Tag: Books

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Missouri, Huckleberry Finn

From the Classics Illustrated comic book, 1965, Gilberton Company, Inc, New York, New York. According to the comic book, “reproductions of any material in any manner whatsoever are prohibited.” I’ll just go to hell.

For our trip to Missouri, I re-read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

I’ve read Huckleberry Finn a lot over 50 years, not counting the times as a child that I read the Classics Illustrated comic book or the abridged version in the Reader’s Digest Best Loved Books for Young Readers. It’s a complicated book, and even when I’m not reading it I find myself thinking about it. Mrs. Pat Miller, maybe the most frightening woman any of us ever knew, explained to 15-year old me that 14 year-old Huck was as certain as any Evangelical of the consequences of sin. In my upbringing damnation mattered, and in Huck’s milieu–and in mine–folks day-by-day and minute-by-minute walked a fine line along the edge of the fiery pit. When Huck said he was going to hell, there wasn’t any wiggle room.

I suspect that while more modern folk understand the importance of Huck’s moment as literature, they may not properly appreciate it as inevitable damnation.

Apparently if you’re writing about Huck Finn, it’s obligatory to recite how it’s always been controversial. After publication it was immediately banned by librarians in Concord (with the aid of Louisa May Alcott of Little Women), and was recently damned by the novelist Jane Smiley,1 who was appalled that anyone ever took Huck Finn seriously. She compares it unfavorably to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which is a little like comparing Moby-Dick unfavorably to the Orvis Guide to Flyfishing. They’re all fine books I’m certain, and Kris greatly admires Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Me, not so much, but then I don’t much admire Ms. Alcott’s Little Women either.

As for Jane Smiley, that broke leg must have pained her something fierce.

From the Classics Illustrated comic book, 1965. Classics Illustrated comic books are universally despised, but as a kid I loved them, and I still imagine the art when I read the book. Look at that purple night sky, that monstrous moon, that silhouette of a canoe in the moonlight . . . I would only note that in my experience the Mississippi is considerably broader than that river, and considerably muddier.

In addition to the criticisms of Mss. Alcott and Smiley, there has also been considerable discussion of Huck Finn’s racism, or lack thereof. The educator John H. Wallace deemed the novel “the most grotesque example of racist trash ever written.”2 Mr. Wallace demands that the original text only be used in graduate courses, and that his alternate text, which among other improvements eradicates the word “hell,” is the only thing that should be allowed in public schools. Of course that raises the question of where it is exactly that Huck is going to go when he frees Jim. How do you delete hell from a novel the climax of which resonates from the certainty of damnation?

The thing is, Huckleberry Finn doesn’t suffer from critics, and as often as not the criticism ponders things that should be pondered. Thinking about the critics’ concerns make reading the novel a richer experience. Conversely, Huck Finn doesn’t really need defense, certainly not from me. It’s a fine novel. There were a few things that this time around I focused on, and in no particular order here they are.

Pap. Pap is Huck’s father. He’s a drunkard. He sleeps in the hog lot on winter nights to stay warm. He is abusive, violent, insensible, and dangerous, and he only returns because he believes Huck is rich. In a delirium he tries to kill Huck with his clasp knife. There is a W.H. Auden quote to the effect that Pap Finn is the evilest creation in all bookdem.3 His chief role in the novel is to tee up Jim as the father surrogate for Huck and the moral compass of the novel, but he also explains Huck, both as to his condition as an outsider and what might be Huck’s likely future.

From the Classics Illustrated comic book, 1965. I’m fond of the red printers smudge on Huck’s spotless white shirt, and how the stuff is piled against the back wall so the artist didn’t have to contend with the joinder of the wall and floor.

Early on Pap also focuses the racial satire of the book. Pap, the least appealing possible man and father, goes off on a black college professor, a man who is clearly Pap’s superior:

Why, looky here. There was a free nigger4 there, from Ohio; a mulatter, most as white as a white man. He had the whitest shirt on you ever see, too, and the shiniest hat; and there ain’t a man in that town that’s got as fine clothes as what he had; and he had a gold watch and chain, and a silver-headed cane–the awfulest old gray headed nabob in the State. And what do you think? they said he was p’fessor in a college, and could talk all kinds of languages, and knowed everything. And that ain’t the wust. They said he could vote.5

Huck. A lot of modern criticism of Huckleberry Finn focuses on the escaped slave, Jim, and there’s reason for it. Without Jim, the novel is an extended fishing trip, and we all know how stupid it is to read about fishing trips. But Huck is there, too, and it is his journey. You just can’t read Huck Finn without considering Huck.

