Rockwell Kent, Mail Service in the Arctic, 1937, oil on canvas, William Jefferson Clinton Federal Building, Washington, D.C., photo by Carol M. Highsmith.
There are so many books about Alaska that there are books about the books about Alaska. This isn’t minor stuff, either. This is some of the best stuff. You could spend a year reading Alaska, and never touch a badly written word. At the end of the year you’d still have plenty left to read.
There’s no great fiction, though everybody knows Call of the Wild. I read it as a child, and then re-read it long enough ago to have forgotten it again. All that stuff about Buck returning to his Wolf Heritage, well, that’s all right I guess, but what I have in my head is that Buck was stolen from a nice vineyard in Sonoma for labor in the Alaskan mines. Sure, maybe Buck liked the wild, but I’m all in for a nice Sonoma vineyard.
Maybe that’s not really how the book goes, but it’s close enough.
The book about the books about Alaska is pretty fine–I’m simplifying here, The Quiet World is more than a book about books, it’s a good if thick book about the Alaskan Wilderness, largely focused on the preservationists who, more often than not, wrote books. It’s written by a neighbor, sort of. The author, Douglas Brinkley, is a Rice Professor, though I think that he actually lives in Austin. We all make mistakes. I live six blocks south of Rice Stadium, so wherever he may actually live, I justly have some neighborly pride.
There is a tension with Americans and Alaska, and like a lot of our modern tensions, it never reconciles. There’s this draw of wild, preserved Alaska, and you have strange odd creatures like Rockwell Kent–who along with N.C. Wyeth was perhaps the most accomplished book illustrator of the first half of the last century. In 1918 Kent and his nine-year-old son over-wintered in a remote cabin in Alaska–one supposes that his stay-at-home wife had better sense than Kent, but then apparently she let her son go. Kent’s journal, Wilderness: A Journal of Quiet Adventure in Alaska, was popular in its day and is a good read, in a Henry David Thoreau-sort-of-way. It is also immensely strange. Who takes their nine-year old son to over-winter in a remote Alaskan cabin?
Kent had an eye for Alaska though, and you see his eye for wilderness lifelong in his work. His Alaska paintings are at once luminous and gloom-filled. Still, that impulse, that impulse to wander off into the wilderness, magnificent as the result may sometimes be, is the same impulse that roughly 100 years later killed Chris McCandles, when unprepared and plain ol’ stupid he hiked into the Alaskan bush and never came out again. The resulting book, John Krakauer’s Into the Wild is, by its nature, troubling, infuriating, and unhappy. It’s also another of those fine books about Alaska. There is also a movie.
John McPhee’s Coming Into the Country, 1979, was the first of McPhee’s books I remember reading, and in many ways it remains for me his finest, blending personal experience, data, history, interviews, stories, and natural and social observation. In some ways it’s also one of the more dated books about Alaska, written during the bloom of the oil boom and the opening of the Alaska pipeline, the implementation of 1971’s Alaskan Native Claims Settlement Act, and the final back-to-nature impulses of an already disappearing counterculture. Still, McPhee captures the tension between the preservationists’ desire for wild Alaska and the developers’ desire for resource extraction. It’s that tension that drives our Alaska conversation, that’s driven the conversation since Teddy Roosevelt.
In recent years the focus of that conflict has been on opening the 19 million acre Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil exploration. There was a clause in the Trump tax bill that allowed lease sales, and a lease sale was held in the final days of the Trump administration. President Biden immediately canceled the sales after taking office. I doubt if Biden managed a stake through its heart though.
If you fly fish, oil exploitation of the arctic refuge has taken second fiddle to development of the Pebble Mine, a massive copper-gold-molybdenum mine proposed for the Bristol Bay watershed. Bristol Bay is the richest salmon nursery in the world. If you eat wild Alaskan sockeye salmon, the fish like as not comes from Bristol Bay, and the notion of mine leachate damaging the fishery has set both the sport and commercial fisheries’ collective teeth on edge. For a time I couldn’t open an advertising email from a fly rod company without an accompanying message about opposition to the Pebble Mine. Really, the only thing that comes close to the fly fishing world’s obsession with the Pebble Mine is the restoration of the Everglades.
The Obama administration opposed the mine, and developers waited until the end of the Obama administration to apply for licenses. President Trump’s administration strongly indicated that the licensing would move forward, then the permit application was rejected. Everyone, it seems, from Alaska’s Republican senators to Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump, Jr., opposed the mine. It’s likely that the project ultimately died because Trump Jr. liked to fish Bristol Bay. In the words of Senator Murkowski, it was the wrong mine in the wrong place.
The book I’m currently reading, and the book I’ll likely finish on the flight to Alaska, is the 1986 National Book Award winner, Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams. It differs from the other books, and in many ways is the best of the lot. It’s a natural history set further north than we’re going, above the arboreal tree line that marks the true Arctic. Early in the book Lopez observes that the further north you go, the less species diversity there is, but the more biologic mass is concentrated into those fewer species. Lopez then goes into detailed descriptions of arctic species and their fragility. I’m through the chapters on the musk-ox, the ringed seal, and the polar bear. Humans come into the book marginally, as researchers, as arctic explorers or residents, and as threats. It’s a magnificent piece of writing.
I’m also taking a copy of John Muir’s Travels in Alaska. Muir–and I’m required by law here to note that Muir founded the Sierra Club, and that Muir is a kind of patron saint for wilderness advocates–he may be the first popular writer about Alaska, though he is also established as a glacier expert–a glaciologist. I’ve read Muir before, an autobiography in college, and when we went to fish Florida his book about his 1000 mile walk. Surprisingly (to me at least) he’s an engaging and readable author, a naturalist and a scientist, a fearless mountaineer, and a bit of a mystic, that is if Scots can be mystics. It’ll be a good book to come home on.
Back to Brinkley, perhaps his most surprising inclusion is the in-all-other-ways conservative Walt Disney. I doubt if Disney set out to be a Wilderness Warrior, but there you are–he made a lot of documentaries about Alaska. When Bambi’s mother stepped into that meadow, her death changed a generation’s views about the value of wilderness wildlife. In the 50s and 60s Disney produced a series of documentaries about Alaska for his target audience, American chillens and their parents. People of a certain age–and I include myself in that group–couldn’t escape those documentaries. They’re not really very good as documentaries. In 1958s White Wilderness, for instance, the film crew actually threw lemmings off the cliffs to create the myth of mass lemming suicides. The documentaries personify bears and otters and seals and whatnot to make them charismatic, charming, and relatable.
They’re still fun to watch.
The documentaries were also popular. His 1948 Seal Island won an Academy Award for best short subject, and the 1953 Alaskan Eskimo won an Academy Award for best short documentary. You can watch Disney’s Alaskan Eskimo on YouTube. White Wilderness was 1958s best feature documentary. Seal Island, probably did more to protect Alaska’s seals from harvest than anything short of Gore-Tex. It’s not great natural history, but just like hunting deer after the death of Bambi’s momma, it’s hard to wear sealskin when you’ve watched momma and baby seals go to church on Sunday. Ok. that’s not true, I’m exaggerating. Some of Disney’s seals were Jewish, and went to synagogue on Saturday. You can watch Seal Island on YouTube too.
