I wrote this essay when I was still working at the Anchorage Museum. It brings up a lot of different feelings for me now. Over the last year, I’ve read with uncanny recognition the many articles revealing the layers of toxicity with museum work culture, and of bullying CEOs and others in positions of power. Each one I read has been triggering; I stand in solidarity with all of the people who have been the object of bullying and abuse at work.
When I do reflect on the years I worked there, I try to focus on the pieces I’m proud of contributing to and creating while there, and the collaboration of my colleagues on so many different projects. This essay came from thoughts I’ve long had about what it means to live in remote places, to be far and near at the same time; and it also came from many discussions with thoughtful colleagues on what it means to live in Alaska. There are new layers to it now—of how much of our world has become remote this past year, and how physical location can have little to do with our sense of being cut off or pulled in.
Here is remote.
When I first moved to Alaska, I traveled north to Fairbanks, to help my partner find a place to live as we started graduate school. We had heard that ‘dry’ cabins are best to rent. It sounded romantic and nostalgic—a cozy wood cabin, an iron stove, quiet solitude, and thinking in white drifts of snow. The reality was a cabin slightly more clean and well kept than other apartments without the need for plumbing in below-freezing conditions. Dry cabins meant a small shack constructed of T-111 siding, with poor insulation, next to the pizza hut or other odd urban/rural juxtaposition. People who live in dry cabins take showers on campus or at their office—which have public showers in Fairbanks because so many do not have plumbing at home. The realities of living at the end-of-the-road (so to speak) became clear, and it was nothing like the romantic howls of a wolf. It was messy, it was domestic and opportunistic, it was suburban in a weird caricature of what ‘urban’ looks like—cul-de-sacs, chain stores, and restaurants in the midst of no plumbing and endless black spruce.
Much of what Alaska and the North conjures in the minds of many is extreme living, of remoteness. A place elsewhere, different from the familiar rhythms of the center.
But this viewpoint comes from a remote perspective—of the center looking at Alaska and the North from a distance. Finding a remote place relies upon view and distance—to be far from the place looking across, from its opposite. For there to be a north, there must, by definition, be a south. For a frontier, a metropolis, for a periphery, a center. Like Newton’s third rule, for every journey out, there must be a return. For Alaska and the north to be a place that is remote, it is fundamentally being defined from somewhere else. And it is a place that requires the return to the center to confirm it is truly remote. Legends only grow about places rarely visited.
But remote is not only the daydream of a center looking to the edge. It is a reality that is harsh and unforgiving in the most crowded of places. Many live in urban areas and feel remote from their villages. Native Alaskans enlisted in the army and found themselves in the remote corners of the southern U.S. Soldiers at Nike Site Summit during the cold war could see the lights of Anchorage, but wrote of long boredom and fatigue with living above the city, assigned to stand watch, while the isolation for months at a time during the winter became real.
Any idea of remote is really about distance—in time, place, and improbability. And looking at remote places from a center, and back across to the center from remote places, can cause the light to bend across that distance, to clarify the landscape both within and without.
The border between space and time is not clean or defined. I began writing this tonight at ten o’clock on a late May evening. The sun is full and high and still beckoning, children’s voices laughing can be heard outside the open windows, at a time of night that many from a more southerly latitude would say is too late for kids to be out. When I realized the time, the light—that it looked like mid-afternoon—I had a familiar flash of recognition, that this light means we are close to the solstice, that by late June, the darkness would begin to press its return sooner than we ever expect. The lull that a flood of daylight can give, of feeling that it is long, constant and here to stay—and then suddenly remembering that nothing in the north stays the same for very long.
I crave constancy and have learned to seek it out, living in the north. I cling to latitude. Of light and dark, of sunset and dawn merged together, the sun sewing light back and forth on the horizon, of twilights that last longer than afternoons. Alaska and the north is a place of continued transition and paradox. The light changes swiftly, birds move through one week to the next, the shift of seasons following as quickly. Monochrome landscapes turn to full green in a weekend, a surprise each year, because no matter how much you understand the tilt of the poles and the earth’s movement around the sun, there’s part of you that still doubts that spring will come.