Huck is Pap’s child of a dead mother, abandoned to fend for himself. Always present is the possibility that someday Huck may turn into Pap. The Widow Douglas is trying to save him, and he’s a strong kid, with plenty of stratagems for self-preservation.

When you got to the table you couldn’t go right to eating, but you had to wait for the widow to tuck down her head and grumble a little over the victuals, though there warn’t really anything the matter with them. That is, nothing only everything was cooked by itself. In a barrel of odds and ends it is different; things get mixed up, and the juice kind of swaps around, and the things go better.6

Part of the delight of the book is that Huck lies. Huck lies to every stranger, kinsman, and acquaintance, Huck lies, then embellishes that lie, and then expands some on the embellishment. He lies to lead everyone so far astray that they miss him altogether. When in the rare instance Huck does tell the truth, even he is astonished.

So I went to studying it out. I says to myself, I reckon a body that ups and tells the truth when he is in a tight place is taking considerable many resks, though I ain’t had no experience, and can’t say for certain; but it looks so to me, anyway; and yet here’s a case where I’m blest if it don’t look to me like the truth is better and actuly safer than a lie. I must lay it by in my mind, and think it over some time or other, it’s so kind of strange and unregular. I never see nothing like it. 7

This is particularly helpful in parsing one of the most difficult (and most written about) exchanges in the book, when Huck is describing the fictional explosion on a nonexistent steamboat that he, asTom Sawyer, was supposed to be traveling on.

“It warn’t the grounding—that didn’t keep us back but a little. We blowed out a cylinder-head.”

“Good gracious! anybody hurt?”

“No’m. Killed a nigger.”

“Well, it’s lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt. ((Chapter XXXII))

Huck is talking to Mrs. Phelps, Tom Sawyer’s aunt. Huck is thrilled that Aunt Sally thinks he’s Tom, because he knows it’s a deception he can carry off. He is there to steal Jim out of slavery, and his only purpose is to get the Phelps’ trust so he can free Jim. It is a convoluted bit of business, and the foregoing infamous bit of dialogue is part and parcel of it.

From the Classics Illustrated comic book, 1965. It’s interesting how the fields of color, the yellow of the dress, the blue of the sky or Huck’s shirt, or the green of the grass, are made more interesting not by variations in shade, but by simple dots of contrasting or darker colors.

There are numerous interpretations of the dialogue. One is that Twain is caught in shameful and egregious callous racism. One is that it is heavily ironic, and that the irony is that Twain is noting the unconscious racism of Aunt Sally Phelps and Huck. For me, though, while it is noting the callous racism of Mrs. Phelps (who is otherwise a good woman), for Huck it’s just another lie, and it says nothing about Huck’s attitudes. Huck was never on a steamboat. No steamboat grounded, and no cylinder head blew. No one died. Huck is lying to put Aunt Sally off his track, because that’s what Huck does. Huck is there to save Jim, and he lies so that Aunt Sally won’t spot his motive.

The last chapters. It’s in the Constitution that if you talk about Huckleberry Finn, you have to quote Ernest Hemingway’s The Green Hills of Africa:

All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. If you read it you must stop where the Nigger Jim is stolen from the boys. That is the real end. The rest is just cheating. ((Hemingway, Ernest, The Green Hills of Africa, London, Jonathan Cape, 1936), 29. As an aside, there’s a lot of discussion by academics about the common naming of Jim as Nigger Jim by commentators. Twain never uses the term. ))

After Chapter 31, after the Duke and the King sell Jim for a portion of a fictitious reward payable by a fictitious downriver plantation, there is a chaotic change in the novel. Huck leaves the river and is confused for Tom Sawyer at Phelps’ farm. Tom Sawyer appears and takes over the lives of Jim and Huck; he leads them through a series of unnecessary and often demeaning gyrations which, one supposes, Twain hopes the reader finds hilarious. In some ways, those gyrations are more typical of Twain than the rest of the novel, and more in the vein of Tom Sawyer, or Connecticut Yankee, or the Prince and the Pauper. It’s certain that after the brilliance of the trip down the river, the final chapters are mostly viewed as a failure.

