In Ben Stiller’s 2018 miniseries Escape at Dannemora, about a 2015 prison break in New York’s North Country, there’s a disconcertingly moving exchange between the two soon-to-be escapees Richard Matt and David Sweat. Deep in the bowels of Clinton Correctional Facility, mapping a labyrinth of passages, tunnels, and pipes, Matt asks Sweat how long he’s been inside the prison. Twelve years, Sweat tells him. “This is the first time in 12 years,” Matt reminds him, “nobody knows where you are.” These aren’t men you want to root for, but it’s hard to suppress a flash of recognition and solidarity at the connection Matt makes between freedom and privacy. “When was the last time,” you ask yourself, “nobody knew where I was?”
Freedom from surveillance is foremost among the kinds that Sebastian Junger explores in his new book Freedom, which has much of the same fed-up, fugitive flavor of Escape at Dannemora. If you can’t imagine how two convicts expected to travel from the Adirondack Park to Mexico undetected, Junger supplies the answer. Their best bet would have been to walk. Freedom describes its author making such an illicit walk, trespassing on railroad tracks, private land, and informal paths, on his way from Washington, D.C., to Baltimore to Philadelphia and so into “Amish country.” He notes, echoing Richard Matt with restrained exultation, that he and his companions were often “the only people in the world who knew where we were.”
Neither the identity of Junger’s companions nor the aim of this hundreds-of-miles-long ramble is easy to suss out. It might detract from Freedom’s air of mystery to know that this slim book is a companion volume to one of Junger’s documentaries, 2014’s The Last Patrol, in which the celebrated war reporter makes this journey with two Afghanistan veterans and another journalist. It further ventilates the mystery to learn, at the book’s conclusion, that the trek is in part a response to Junger’s divorce. If you’re the lantern-jawed daredevil responsible for the books The Perfect Storm, War, and Tribe and the war documentaries Restrepo and Korengal, this is perhaps the only way to do a late-mid-life crisis.
Tribe, Junger’s other very short book, offered an unorthodox account of PTSD and the transition from military to civilian life, not only as a psychological and physiological response to trauma but also as an existential loss of the close emotional ties and cooperative self-sufficiency of life in a roving band of brothers. Freedom is an attempt to recreate and study, albeit in a desultory way, the parameters of such a nomadic and frequently dangerous life. It is a rhythmic, at times mesmerizing account of travel in the outdoors, but more in keeping with the violent, chthonic preoccupations of Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek than with the bumbling old-dogs comedy of Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods.
Junger is the anti-Bryson, really. Prospective readers are warned that this modern Odysseus never smiles and that his ears seem well stoppered against the temptations of levity, frivolity, or self-deprecation. If veterans ever joke, laugh, trip over themselves, or get urine on their zippers, we don’t hear much about it. Instead, there are grating alpha-male fantasies like this one, occasioned by hearing a .22 being fired: “I didn’t think the guy with the gun would come back, but even if he did, he’d have a fifty-pound mix-breed coming at him through the underbrush in the dark and then us after; forget it.”
At times the effect is like reading Stand By Me as reimagined by Ernest Hemingway or, worse, William T. Vollmann. What would certainly work well as an Esquire essay develops blisters, shin splints, and a limp even over a modest 133 pages. Hiking on or around freight lines is, in fact, highly dangerous, though not because you might need an exfil from ambush by bored Pennsylvania teenagers. Over 400 people are killed by trains while trespassing every year, and about as many are injured. (As they say in the military, play stupid games, win stupid prizes.) Train-hopping and track-trekking have been shorthand for freedom since the Great Depression, and you can’t live near bohemians, artists, or marginal political types without being told about it, at too-great length, like it was veganism or noise music. It may be hazardous, but that can’t be counted on to make it interesting.
Freedom’s fascination is generated less by its travel writing than by its detours and forays and bushwhacks and bivouacs in the conceptual territory of human freedom and flourishing, and whatever adjacent parcels Junger and company feel like penetrating. True, the travel writing affords flashes of grim beauty: “The river shot a gorge above Huntington that breached another ridge, which ran dead straight past the Potomac almost to the Shenandoah. … From time to time we passed someone’s fishing camp, usually a tent or tarpaper shack that sat just above flood stage with a spring-shot armchair or couch mouldering in front of a firepit.”
Yet Junger’s digressions — on conflicting conceptions of freedom, on the tension between dependent sedentism and self-reliant nomadism, and on the stultifying character of modern American society — are this book’s lifeblood, its spring water and baked beans. “To be fair,” Junger writes, “it’s hard to feel loyal to a society that is so huge it hardly even knows we’re here and yet makes sure we are completely dependent on it.” Walking is one way of shedding that dependency. Car ownership didn’t take off until after World War II; by trekking, Junger notes, “we were still doing something that felt ancient and hard.”
The connections between the old ways and Freedom’s project are pointed out via capsule histories, exploring everything from the Iroquois Confederacy to railroad construction, from the raiding Scythians and the elusive Apache to the modern Taliban, from the physiology of running ultramarathons to the mechanics of hand-to-hand fighting. These digressions may resemble the baggy patchwork of a hobo’s suit, but they’re seldom dull.
And they furnish some lapidary departure points for thinking and reading about freedom. On big government, a la Gerald Ford: “The central problem for human freedom is that groups that are well organized enough to defend themselves against others are well organized enough to oppress their own.” On outlaws and gangsters: “The freedom that comes from being feared is tempting for people who have suffered that fear themselves.” On the compromises of sedentism: “But one can also imagine — easily imagine — hunters and shepherds watching men plow fields in the hot sun and thinking that such a life was a kind of servitude, and that it was better to risk starving in the mountains than to eat well on the plains.” Cain and Abel, Genghis Khan, Daniel Boone, and Muhammad Ali, among others, turn up in these riffs.
One of the best things that can be said of Freedom is that it makes you want to read as well as to disappear into the woods. Junger’s basic take on sedentism and nomadism may be richly expanded by an encounter with James C. Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia or Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States. His nods to America’s infancy make you eager to revisit histories of frontier and settlement, not just in the United States but all over the world, from time immemorial.
But Freedom also makes you want to bring some fictional characters out of retirement: Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook of James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, or Huck and Jim, who need no introduction. At his most overwrought and un-self-aware, Junger recalls Lewis Medlock, played by Burt Reynolds in the adaptation of James Dickey’s Deliverance, or Allie Fox, the crank anti-hero of Paul Theroux’s The Mosquito Coast. These are men who, like Junger, sneered at modernity, and they did so at terrible cost to themselves and their loved ones.
Yet, like Junger, we all have something of Medlock and Fox in our bones. Perhaps the inclination to bust Junger’s balls for this war-bonnet cosplay, especially given that Junger has seen plenty of real war as a journalist, is its own kind of moral failing, its own form of mental slavery. One of the last great freedoms that civilization threatens is the freedom to pretend, without being laughed at, without being scorned, that we can ever go back to the way we were.
Stefan Beck is a writer living in Hudson, New York.
