Travelers' Tales Alaska (2 page)

BILL SHERWONIT

Would You Be, Could You Be, Won't You Be (and Why in the Hell Does Anyone Want to Be) My Neighbor?

MIKE GRUDOWSKI

Leaving Land Behind

TOBY SULLIVAN

I Want to Ride on the Bus Chris Died In

SHERRY SIMPSON

Part Five

T
HE
L
AST
W
ORD

In the Giant's Hand

NANCY LORD

Index

Index of Contributors

Recommended Reading

Acknowledgments

by David Roberts

With six college friends, I first arrived in Alaska in June 1963, having driven a VW bus up the Alcan (not yet the Alaska Highway) in order to assault the then-unclimbed north face of Mt. McKinley (not yet Denali). As we started hiking at midnight across the tundra toward the Peters Glacier, I was one scared twenty-year-old. At the moment, there were many other places I would rather have been than Alaska. The gigantic, avalanche-swept mountain wall we had chosen to attack, I felt in my gut, would prove too much for the modest talents of our gang, trained as we were on the diminutive crags and gullies of New England.

Thirty-five days later, as we staggered out of the wilderness, having not only climbed the Wickersham Wall but traversed over both summits of McKinley, I was hooked. Hooked on Alaska—though to be honest, it was Alaska's mountains that had set the lure. For the next twelve years, I returned every summer, seeking out virgin faces and peaks all over the state. The sheer plenitude of untrodden glaciers and ridges in Alaska dazzled me; I felt like a classical scholar who had stumbled upon a cache of unknown scrolls. In 1967, we even got to name a whole range—the Revelation Mountains—that had never been explored.

During those thirteen years, Alaska was by far the most
real
place on earth for me. During the “off-season,” as I trudged
through college, grad school, and a teaching career, I longed for the Alaskan ranges as a troubadour poet pined for his unattainable mistress. Yet never for a moment did I consider moving to the 49th state, as several of my alpinist cronies did. On the way in and out of the mountains, what I saw of Alaskan culture dismayed rather than enthralled me. A get-rich-quick opportunism seemed to dominate the sprawling burgs of Anchorage and Fairbanks. The bush was steeped in a frontier ethic, the resourceful pluck of the homesteader leavened by his provincialism. There was no ignoring the xenophobia that ran deep through Alaska's boom-or-bust mentality, and the squalor and alcoholism that pervaded many an Inuit or Indian village that I visited seemed heartbreaking.

In my ex cathedra take on Alaska I was, of course, acting like the Eastern snob I was sometimes accused of being. There was, I had to admit, as much provincialism and squalor in Boston or New York as there was in Alaska.

Still, it was the Alaskan wilderness that spoke to me. Like most mountain climbers, the more passionate I was about new routes on unnamed peaks, the less curious I was about the cultural matrix that embraced that wilderness. It was only as my career as a climber started to taper off that I began to probe deeper into Alaska's unique and puzzling history and culture.

As the twenty-six narratives assembled in this beguiling collection testify, I was hardly alone in my response to Alaska. Again and again in these tales, it is the power and peril of the wilderness that the authors celebrate. The rare exceptions—Ellen Bielawski's “Camping at Wal
Mart” or Mike Grudowski's mordant portrait of Whittier—only reinforce the centrality of wilderness in Alaskan life, by evoking parodic inversions of the myth of the limitless outback. This emphasis is not surprising. Alaska does indeed teem with some of the most magnificent
and daunting back country on earth, on the edges of which a mere 627,000 inhabitants (55 percent of them nestled in Anchorage and Fairbanks) cling to their livelihoods. As a result, the literature of Alaska, unlike that of, say, Tuscany or Virginia, focuses almost obsessively on man's (and woman's) encounter with nature.

Thirty years ago, Margaret Atwood, in a polemic called
Survival,
argued that Canadian literature would never come of age until it got over its preoccupation with adventurers battling the wilderness. As a feminist, Atwood saw this fixation as a predominantly male hang-up. At its core, “survival” was reduced for Canadian writers to a morally simplistic, anti-intellectual machismo.

Does the same stricture hold for Alaska? I think this anthology of some of the freshest writing in recent years makes a strong case to the contrary. The classic Alaskan narratives of the first half of the twentieth century—works such as Belmore Browne's
The Conquest of Mount McKinley,
Charles Brower's
Fifty Years Below Zero,
and Robert Marshall's
Arctic Wilderness
—wove lyrical and heroic fantasias around the monotonic theme of an explorer or pioneer confronting the wilderness. In the present collection, in contrast, there are twenty-six different voices ranging, with a thoroughly postmodern sense of irony, across a dozen themes more ambiguous than survival or wilderness.