I’m stupid though. They often make me laugh out loud.

I’ve read that psychologically, the last chapters are true to the nature of boys. Huck would be coerced by Tom Sawyer because peer pressure is a lot of what adolescence is about. I don’t know about that, but I would say that at least in the context of Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, for Huck and Tom there’s nothing out of character in the last chapters. Tom is always the trigger for mayhem, and Huck is always at his least discerning and most likely to do something stupid when he subscribes to what someone else tells him. It’s a characteristic failure that he always trusts Tom Sawyer as to how things work, or at least follows along, and he often distrusts his own (usually better) judgment. Until Jim, Huck is the outcast, andTom was his truest friend.

As for Jim, what choice does he have but to go along with the absurdities? He has only one friend in the situation, Huck, and Huck trusts Tom, mostly. Even with all that, Jim performs the noblest act of the novel: he gives up his freedom to save Tom.

I must have read somewhere that if Twain had carried Huck Finn out to its logical conclusion, then it would have been a William Faulkner novel. It’s a view I’m not smart enough to have thought of myself, but heartily subscribe to. In a more likely end, Jim would have been lynched, or at least sold back into bondage. But Twain is writing not as Faulkner, but in the line of Oliver Twist or David Copperfield. Everything has to turn out right in the end, and it does, mostly.

Twain, Mark, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (New York, Charles L. Webster and Company, 1885), frontispiece illustration by E.W. Kimble.

  1. Smiley, Jane, “Say it Ain’t So, Huck,” Harper’s Monthly, January 1996, 61. Smiley re-read Huck Finn while immobilized with a broken leg. [↩]
  2. Wallace, John H., “The Case Against Huck Finn,” in Satire or Evasion: Black Perspectives on Huckleberry Finn, ed. Leonard, James S., Tenney, Thomas A, and Davis, Thaddeus M. (Durham and London, Duke University Press, 1992), 16. [↩]
  3. I’ve been trying to find the exact quote, and of course it’s taken off for the territory. Auden certainly didn’t say the precise words I’ve attributed to him, but if he didn’t say something like the sense of it, then I’ll claim it as my own and be proud. [↩]
  4. It appears more than 200 times in Huck Finn, and in talking about the book, there’s no getting around it. Much of the difficulty of Huck Finn‘s racism is not that it is a racist statement by Twain, but that Twain revels in irony, including the irony of the constant racist language. It doesn’t mean that Huck Finn shouldn’t be taught, ever, but that it takes a good and careful teacher, or at least the meanest teacher you ever had, with students who are old enough to get irony. It never helps that Twain often states as gospel what isn’t, just to illuminate what is. [↩]
  5. Chapter V. It’s worth noting also that while Huckleberry Finn is a historical novel set in 1840, Twain writes Huck Finn between 1875 and 1886, during the failure of Reconstruction and the rise of segregated America, North and South. Arguably, Pap’s diatribe isn’t so much a statement of the world view of a particularly evil man, as a statement about the rise of Jim Crow in a particularly evil world. [↩]
  6. Chapter I. Before being taken in by the Widow Douglas, Huck has apparently survived on slop, and he seems to appreciate its value. [↩]
  7. Chapter XXVII. Huck deciding to tell the truth to Mary Jane. [↩]
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Happy New Year! North Dakota!

http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/10159

John Caleb Bingham, Trappers Descending the Missouri, 1845, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

I know, I know, it’s February, and I haven’t written anything since, I dunno, August of last year? I’ve stalled. It’s past Valentine’s, and I haven’t wished you Happy New Year.

Happy New Year!

We have fished. We’ve fished for Redfish at Port O’Connor, for bonefish on South Andros in the Bahamas, and I caught a 12-pound grass carp at Damon on a six weight Winston trout rod. The carp dragged my canoe around until it finally came to hand. We were both exhausted, but I’m pretty certain that I was the only one happy about it.

I’ve planned fishing trips. In April I’m going with a group from Houston to Cuba, which is these days a hot fly-fishing destination. We’re going for the benefit of the Cuban people, but we’ll also fish. In September Kris and I are going to Maine, so maybe we’ll add at least one state this year.

And we’ve traveled without fishing. In November we went to Spain for our son’s wedding, and that took a lot of physical and mental energy. I had to write a speech for the wedding dinner, and it was the best wedding speech ever. You should have been there.

gratuitous photo of a barracuda I caught on South Andros with a spinning rod.

