read . write . wander

On Wolves

During our Yukon trip, I saw a wolf in its own habitat for the first time. I’d seen wolves before – notably someone’s pet wolves who visited the dogyard in Willow and clamped their mouths over my tiny arm in what I was told was a “wolf greeting”, an “I’m bigger than you and you should know it to make things fair between us” kind of hello.

In the years since, I have continued to marvel at the way the 60-dog yard (of sled dogs) was silent – utterly silent – the whole time the wolves were tied out in the driveway. And they – the wolves – were enormous. The mushers had stories of seeing wolves run alongside the team (though the wolves stayed in the trees, or along the opposite side of a river) during night runs. The stories imply a certain amount of curiosity on the part of the wolves, I think.

The day before we encountered the Yukon River wolf, we heard howls. The sound spilled out of the mountains and echoed through the river bed, entering the very water it seemed. The sound rooted me to my seat in the canoe. I felt sure the fish below us knew of the wolves’ presence, although probably that’s ridiculous. Our own dog slept through it, after all.

When I read Rick Bass’s small treasure of a book, The Ninemile Wolves, last week, I felt invited to relive my small encounter – and that very feeling of smallness, and at the same time privilege, for being in the right place at the right time.

This wolf didn’t flee when it saw us. It lay down and watched us approach.

“There is an electricity, a tension going on inside the wolves – the actual physics of it probably fitting into some undiscovered formula, if one cares to go in that direction – a flow of sparks across the gap of too much and not enough, between ‘good’ and ‘bad'” (139).

Lately I’ve been a little low, and I often respond to lowness by reading my favorites. For this reason, I try to keep around at least one Rick Bass book I haven’t read. Fortunately, he keeps writing new books as I keep reading, so this arrangement has worked out well.

I was not disappointed with this small book, published in 1992. Bass’s words fell nicely into conversation with those of Canadian writer Farley Mowat, whose Never Cry Wolf John and I read out loud to each other on the Yukon. He brings in other “wilderness writers” I’ve read and respected, like Peter Matthiessen and Barry Lopez.

Most of all, though, I appreciated the snarky voice that snuck through every now and then in The Ninemile Wolves. This is no romance novel to the wolves, and it is not dry science, either. This tale does that thing I most admire in writing: it lives. It brings in biological information, ecosystems, hard facts – as well as a lived experience, the acknowledgement that yes, we humans also think in metaphors and symbols, in dreams and interpersonal connections, and it manages to salvage the integrity of all these modes of thinking.

After beginning with a warning against the urge to anthropomorphize the wolves (to endow them with human attributes), Bass describes a typical wolf kill. He considers the tools wolves have at their disposal: “All they’ve got is teeth, long legs, and – I have to say this – great hearts. I can say what I want to say. I gave up my science badge a long time ago” (3-4).

This irreverent voice, the one that tows the line between science and poetry, never entirely giving in to either, but weighing them, respecting them both – this is what I love. That age-old dichotomy broken down. Friends, we do not have to be scientists or artists. There are hearts and minds in the world sophisticated enough to take in both.

Up until this moment, I thought we might be looking at a large dog. I kept looking around signs of people or cabins.

Of course, I tend to prefer the poetry side to the science, myself, as you might notice from the passages I’ve chosen to quote. But writers like Bass have pulled me out of my shell a lot in the past few years.

“[T]he thing that defines a wolf more than anything – better than DNA, better than fur, teeth, green eyes, better than even the low, mournful howl – is the way it travels” (6). Bass follows the wolves in their endless travel, their enormous territories and their tested boundaries, as they drift further and further south into Montana. The journey comes complete with triumphs, devastations, and tangles with cattle.