The twilights of northern latitudes leave a long transition in between the move from light and dark. In Greek, the word for dusk is lykophos, meaning “wolf-light”—a descriptive also referenced in French, of twilight being “the time between dog and wolf” (Davidson, Twilight, p. 17). The shift between domestication and the possibility of wildness and otherness—the familiar bark of a dog turning to the uncontrollable howls of a wolf. An idea that is reflected in outsider-created mythologies of Alaska, Jack London notably crystallizes the metaphor in Call of the Wild—the story that a dog can return to wolf, that what is true and real and unfettered is what exists beyond the twilight transition between the urban south and remote north.
Karl Ove Knaussgard writes “the division between night and day is a border, perhaps the most fundamental one we have, and up [north] it was abolished, first in an eternal night, then in an eternal day.” The latitude of north marks this transition to a remote place, an edge that invokes a sense of the unfamiliar, of the possibility of the supernatural, of places beyond the known world. The expected rhythms and routines of the center—the city, the temperate, the middle—are overturned and suddenly the feelings of the unknown are what crowd and take shape.
Whether it is foolishness to try to live on one’s own in what is often considered the extreme corners of the world—the north, where the elements are entirely indifferent to our success or failure—is unclear. There is no easy agriculture or harvest in Alaska. There is the possibility of individual riches, but really that belongs to previous generations of outsiders coming in, where striking gold and leaving quickly recedes into myth. What remote living for outsiders is now is what Walden offered Thoreau, what Alaska offered to many people including McCandless, Treadwell, Proenneke, and Hassleborg—the idealized challenge where “a man can make his soul” (Davidson, Idea of North, p. 10).
The irony of this self-challenge, of existential ideas of wildness and remoteness, is that it is an illusion, like the fata morgana—mountains that polar explorers would claim and locate on maps only to never re-locate—the idea of solitude and remote living evaporates as you get closer to it. Living successfully in remote places means that you rely more than ever on being connected to others. At the core of every success and failure to live in remote places is the need for community, both physically and mentally. For Proenneke, it was a remote community that supported his solitary life, with supplies and correspondence flown in regularly. For McCandless, it was others who helped him get to his final remote place and his isolation that ultimately became part of his demise. No one lives remotely alone.
A friend of mine who was on a guided backpacking trip in the Brooks Range likes to tell the story of an older man from Chicago who was a member of their group. In the middle of the trip, he had a panic when he truly realized that his cell phone would not work. They were on their own, unconnected, without a net. This man pushed outside his own boundaries to experience remoteness, and yet when the reality of remoteness crashed in on him, he experienced a sunlit, night-long panic of what could happen to him or anyone else if they were injured. He never fully relaxed for the rest of the trip, despite a community of people with varied experiences and skills living alongside one another, day in and day out. What we rely on to connect us, and the boundaries we recognize, are not always reality either.
New realities of remote living now raise questions of whether or not anyone can ever be truly remote. Where film cameras and journals accompanied Proenneke and documented his remote living, modern-day Proennekes set out for solitary living with remote communities in tow:
Four months have passed since Chuck Baird went into the wild to the no-so-remote islands in Alaska’s Prince William Sound. The goat is dead. The dog is sick. Baird has lost 35 pounds. But the internet is working great. And Baird now has more than 5,825 ‘likes,’ with the number increasing daily, on Facebook, where people check in on his almost daily jottings on living the pioneer life. Well, sort of, if the pioneers had been equipped with lasers, night-vision optics, motion-sensing cameras, solar cells, wind turbines, battery banks, computers, iPhones, DVDs, Kindles, video cameras, telephoto lenses, chainsaws, plywood, and more. Baird confessed in an August video that the ‘Alaska Pioneer’ name of his adventure ‘is probably a misnomer,’ but added that ‘it’s close enough to what I’m doing.’ He says his sojourn is a re-enactment of pioneer days1.