Gratuitous photo of a barracuda I caught in January in the Bahamas with a spinning rod.

We cleaned out our storage bin, mostly, and I learned Spanish, some. The Astros won the World Series.

So we’ve been stuck at 31 states since last August, and all of my angler’s block stems from our September trip to North Dakota.I had dreaded North Dakota. Even though I grew up in the middle of nowhere, North Dakota is just a wee bit past the middle. There are big lakes in North Dakota, some natural lakes left by glaciers, some man-made, and if you want to fish for walleye with conventional gear, it’s a good place to go. Not so much for fly fishing.

From time to time in recent years I’ve checked the internet for suggestions for fly fishing in North Dakota, and have come across a lot of forum posts that look something like this:

QUERY: I’ve just moved to North Dakota for medical school/to count grasshopers/for the climate. Where is there to fly fish?

REPLY: South Dakota. All the rivers in North Dakota are flat, slow, and muddy.

It’s kinda hard to separate South Dakota and North Dakota, though Congress clearly managed it. The best history of North Dakota, Dakota by Norman Rijsford, is also the best history of South Dakota. The Dakota/Lakota, the Mandan, the Cheyenne, the Crow, the Hidatsa, the Chippewa . . . they all blatantly disregarded the state line. When Lewis and Clark traveled up the wide Missouri, they never mentioned when they crossed from south to north. Congress separated the Dakotas when they entered the Union because the locals couldn’t agree on a location for the state capitol. South Dakota still ended up with Pierre.

There is one difference between the states. There are no native trout in North Dakota, and at least historically there wasn’t much fly fishing anywhere without trout. South Dakota, in and around Badlands National Park, has trout. North Dakota also has a national park, Theodore Roosevelt, but no trout.

After a lot of internet perusing I found a guide in Bismarck, halfway between the state’s eastern and western borders, about 16 hours and 980 miles almost directly north of Vernon, Texas, my hometown. That driving route is roughly on the line of the 100th Meridian, where the wetter east gives way to the drier Great Plains.

From The Great Plains Trail. I don’t know where they stole it from. The dry line may be moving east because of Global Warming. Just another thing to keep you up at night.

We didn’t make that drive though. We flew from Houston to Minneapolis, which would have been a roughly 17 hour and 1,230-mile drive. In Minneapolis we went to a late-season Twins game at Target Field on St. Olaf College night, ate fried walleye, bought some pike flies at a local fly shop, and had a delicious, healthy breakfast at the Minnesota State Fair: Mini donuts shot into a deep frier out of a mini-donut gun, fried cheese curds, deep fried corn on the cob, and a corny dog. I had a corny dog anyway. Kris didn’t really eat her fair share of the cheese curds either.

The guide I found, Kurt Yancy, isn’t a full-time fly fishing guide, but he is a full-time fishing guide who dabbles in fly fishing, and he said we might catch smallmouth, walleye, pike, or carp. On his website there are lots of photos of guys dressed against a north wind holding large walleyes. You can catch walleye on fly rods, but they’re mostly caught deep in lakes, as much as 30 feet, and once you get much beyond ten feet fishing with a fly rod starts getting really stupid. Stupider.

It’s also hard to ice fish with a fly rod, so our potential North Dakota season was short.

Driving from Minneapolis to Bismarck takes about six hours. We ate lunch at the Fisher’s Club on Middle Spunk Lake in Avon, Mn., and the Fisher’s Club is charming and someplace everyone should visit. At the visitor center in Fargo we met North Dakota’s most famous actor. Almost to Bismarck, we drove past miles and miles of ponds that set my heart racing, but Kurt told me later that the ponds were very shallow, only a couple of feet deep, and that they froze solid in winter. Fish couldn’t survive the freeze. A thousand miles further south and those miles of ponds would be a destination, except of course when they dried up in the heat of the summer.

Well, actually, a thousand miles further south they’d be High Plains playa lakes, and those aren’t something you fish either.

At the Fargo visitor’s center, North Dakota’s most famous actor. He was autographed by the Coen brothers.

Ok, that’s enough of a wind up. Here’s the bottom line: we didn’t catch a fish in North Dakota. It was hard to get to, and then it was even harder getting home–it was our first intimation that things are a bit screwed up at Southwest Airlines. Coming home we had a 16-hour day and were routed through New Orleans from Austin to get to Houston. We could have gone to Paris from New York and back to New York again.