And throughout the short narrative, Bass diverges from the Ninemile wolves to document other wolf stories, in Alaska, Alberta, Minnesota:

“Ninemile. I need to stick to that one small skinny valley in northwest Montana. But it is not one story. All wolves are tied together. It’s a brotherhood, a sisterhood. You can’t help it. They – the wolves – remind us of ourselves on our better days, our best days. They teach us splendidly about the overriding force of nature, too – about the way we’ve managed to suppress and ignore it in ourselves, or judge it.” (39)

At the close of the book, we end up in a bar in Fairbanks. I wasn’t expecting that, and yet it fits. There’s a story about an aerial hunter – a guy with a gun shooting wolves from airplanes, a contentious topic in Alaska – and he doesn’t quite understand what to do with his own sense of awe, of being connected to something wild – and yet being there (up in the air, at an absurdly unfair advantage) expressly to kill wolves.

Bass is himself a hunter (though not of wolves), and there again is that line to be towed, crossed, examined, respected. In the end, Bass does not demonize the hunters, or the ranchers, or the government, or the wolves. And yet his is a clear case for the reintroduction of wolves to their natural habitats. I find that I must agree.

“We are ‘brothers in the hunt,’ as Ed Bangs has pointed out; but I think we are brothers in something else, too. I am convinced that it has something to do with internal fire, soul, and the creation and pursuit of mystery.

You’ve come too far in this story to turn away now, when I start talking crazy like this. You can’t turn away. We have to follow.” (140)

Finally we got too close, drifting by on the river, and the wolf disappeared.

The Perks and Pitfalls of Finite Living: Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal

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This past weekend, John and I went camping to celebrate our four-month anniversary. When you’ve only been married four months, such milestones carry significance. A new record every day!

Despite my best efforts, though, he still doesn’t appreciate when I start conversations by asking him about his feelings towards death. I suppose I’ll have to keep my musings about Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal to myself…and the blog.

All this reading about how life ends has made me hungry to think about the life we’re living now, too. We camped on Lonely Lake, a calm, still lake situated in the middle of a wilderness lake system about an hour’s drive from our house. There are well-kept portage trails and sometimes even water trails between the lakes, and many of them are full of trout.

Our last trip to this area was early last spring, as we were contemplating our big Yukon voyage. By now, it is definitely fall. Though it was sunny, gorgeous weather, temperatures hovered around freezing throughout our overnight foray, and we had to share the tent with several dogs to keep warm. More accurately, the dogs shared the tent – in ever-decreasing portions as the night progressed – with us.

The next morning, after a breakfast and warming fire, and several cups of hot-chocolate-infused coffee, we packed up and set off for the car. Before long, our beautiful morning turned cloudy and windy – a cold, searing wind. Then we encountered the sheen of ice between one lake and a narrow, windy passage to the next. We plowed into the ice, thinking it was more fragile than it was, and as we entered the narrow passage, John’s voice came calm and steady from the front of the boat.

“We’ve got a hole in the boat. We’re taking on water.”

Indeed, I could see water rushing back towards me, under the dogs feet (we had all three with, of course) and beneath our bags. Lots of water.

“Can you plug it?”

“No, it’s a tear.”

“Can we make it to the other end of this narrow spot?”

“Nope, we need to pull over.”

“Up there?”

“Here. Right now, actually.”

And so we ended up calf-deep in a half-frozen bog, gear strewn about, smashing fragile lichens, dogs post-holing, and the boat upside down to assess the damage. I happened to notice at this point that the wind had picked up, or we were in some sort of tunnel, and the clouds looked like snow.

“I hadn’t dreamed the ice would be so thick,” I said.

Luckily, John had packed the repair kit.

“How long does it take to set?” I asked.

“Sets in 15 minutes at 90 degrees,” John read. It was about 32.

“Should we light a fire near it?” I asked. But there wasn’t any stable ground to light it on, and we didn’t want to risk burning more holes into our vessel.

Later, I’d reflect how this Pakboat canoe had carried us over 700 miles on the Yukon, through water so heavy with silt that it sloughed against the side of the boat like sandpaper. We’d run the Eleven Point river in southern Missouri in this boat and tied it up overnight while we camped in a limestone cave in the riverbank. In Bull Shoals Lake, we’d paddled past a water moccasin that was coiled on top of the water and struck at our paddles and the side of the boat as we passed. This canoe had been on our strange but beautiful trip to Tangle Lakes, where Maggie split the caribou herd in half and disappeared for hours.