Living remotely now means that we do not enter into wild and remote places alone—we remotely bring the community with us. The edge and center are compressing, leaving a lack of distance through which to see clearly, the sharpened vision that comes from seeing things from a distance. With remote control becoming a part of remote life, there is no longer the distance that led so many to live in remote places. And for the center, what does it mean now that there is no longer an edge to define itself by, that the merging of remote and center leaves little room for clarity. Macfarlane writes that “the north represents not a retreat to an imagined distance, but rather a means of seeing more clearly and thinking more lucidly” (Landmarks p. 212). If this distance collapses, and remote becomes resigned to periods of disconnection from a literal network, the world becoming hyper-local, can we still recognize distance? Can we still recognize ourselves?
For many, the allure of living ‘remotely’ has been a focus of pilgrimage, ascetic principles, of living in a way that is free from a society that is considered too much. Medieval monks would seek out remote places to find purity of thought, contemplation, and wisdom. The transcendental movement brought similar principles to Thoreau and others looking to remove themselves from what they disliked about the world, to find a clarity that crowds and mechanization weren’t offering. They wanted to reinvent the world for themselves, to remove to a remote place both in space and time. Remote, by these accounts, is aspirational, the daydream of a crowded center that superimposes an ideal of reality, an effort to wipe clean a dissatisfaction with the present.
Remoteness is often cited as a form of clarification, observance, and of melancholy—to unite the viewer and the view in a way that the inner landscape is explored as much as the outer landscape. Remoteness brings a sharp clarity, whether the ideal or the reality is met. And the largest part of what remote living offers is a challenge between the dog and the wolf, or life and death: “Death may be the wildest thing of all, the least tamed or known phenomenon our consciousness has to reckon with.” (Saulitis, Orion). Living in remote corners forces a confrontation with the realities we are ultimately faced with everywhere, and which the center—when fortunate—is adept at ignoring. The unknown boundaries of ourselves are what is sought in remote corners.
The poet John Haines withdrew, living for 25 years in remote Alaska, and writing about the time, the days, and the landscape he witnessed there. His poetry speaks to the existential ideal of remoteness, of supporting oneself and observing, finding clarity in the distance away from society. Writing of the “glass arrangement of the wind.” A review of his poetry writes that he:
may have withdrawn physically from the human community, but not spiritually or emotionally. This, of course, is the greatest risk of solitude. For if the exile goes into the bush (or tundra) with the intention of tracking down internal truths that are of no wider currency—if, that is, the wanderer returns bearing verities only narrowly his own—the trip wasn't worth it. John Haines's journey has paid off: it has borne the fruit of a poetic journey into the "cloudlit stillness" at the center of all our lives. To this cloudlit stillness the pilgrims come, reading prayers from a guidebook -- to see, to question, and depart.2
And yet not all find this clarity. Remote’s edge can be razor-sharp, it is without the mirror of community, the network to define yourself by, clarity is not always an easy reward. Neil Ansell, after living alone for five years, learned that although clarity is the aspiration of remote living, it was not the reality. Instead, he lost himself, the identity and definition of who he was receded into the landscape, and the clarity of his own existence was what became remote, nearly invisible:
you might think that such protracted solitude would lead to introspection, to self-examination, to a growing self-awareness. But not for me. What happened to me was that I began to forget myself, my focus shifted almost entirely outwards …during my years in the hills I kept a journal. For the first year it is a conventional diary; places I had gone, things I had done. By the second year it is little more than a nature journal; what birds I had seen that day, perhaps some notes on the weather. By the third year it is no more than an almanac, marking the turn of the seasons by the comings and goings of migrant birds and their nesting dates, interspersed by the occasional detailed depiction of a moment, perhaps the flight of a single bird. I am an absence, a void, I have disappeared from my own story.3
Remote control is something that has become so seamless in our lives now that the mechanics of how it works—the pulses of radiation connected to a network—has become ignorable. But it informs what the reality of remote really is, and how it informs much of what living in the north is about. “A place that can only be accessed by means of a network.”4 Community is what makes people successful living in remote places, and is a part of what northern living is about—the story telling, the support of community, of leaning on others to survive despite of, or because of, an indifferent landscape. The return journey is paramount. Without an acknowledgment of the return to the center—to community, to others, to support—we cannot limn the edges of our known world, and we can’t absorb the clarity we seek without others to share our words, our stories, our observations.