And like I said, we didn’t catch a fish. We fished the second day at Nelson Lake and watched carp gulp air into their swim bladders because the outfall from the power plant was heating the lake. It was frustrating. The first day though we fished in the side channels of the Missouri River, and the Missouri, maybe our most famous river after the Mississippi, was magnificent for every reason except fly fishing. You can’t stand beside the Missouri without thinking about Lewis and Clark, Teddy Roosevelt, Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, western migration, buffalo, migratory birds and antelope and seas of grass, everything the plains are. North Dakota feels as wild as it gets in the lower 48.

Thoreau wrote a series of essays about Maine, and in one, Chesuncook, after a companion gratuitously kills a moose, he is at his best, writing about our relationship to nature and to wildness, and how–and I paraphrase here–our highest use of nature is not to catch a fish, or chop down a tree, or kill a moose–those uses are petty. Our highest use is to discover our shared immortality with the fish, or the pine tree, or the moose. I’m not sure I buy that immortality business, but I get what he’s saying, at least a bit, and he recognizes in 1853, when there was still plenty ‘o wildness, that something was lost if our incidental uses used up the unsullied natural world, or if we only approached the natural world as something only to be fished, or lumbered, or hunted. In North Dakota, there’s still some natural world left to contemplate, and some of the human world too, particularly while standing on the bank of the Missouri River.

But dangit, higher aspirations and Henry David Thoreau aside, I surely would have liked to catch a fish.

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Alaska Packing List

Gear

We took too much stuff.  On our flight to Quinagak we were limited to 50 pounds apiece of luggage, and we pushed the limit.  They let us on the plane with 101 pounds, but don’t tell anybody. We did well enough on clothes—Ok, I had one too many pairs of long underwear, but Kris ended up borrowing the extra. I have very stylish long underwear.

Where we failed was with fishing gear. We only used four rods, four reels, and four lines.  We would have done just fine with nothing but the the two big Spey rods and the two seven-weight single-handed rods that we used for trout.

Meanwhile I had packed five more rods and reels, just in case. I did use some of the flies I tied, which always makes me happy.

Besides long underwear, I had a pair of pile pants to wear under my waders that worked well, and a couple of sweaters, one wool and one capiIene. I don’t think I took the sweaters off until day six. On that sunny day it got within the vicinity of almost hot and all the guides were sporting t-shirts. Show-offs.

Our rain gear got a work out, and the knit cap that fit over my baseball cap did double duty, both keeping me warm and providing padding when I whacked the back of my head on bad casts.

I took the new pair of waders Kris gave me for Father’s Day.  Waders are expensive, and sometimes they spring leaks.  My last pair were good Patagonia waders that I’d had six or seven years, but the last couple of times out I’d ended up with a wet butt. I’d tried to seal them, but never could find the leak.  We have a water feature in our back yard, a shallow pool with a fountain, and weekly in May I’d put on a pair of khakis and my waders and go sit in the cement pond to see if I’d fixed them yet. I never did.

The new waders have a front zipper, which is a recent innovation. Why a front zipper? So it’s easier to pee of course.  I’m here to report that for an old man, the zipper is the greatest thing ever, right up there in the list of civilization’s achievements with fire, the wheel, and yoga pants.

The Camp

I had the notion that our stay at Alaska West would be glamping. It wasn’t.  Now mind, it was perfectly comfortable.  The tent had a propane heater, each cot had its own mosquito net, and there were hangers on a galvanized pipe.  The food was good and would have paired well with beer if Quinagak hadn’t been dry.  We made our sandwiches each day for our riverside lunch, and there was a perfectly adequate selection of cold cuts. On some days there were Cheetos. The camp runner made our bed each day, and while the cot was made out of 2x4s and a sheet of plywood, it was comfortable, and like I said, it came with mosquito netting. All the luxuries.

Demonstrating the Nap T.

That said, nobody knew the thread-count on the sheets, and a memorable part of each shower was spent alternating between cold water and scalding. There were plenty of outhouses though, and there was a shower, not just a hose with a foot pump. I’m sure that in Alaska there are glamorous lodges with down comforters, plush towels, adjustable shower heads, bottles of pinot noir, micro greens applied to plates with tweezers, and flush toilets, and I wouldn’t have minded any of those things, but I also liked our camp at Alaska West. I liked it a lot.