And yet, in
Traveler's Tales Alaska
there lingers (as I would guess is true for very few other places in the world) a fundamental choose-up-sides distinction between writers who live in the state and those who hail from Outside (the metaphoric tag could not be more apt). At its most tendentious, the attitude of Alaskans toward writers (and travelers) from the Lower 48 is that they can't possibly get it right. The countervailing
prejudice (exemplified in Joe McGinnis's brilliantly unfair
Going to Extremes
) is that Alaskans, being country bumpkins, are best explicated by a visitor from the heartland of American sophistication (read the East Coast)—just as three generations of Victorian colonialists thought they had better takes on Borneo or Sudan or India than anybody who had the misfortune to be born and raised in those benighted purlieus.

Nowhere is this us-them dichotomy more vivid than in the reception of the bestseller
Into the Wild.
The Alaskan response to Jon Krakauer's evocation of Chris McCandless's demise, as he tried to live solo off the land north of Denali, was more negative than the book garnered anywhere else in the world. The knee-jerk Alaskan fix on McCandless/Krakauer could be paraphrased as, “One more clueless, screwed-up hippie buys the farm 'cause he doesn't know what he's doing up here. Why romanticize and glorify the poor sucker?”

Yet McCandless's saga proved to have a universal resonance. In this volume, Sherry Simpson's complex meditation, “I Want to Ride on the Bus Chris Died In,” captures the full spectrum of reactions to McCandless's unwittingly symbolic quest and fate, and thus punctures the ultimately foolish us-versus-them split between writers and witnesses who live in Alaska and those who visit from Outside.

In this context, the editors have performed a salutary service by saving for last Nancy Lord's wonderfully wistful essay, “In the Giant's Hand.” Lord, who moved to Alaska in the wake of a profound wilderness experience in the Brooks Range at the age of nineteen, and who has lived there ever since, manages to look back on the naive idealist she once was from the vantage point of three decades of living in and writing about the 49th state. In a mere eight pages, Lord dismantles the us-them dichotomy (for she is both in one person),
finding her own truths in the universal human dramas of desire and aging and coming to terms with one's own mortality. Here is the kind of writing that, we can only hope, Alaska will provoke from her celebrants as the twenty-first century unveils new ways of comprehending the Great Land.

 

David Roberts is a mountaineer and adventurer who has climbed the 20,000-foot Quenehar in Argentina to discover the remains of Inca sacrificial victims, made the first descent of the Tekeze in Ethiopia, and been stranded in China during the Tiananmen Square massacre. He has journeyed from academia where he was an associate professor of literature, to Alaska and the Yukon where he led thirteen climbing expeditions (including more than six first ascents), to the literary world where he has written or edited sixteen books and won numerous awards, including the Prix Méditerrané, the Prix du Salon de Livre de Passy, the Prix d'Autrans, and the American Alpine Club Literary Award. He has also written for
National Geographic, Outside, Smithsonian, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Magazine, Travel and Leisure, Conde Nast Traveler,
and more.

JEFF FAIR

A transplanted Easterner gets a cold reception in the far, frigid north.

A
FEW YEARS AGO
I
LEFT BEHIND MY JOB, THE OLD
family cookstove, several loved ones, and Magalloway Maine, to make my way to Alaska once and for all. My plan was to travel overland in the American tradition, staying in touch with the landscape and its climates and thus better understand the meaning of my journey. I chose January because it was earlier than June or even April. Couldn't wait to get going.

Shortly after the holidays, I packed the Trooper (outfitted with a new engine-block heater, cord slithering out through the grille like the tongue of a snake) with all the worldly possessions that fit, inverted the canoe on top, summoned my travel companions (a pair of Brittany spaniels), and motored off.

We made good time to the Missouri River, with one ominous sign: The venison I'd stowed in the bow of the canoe began to thaw. At fifty-four degrees in Mitchell, South Dakota, not a patch of snow in sight, I had to buy ice. In January. I felt spiritually deprived, but things improved by way of a cold front near Shelby, Montana. In a motel lot in Whitecourt,
Alberta, I plugged in the block heater for the first time, barely able to suppress my glee. Twenty below.

The following night in Fort Nelson, British Columbia (forty below), not a room was available. “Oilman's convention,” the clerk explained. “Your best bet is Fort St. John.” But that was the wrong direction. I phoned ahead and secured a room at Toad River Lodge, 122 miles up the road according to my map. I asked what time they closed.

“What time you coming through?” asked the proprietress.

“I'm leaving Fort Nelson now,” I said.

“If you're not here by ten we'll come up the road looking for you.”