Seeking out remote places is often an act of resistance, of reform and dissidence—removing yourself from the present to find an alternative history. From not only a crowded center, but from a distance in time as well, to an idealized past where a new path forward can be invented.
For Alaska and the north, too often idealizations of remote overshadow the reality—where the center decides the remote is frozen in the past. Yet there is something to the idea that living in the remote corners of the world that there can be an alternative future, that by retreading steps to the past, finding our way through the observations of daily living on a more immediate level with the landscape—and with a landscape that is unignorable—there is a clarity, a new way forward.
Remote places cause connection by their very distance. The connection between Alaska and the center of the U.S. is much closer than its physical proximity. The magnitude of its remoteness and the resources it holds keeps it squarely with a direct line to the center.
It is distance that necessitates connection—the device being controlled needs access. Whether it is ironic or not, one of the first wireless connections was invented because of the distance that Alaska presented, and the need to connect people who lived in places that were becoming newly remote. Radio and telephone lines were brought to rural Alaska in the 1970s, requiring new developments to reach across distances and arctic conditions. These conditions later informed the invention of wifi, the wireless network that supports every remote connection:
[Alex] Hills…brought telephones for the first time to many rural villages, adapting satellite and radio technology to new purposes in a new environment… For the first time, young men away in the military could call home. The emotion of those first calls flowed to the technicians who had just put in the phones. Most village kids were going off to boarding school for high school, because they could only go up to the eighth grade in the villages. ‘The parents really missed their kids,’ Hills said. ‘When we did the village telephones, that gave the parents the chance to at least call the kids and hear their voice over the phone.’5
I struggle with what to call this place and subject, about what is remote because it can be so many things. It is here and there. It is internal, external, far away, local. And it can be Alaska, the north, the tropics, an island, the desert. Alaska has no monopoly on what is remote.
But for me, Alaska is both startlingly away from and hyper-near. It brings out the physicality of being away from the center, of living on the edge of where most people live (from a certain point of view)—to realizing that because of that far distance, we are more connected here than ever—both to each other and to the center.
Alaska has more federal involvement and access to government than most places, due to its remoteness. President Obama visited Alaska in 2015, because the center is recognizing how impactful the areas are that have been considered ‘remote.’ They inform the rest of the world about what is happening on its edges, what is creeping towards them (climate change), what opportunities and technologies arise from that (erosion control, the northwest passage). And that remote areas are economic, attract development and transitory rushes of movement and attention from the center.
The rushes of frenzy that remote places rely upon is the ebb and flow that informs so much of what is important at the time. Shifts from furs, to gold, to fish, to oil, to mining, tourism, and yes, individual existentialism, eco-tourism, remote seekers. All of it is a currency for remote places, the push-pull of the edge, the fragment mourning for its whole. It is inconstant, but constant in its inconstancy, its swings from center to edge. And all is defined and began with the identification of Alaska as remote, a place distant from the center that gave it a new name. For the people who have lived here forever, it was not remote. It has been home since time immemorial. The center defines the remote places of the world, not the other way around. And remote places stand by and watch. But like the poles, there are periods of magnetic shift, where the center and the edge reverse position.
Remote control seeks to reach across and control a device without wires, without visible connectors, with pulses of light and radiation. The push-pull of frenzy and the access to the center that remote places bring reminds me of this simple definition for remote: controlling from a distance. From which end of the distance is always in question.
Republished by permission of the copyright holder, the University of Washington Press.
Anchorage Daily News, 2012
NY Times, 1998.
The Guardian,
“Remote,” Oxford English Dictionary
Anchorage Daily News