Besides us, there were eight other anglers in camp the week we were there, and Kris and I were the only anglers who hadn’t been there at least once before.  Three anglers were from Britain, and one, from California, came every summer and was spending two weeks. Apparently there are a lot of repeat customers.

You know what’s great about almost endless sunlight? You don’t have to find a flashlight if you need to pee in the middle of the night.

Anchorage and Seward

We were in Alaska for ten nights, seven in camp, two in Anchorage, and one in Seward. We flew out of Anchorage at 11 pm on the night we got back from the Alaska West camp, with an Alaska Airlines flight from Anchorage to Denver. In Denver we changed planes and airlines, and got home at 2 the next afternoon. I honestly don’t remember a thing about that flight home.

To get there we flew into Anchorage three days early and took a sightseeing train across the Kenai Peninsula to Seward. The Alaska Railroad is terrific, and they had a tour package that included a visit to a dog-sled kennel, a hike to a glacier, and then a six-hour boat tour of Kenai Fjords National Park. We saw whales! We mourned accelerated glacial melting!  We saw seals and sea otters and kittiwakes! No wonder people go on cruises to Alaska. 

In Anchorage we stayed the first night at the Comfort Inn Downtown–Ship Creek, so that we could walk to the train station the next morning to catch our train to Seward. We had stashed most of our luggage at our third night’s hotel, The Lakefront Anchorage. In between those two we spent the night at the Harbor 360 Hotel in Seward, which was part of the train tour package. Little known fact, but every hotel in Alaska is required by law to have a stuffed bear in the lobby, and the really fancy places will also have a stuffed muskox.

We ate in Seward at The Cookery.  If you own a tourist-dependent restaurant in Seward, you open each year in late spring and close down in the fall, but The Cookery was good enough that if they opened in February I’d go back to Seward just to eat there. What great oysters they have in Alaska.

Food in Anchorage was pretty hit or miss, but our first night there we ate at a popular brewpub, The Glacier Brewhouse.  We didn’t have a reservation but they seated us at the bar.  Our waitress was from Katy, Texas. The couple next to us at the bar was from Monahans, Texas.  I think there’s a good bit of Texas in Alaska, and it just goes to show, wearing an Astros cap is never a bad choice. 

Playlist

There is a lot of good writing about Alaska, and there are some pretty good movies, plus we bought the boxed set of six seasons of Northern Exposure, which is still the best thing ever broadcast on network television. It’s too bad that Janine Turner is a nutcase.

Music, though, is limited.  There’s “North to Alaska” by Johnny Horten, and I found a pretty good cover of it by a blue grass performer, David Mallett.  There’s the song, “Alaska” by Maggie Rogers, which she wrote in Boston, and “Anchorage” by Michelle Shocked which I suppose she wrote in Texas. There’s a band, Portugal the Man, which is likely the best thing to ever come out of Wasilla, Alaska, though I gather they’re now based in Portland. Their stuff is very good, and you’d likely recognize a song or two.

After that Alaska seems to turn out female singer-songwriters, led, of course, by Jewel, and including Anna Graceman, Janet Gardner, and Libby Roderick.  I’ve got nothing against female singer-songwriters, I’ve got nothing against Jewel, but of the 39 songs on our Alaska playlist, 30 were by female singer-songwriters, and 19 of those were by Jewel. It made one yearn for another run-through of North to Alaska.

I was surprised at the lack of country and western singers from Alaska. With all those Texans, it seemed like an obvious choice. Maybe I just missed them.

Guitar

To save weight, I took my small travel guitar. I bought it originally so that I wouldn’t cry if it was accidentally destroyed, and I had visions of having to leave it in a trash can to make the Quinagak weight limit. I didn’t have to leave it, and it survived another trip. I took the music for “Recuerdos de la Alhambra”, a song I’ve played through from time to time but never learned, and worked on that most evenings.  I’m still working on it, and probably never will learn it. 

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Literary Alaska

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.

Rockwell Kent, sketch from Wilderness: A Journal of Quiet Adventure in Alaska, 1920, G.P. Putnam’s and Sons, New York, at vii.

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?

Rockwell Kent, Bear Glacier, 1919, Plattsburgh State Art Museum, State University of New York, Rockwell Kent Gallery. Reproduced under fair use.

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.