Four Quarters of Light (50 page)

For a moment I smiled, sick with apprehension at those other writers who had drawn words out of Alaska. For me, the fluency of language was pulled up short here. Whatever the moments of sheer pleasure, fear, dislocation and all the other half-baked notions that impel us to strange places, one thing is for sure: a line traced on a map is no measure. The original of the cartographer's blueprint is somewhere inside ourselves. My trek through Alaska was mirrored by a struggle in the heart to find my own spirituality, which had been lost, or which time had dulled. A renewal of faith, a belief in the spirit. Confirmation that love, beauty and freedom were still real and attainable. That life, whether man, beast or bird, is related in spirit. My experiences in Alaska proved to me the reality of something that had been hanging around in the shadowy corridors of my understanding: life is not a journey to a terminus, and even when we are gone from this world we never leave it. There is a very real world beyond sight and reason that we can enter into. It exists to enrich and help us. Life is a rite of passage out of all the confines and limitations we sometimes
fall into. It is not enough simply to pass through a place. I want to pass into it, for I am convinced that it is really the unseen that makes a place permanent to human perception.

A few days before our departure, I sat long into the small hours. The night was chilly and there was a noticeable drop in the light. I remembered that it had been like this when we arrived. Then it had been early summer; now I could smell winter in the air. I wondered how all those places in which I had stayed might already be in the depths of winter. As I thought about how the coming winter was signalling itself, I felt that part of the problem when it came to writing about Alaska was that the land and everything on it seemed to be in a constant dynamic: animals, birds and fish migrating and returning; humans working and surviving in constant response to the seasons; ice breaking up and glutting the rivers in summer, and seas freezing over in winter; the coming and going of whales; the still active volcanoes and the ever-present threat of tsunamis that could change the coastal landscape; the mad frenzy of summer and the dark, white silence of winter. Alaska never stays still long enough for you to get a hold on it. Maybe you have to have the psychological stamina of the hunter to live here. Maybe it would take a whole lifetime to track down what Alaska means.

I had spent many hours in the Sheldon Jackson library and museum in Sitka with its thousands of books and magnificent collection of native artefacts. I had even bought a copy of James Michener's epic
Alaska
. Its historical sweep, from prehistory, the ice age and early hunter-gatherers through to various periods of occupation and exploitation with their different layers of cultural and religious beliefs, made it a massive tome. Throughout the book it is the land itself which dominates over the affairs of men. The book ends where it started, with a hunting scene. Two friends, who are oil barons and among the important movers and shakers in Washington, are in Alaska to discuss oil development. One of the men, Jeb, has come to love the unspoiled wilderness and is determined to obstruct his friend Poley's ideas, which amounts to turning Alaska into another Texas, an oil-dollar
republic in which the only motivation for any endeavour is profit and Mammon is the new religion. The two debaters go to a remote ‘primeval area which few people ever saw'. There they intend to hunt a magnificent specimen of a dall sheep. During their debate they ignore radio warnings about the intense volcano activity of the Aleutian Islands. At last they find their prey and Jeb kills it. But it falls down the side of the mountain and Jeb must follow it to reclaim his prize, while Poley remains on high ground preparing for departure. He watches his friend's descent, then looks out on to the fjord to see the sudden and persistent suction of water from the bay. Inevitably, Jeb is swept away by the rising waters of the tidal wave. Poley, the entrepreneur and exploiter, reaches high ground and safety. It is a kind of fable which at first glance awards the future to the capitalist. But then you remind yourself that it is the raging of the elements, the mountains, the seas and the rivers that determines the course of history. Mammon will be left shivering on a precipice.

I smiled as I thought of Michener sitting here in the library absorbing facts and creating characters to carry the huge weight of his research. I wasn't really interested in the factual history of Alaska; it was only a gloss on the surface. What intrigued me was the land itself as the immutable force behind history's cause and effect, and the unique power of transcendence that seems to breathe out of the land and can sweep all rational preconceptions away, just like the tsunami at the end of Michener's
Alaska
.

Before going to bed for our last evening, I searched my memory and leafed through the pages in my diary for a particular phrase or specific incident that would render up this invisible Alaska. But, like Moses before the burning bush, I was speechless. Like a child, I suppose, I wanted some fairy-story image to lullaby me during my last hours here; more importantly, something that would connect my spirit to the spirit of the place, which I had felt with me everywhere. Instinctively, I picked up Barry Lopez's book
Arctic Dreams
and copied these words from it as the closing note in my diary:

I looked out over the Bering Sea and brought my hands folded to the breast of my parka and bowed from the waist deeply toward the north, that great strait filled with life, the ice and the water. I held the bow to the pale sulphur sky at the northern rim of the earth. I held the bow until my back ached, and my mind was emptied of its categories and designs, its plans and speculations. I bowed before the simple evidence of the moment in my life in a tangible place on the earth that was beautiful.

When I stood I thought I glimpsed my own desire. The landscape and the animals were like something found at the end of a dream. The edges of the real landscape became one with the edges of something I had dreamed. But what I had dreamed was only a pattern, some beautiful pattern of light. The continuous work of the imagination, I thought, to bring what is actual together with what is dreamed is an expression of human evolution . . .

Whatever world that is, it lies far ahead. But its outline, its adumbration, is clear in the landscape, and upon this one can actually hope we will find our way.

I bowed again, deeply, toward the north, and turned south to retrace my steps over the dark cobbles to the home where I was staying. I was full of appreciation for all that I had seen.

I recalled making this same instinctive act of supplication on Oneson's hill. I knew, too, that in some confused way the pattern and outline of my own dreams had brought me here. Even though I would be leaving the next day, I knew those same dreams would bring me back again.

I rose to go to bed and looked in on Jack and Cal. Littered across their bed were toy sea eagles, bears, wolves, moose and musk ox. I laughed, thinking of the racks of antlers waiting to be shipped home with us. If my dreams ever failed me, my sons' totem animals and my own ‘toys' would not let me forget.

The author and publishers are grateful to the following for permission to reproduce extracts:

To Barry Lopez and Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc., for lines from
Arctic Dreams
, published by Scribner, reprinted by permission of SLL/Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc., copyright © 1986 by Barry Lopez.

To Macmillan, London, for lines from
Into the Wild
by Jon Krakauer, published by Macmillan, 1998, used by permission.

To Thad and James Poulson, for an extract from
All About Sitka
, a publication of the
Daily Sitka Sentinel: All About Sitka
2001 Copyright © 2001
Daily Sitka Sentinel
, used by permission.

To Ned Rozell, University of Alaska Geophysical Institute, for a passage from his article ‘World's Oldest Mammals', in
Anchorage Daily News
, 25 February 2001.

To the University of Washington Press, for an extract from
Alaska's Copper River Delta
by Riki Ott, published by the Artists for Nature Foundation and the University of Washington Press, reprinted by permission of the University of Washington Press, 1998.

To Alfred A. Knopf, for an extract from
Going to Extremes
by Joe McGinnis, © 1980 by Joe McGinnis.

The author and publishers have made every reasonable effort to contact the copyright owners of the extracts reproduced in this book. In the few cases where they have been unsuccessful they invite copyright holders to contact them direct.