As it turns out, canoes are mortal, too. We have that much in common.

In the moment of our return trip from Lonely Lake, however, we didn’t have time to mourn our canoe. We traded off having mini panic attacks about the situation and making clear-headed, practical decisions about what to do.

In the end, we triaged. We smeared our hands and the boat with the caulking glue, smoothed out the patch as best we could, and then wrapped the entire bow of the boat with some kind of waterproof firefighter tape that we had in one of our packs. We portaged our gear, dogs, and boat across the delicate edge between bog and forest-on-a-slope, and we back-loaded the canoe. I sat in front with a paddle in one hand and our one-quart coffee press in the other, ready to bail.

Though it wasn’t a permanent solution (the whole hull had been worn down enough to be easily compromised), she held. We held. The weather even cleared, and the sun warmed our wind-chapped hands a bit. It turned back into a glorious, quiet morning paddle.

When we emerged into the parking lot, we cut the tape around the bow, broke down the canoe, and packed it into the car. At least the last voyage was a true adventure, threat of freezing and all.

And though I haven’t said one word about Gawande’s book, I may have painted a similar picture of the issue of dying these days. Is it better to triage and enjoy the quality of life as it ebbs, or should we fight until the end?

In the canoe’s case, we would have been very, very cold. In the case of human life, it’s obviously far more complicated.

When is it time to “give up” on treatment and give in to the art of dying – the time we have left – and when should we cart our elderly to the hospital for each small hole in a sinking ship? Or, as Gawande put it, the “ODTAA syndrome: the syndrome of One Damn Thing After Another” (208).

I don’t know. It varies from situation to situation. Most important, I think, is honest, compassionate communication between practitioners and the terminally ill. Also important are the patient (the individual person)’s own wishes.

I have to admit that my youth (because yes, we live in a world where 30 is quite young) makes it hard for me to truly stay focused on the issue of death. Right now, it seems more likely that I would die quickly in a horrible accident than die slowly, inevitably, in a terminal decline. Both are possible, but both unlikely. I can only hope to have a few more years to ponder the above questions. Still, as Gawande suggests in Being Mortal, they are questions worth pondering, worth working out ahead of time: before the crisis.

I need to put this sticky issue to bed for a while. Time to put the beast back in the cage. It is almost November, after all – that dark and dreary Alaskan month, the strange creep of time – and I must find cheerier things to focus on. Or at least try.

I’ll leave you with an interesting premise that Gawande puts forward regarding end-of-life care for those ready to accept that they are dying: “The lesson seems almost Zen: you live longer only when you stop trying to live longer” (178).

Maybe the same lesson applies to happiness: maybe we are happier once we stop trying so damn hard to be happy, and just let ourselves live. And because I still haven’t let go of Annie Dillard, here’s another way of putting it:

The weasel lives in necessity and we live in choice, hating necessity and dying at the last ignobly in its talons. I would like to live as I should, as the weasel lives as he should. And I suspect that for me the way is like the weasel’s: open to time and death painlessly, choosing the given with a fierce and pointed will.

….The thing is to stalk your calling in a certain skilled and supple way, to locate the most tender and live spot and plug into that pulse. This is yielding, not fighting. A weasel doesn’t “attack” anything; a weasel lives as he’s meant to, yielding at every moment to the perfect freedom of single necessity. (“Living Like Weasels”, Teaching a Stone to Talk, 33-4)

More on Death: Annie Dillard’s The Living

When I first started blogging about books in response to the Mount To Be Read (TBR) Reading Challenge, I wrote about how the Bhutanese are asked to consider the realities of death several times a day, and how this might actually make them happier.

After a long hiatus, I’m back to the subject of mortality. (And really, isn’t that what all writing is about?) It’s been a strange fall. On August 31st, two planes collided near Russian Mission, Alaska, and our priest’s son was among the five fatalities. There were no survivors. As we tried to wrap our heads around the odds of such a collision ever happening, much less killing someone we knew, we watched our small church be transformed by grief and shock. The beautiful icon stand in the center of the church, around which we so recently processed in an dance of joy at our wedding, was transformed into a shroud, and then an empty space, space enough for a simple wooden casket.

