I’m not the most skilled when it comes to planning—I like routine, as unglamorous as that always sounds—and that tendency has only had room to expand these last couple of years with pandemic life. But my family and I did manage enough of a plan to head out to a cabin in the interior of Alaska for a few days last week.
When you drive into the interior, you can see how hard the landscape is on buildings—structures made for utmost practicality, with scarps of weathered plywood and rotting tyvek, corrugated steel fragments and car frames sinking into the tundra, peppering the landscape in unexpected collectives along the road system. And then as you drive past miles of black spruce and boreal forest you see the pipeline snaking in and out of view. It’s all a bit surreal.
And as much as I appreciate and respect this landscape, every time I spend time in it I can’t stop thinking about how much has had to happen to make this place a duality of open country and industrial use. How we are hellbent on leaving nothing alone.
Needless to say, I have push-pull feelings about heading out into the interior. I tend to get a strong feeling of unease in remote landscapes—a sense of being alone, but also the unease that comes with the possibility of anything that could threaten that expectation of isolation: the possibility of a bear, or another camper… But more strongly, it comes from the layers of history that are held in the soil. It’s a kind of haunting, of what has been taken from the lands we’re on.
I remember talking to Scottish friends who had visited the Shetland Islands—one of the more remote places in Scotland—and described it as spooky—beautiful, but spooky. When I asked what that meant to them, they described how it feels left— a distinct feeling of what was once there but is now gone—a kind of hauntology of loss, with a few communities lingering on. I also think what they were describing was a sense of feeling unwelcome—of being intrusive to a place that you don’t otherwise have a tie to other than as a visitor. Of a place that you won’t be able to really know because it will always keep you at a distance. It felt like it was getting nearer to how I so often feel in the Alaskan landscape.
It reminded me of this aching Joy Harjo poem, In Mystic, where she writes:
I ask the guardians of these lands for permission to enter. I am a visitor to this history. No one remembers to ask anymore, they answer.
Perhaps it is that sense of trespassing, of being in places that didn’t invite us in. How to ask permission to be in places that are not our own? What right do we have to ask?
I would rather not speak with history but history came to me.
Driving back early in the morning after being out for three days, the breaking light between clouds over mountains and glaciers was stunning. The view was overwhelming really, in how obtrusive the mountains grew, in bold indifference, striking height. At one point I had a split-second reaction of being afraid of their size—it was so odd, I’ve seen those same mountains many many times. But there was also something reassuring about that flash of fear, a reminder that some places are not meant for us, are ancient and binding and rooted in ways that we’re lucky to witness.
There’s a line that kept returning to my mind by the poet David Wagoner over our time away—of place being a powerful stranger. How succinct and right that feels—so brief and yet it is wound in threads of deference, respect, a little fear, and care. A recognition of our smallness alongside mountains that have been rooted in place for millennia or trees that have been surviving sub-arctic winters generation afer generation—an experience of time beyond what we will ever understand, beyond any claim we might seek to make.
To let the trees and the mountains remind us of what Here means.
Lost Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here, And you must treat it as a powerful stranger, Must ask permission to know it and be known. The forest breathes. Listen. It answers, I have made this place around you. If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here. No two trees are the same to Raven. No two branches are the same to Wren. If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you, You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows Where you are. You must let it find you. —David Wagoner
I love seeing these pictures. Alaska also on my wish to see list in my life.
My father worked and lived in Anchorage in the 1940s, then in the service there.
He and another officer actually drove to Seattle from Alaska on this highway, when it was fairly new.
And thanks for the David Wagoner poem. As you probably know, he passed away this year.
What beautiful photos, and still a place I so badly want to see. I hope I can, someday. Maybe I'll start walking tomorrow....