts with one hand, and it stabs him in the back with the other. In the end, it is Indio’s online fame that almost kills him after his Loba’s Lullaby video goes viral and he has to keep dealing with the flood of online attention. I modeled Indio’s breakdown following the astounding success of his video after the experience of Californian children’s rights activist, Jason Russell, whose video Kony 2012, captured millions of views almost overnight and triggered a psychological collapse. Medical reports attributed Russell’s breakdown to “extreme exhaustion, stress, and dehydration as a result of the popularity of his video.”
Thank you, Jamie.
Other books by Jamie Bastedo
FICTION
Nighthawk!
On Thin Ice
Sila’s Revenge (sequel to On Thin Ice)
Tracking Triple Seven
Free as the Wind: Saving the Horses of Sable Island
Reaching North: A Celebration of the Subarctic
NON-FICTION
Falling for Snow: A Naturalist’s Journey into the World of Winter
Shield Country: Life and Times of the Oldest Piece of the Planet
Trans Canada Trail: Official Guide to the Northwest Territories
Northern Wild: Best of Contemporary Canadian Nature Writing (edited by David Boyd)
For more information on our full catalogue of eBooks visit:
Copyright © 2015 by Jamie Bastedo
Published in Canada by Red Deer Press, 195 Allstate Parkway, Markham, Ontario L3R 4T8
Published in the United States by Red Deer Press, 311 Washington Street, Brighton, Massachusetts 02135
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews and articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Red Deer Press, 195 Allstate Parkway, Markham, Ontario L3R 4T8.
www.reddeerpress.com
Red Deer Press acknowledges with thanks the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Ontario Arts Council for their support of our publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF) for our publishing activities.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Bastedo, Jamie, author
Cut off/ Jamie Bastedo.
ISBN 978-0-88995-511-0 (print), 978-1-55244-400-9 (epub)
Data available on file.
Publisher Cataloging-in-Publication Data (U.S.)
Bastedo, Jamie, author
Cut off/ Jamie Bastedo.
ISBN 978-0-88995-511-0 (print), 978-1-55244-400-9 (epub)
Data available on file.
Cover and text design by Daniel Choi
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