John and I struggled to offer sympathy for something we in truth couldn’t fathom – the loss of a child – and we were awed by the strength of a community that had celebrated with us a few short months before.

“This is what communities are for,” we told each other.

Driving home from one of the services for the priest’s son, we encountered a young man on a dirt bike. This is not an out-of-place encounter on our road, which peters out into a two-track through undeveloped land just after our house. The boy looked to be a teenager, blond and confident. Although he was on the “bike path”, a graveled, mogul-ridden track that parallels the paved road, it was unclear whether he would pop out into the road at any moment. His speed approached 35-40 miles per hour.

As this young man hit each of the many bumps in his racetrack, I marveled at the way his rigid body absorbed the shocks. The bike moved under him – airborne – and yet the hard line of his body did not bend. He was full speed ahead.

“That kid really wants to get hurt,” John muttered as he slowed to keep the careening bike in front of us.

He doesn’t even know he’s alive, I thought. In theory, an older man would know the risks of revving a bike like that along a road, near moving cars. This theoretical older man would have probably taken a spill or two, been hurt, and learned to specify his fears. If he absolutely had to keep biking, he might have chosen to do it away from moving cars.

This kid did not know what to fear, really, and his young strength, the pounding of his joints against the jerky movements of the bike, was almost sexual. For me, his image of carelessness represented something I’d moved away from. There are lots of specific things I fear, and increasingly, death is one of them.

My grandfather with his record-breaking Blue Marlin (Shadow of me, the picture-taker, overlayed.)

A few weeks ago, we lost my grandfather. He was weeks away from a 95th birthday and a 75th wedding anniversary, two milestones that many of us will never come close to. He lived a long, full, and loving life, and at his funeral I was struck by the physical sense of his legacy. In the front of the church stood three generations of the family he helped to create. In the back of the church stood four generations of people whose lives he touched.

Though I usually balk at the word, my grandfather was the patriarch of our family. If any man ever has, he embodied many positive aspects of this role. I don’t see that any man will replace him. With his passing, I was forced to consider the pain of losing of a way of life – an entire generation – too. These days I’m often quick to fall on the side of progress (especially the side whose rallying cry is, “Down with the patriarchy!”), and when I returned to Savannah to celebrate my grandfather’s life, I was again reminded that life is far more beautiful and complex than societal structures reflect.

Where change is needed, there is also good. This simple statement requires much thought.

We are all going to die, and we don’t know when.

More than once, I’ve turned to Annie Dillard to help me approach such deceptively simple sentiments. The tragedy of a midair plane crash brought me back to a section of Holy the Firm in which Dillard explores the aftermath of a plane crash that has left a young girl badly burned and lying in the hospital.

Into this world falls a plane.

….There was no reason: the plane’s engine simply stilled after takeoff, and the light plane failed to clear the firs. It fell easily; one wing snagged on a fir top; the metal fell down the air and smashed in the thin woods where cattle browse; the fuel exploded; and Julie Norwich seven years old burnt off her face.

….It is November 19 and no wind, and no hope of heaven, and no wish for heaven, since the meanest of people show more mercy than hounding and terrorist gods. (35-6)

No one else in the crash is harmed at all, just little Julie, and Dillard’s essay is a poignant exploration of another deceptively simple question: why?

Though, as we all know, there is really no sufficient answer we can assign to this question, Dillard points out that pain is real because love is real:

And you get caught holding one end of a love, when your father drops, and your mother; when a land is lost, or a time, and your friend blotted out, gone, your brother’s body spoiled, and cold, your infant dead, and you dying: you reel out love’s long line alone, stripped like a live wire loosing its sparks to a cloud, like a live wire loosed in space to longing and grief everlasting. (44)

Oddly enough (or not), I was reading Annie Dillard’s first novel, The Living, published in 1992, during the midair plane crash and as my grandfather’s life ebbed. Dillard wrote Holy the Firm in 1977 after moving to an island in Puget Sound, and there is no doubt that her time there (five years) also influenced The Living, which is set in the late 1800s/early 1900s settlements around Bellingham Bay.

