In 2013, Jenny O’Connell met a legendary woman who would change the course of her life. Petronella van der Moer came to Finland as a penniless aspiring writer in the summer of 1949. After skipping out on her hotel bills in Helsinki and fleeing to Lapland’s goldfields, the Dutch woman was deported at the center of a scandal, eventually becoming a folk hero in Finland’s far north. When fate brought Jenny and Petronella together in the final months of Petronella’s life, Jenny held her breath as the dying legend whispered four captivating words: “I walked to Lapland.”
Enthralled by Petronella’s adventure in Finland and the mysterious web of unverified stories she left behind, Jenny leaves her job as an outdoor educator in San Francisco and sets out with a big red backpack to retrace Petronella’s route from Helsinki to the dramatic, rock-studded fjelds of Lapland’s Lemmenjoki National Park. As she walks and hitchhikes from the city suburbs and wide-open lakes of southern Finland to the rugged and unfamiliar terrain above the Arctic Circle, she confronts her own mortality as she encounters violent storms, illness, and the shocking tenderness of strangers, lives with an eccentric group of gold prospectors, and begins to reclaim the wildness and trust in herself she lost as a young girl.
Set against a harsh and stunning backdrop of wild rivers, rolling mountains, and the midnight sun, Wildheart provides sharp inquiry into what it is to be a woman making her way in the male-dominated world of outdoor adventure, interrogates the inherited fears that keep us small, and examines the critical connection between wild places and our most authentic selves. A moving account of self-discovery and transformation, this book explores our lost connection to wildness and the rich life that awaits us when we take it back.