The novel begins with an Ada Fishburn setting foot in Whatcom in 1855, and follows Ada and her descendants throughout. It seems like half of what Ada does in this frontier settlement is watch those around her fall dead; some are felled by trees, some by rough water, some by violence, and others – her first husband Rooney included – by digging a well in the wrong spot.

And yet Ada, despite the odds, reaches old age. She remarries, then buries a second husband. She moves in with her son Clare and his young family. She watches the world around her change:

Now Ada set Mabel to lettering her name, with a pencil, on pieces of paper on the floor. Her own children – lacking paper, pencils, and everything else – had first lettered their names with sticks on the muddy sides of pigs. She looked down at Mabel’s red head, so close to the paper she seemed to be writing with her nose. She looked from the window and saw it was still raining. The more time God granted her on this earth, the more she saw it rain, but He mustn’t think she wasn’t grateful, because she was grateful – only if He was giving out time, why not pass some to people who needed it? (293)

Towards the close of her own life, Ada often wonders why she – of all people – has had such a long time, with such good health. She’s lost two children, two husbands – both loved – and countless friends. She’s watched the town boom and bust, and her longevity seems at times a blessing and at times random, and even cruel.

Her son Clare, though young, optimistic, and impulsive, has also seen health and success. In a strange turn of fate, a disturbed giant of a townsman decides to conduct a psychological experiment on Clare by telling the happy-go-lucky young man that he (the disturbed giant) will kill Clare. Only not today. Not tomorrow. Just sometime, sometime soon.

Clare balks, and begins to look at everyone around him – wife and daughter included – as if it might be his last glance. Gradually he sheds his fears and comes back to life with wide open eyes and a fuller appreciation. Though this disappoints his would-be torturer, it is a fascinating transformation to read. The Bhutanese might be onto something after all.

In remembering that his life will end, possibly very soon, Clare hits upon a freedom mostly unavailable to other characters in the novel. As the story winds to a close, we see perhaps the most ill-fortuned character of all, young Hugh Honer – who has watched nearly all his family members die – finding the strength to leap into unknown darkness.

Still, there is pain that comes with the loss of life, and Dillard’s earlier words are echoed here, too: because love is real, pain is also real.

June and Clare were surprised that expecting Ada’s death, and planning for and around it, was no proof against either its grief or its shock. Clare had observed that when someone died, the world hushed the matter up. The living swarmed over the gap and closed it; the hole in the mud swelled shut. His mother, however, had left a hole, a space in the air like a space at the table, into which bits of living thoughts flowed and were annihilated. (341)

Sometimes reading Annie Dillard makes me feel like there is no one else to read. Of course I know that to be an illogical thought. Still, I am unable to let this sticky subject – the fact that we are all going to die and we don’t know when – slip away from me just yet. That probably has something to do with why I’m halfway through Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal.

If this all sounds a bit morbid, I would remind you that it is fall in Alaska, and the light is fading fast. But actually – dark humor aside – I feel lighter. I am ready to feel the sting of winter air in my lungs, and clumps of snow (hopefully, fingers crossed) on my face. I am craving winter’s harshness, and also the warm stove and the smell of home within. The things we hide from have a funny way of becoming larger than life. If we can face them, maybe we’ll see that they’re just part of it.

Reading the Yukon: Hospitality in the North

As all great trips eventually do, our Yukon voyage is fading into the well of experience. We won’t ever forget it, but it’s being shuffled into a deck of cards. The top cards, if you will, now reveal more pressing agendas, projects, and people.

Now, instead of simply wanting to hear about our trip down the Yukon, people around Alaska want to know if we’ve seen the article about the guy who swam the entire river. It’s as it should be: the world of trip must fade into the world where ‘trip’ is a passing anecdote, a photograph, a story around the campfire.

We did, if you are wondering, read about the French Canadian man who swam the river from Whitehorse to Emmonak. He was about a week in front of us at one point, and we read some of his entries in public cabin log books. At first I said to John, “This guy must have been bored to draw such an elaborate fantasy scheme in the log book.” Later, in Fort Selkirk, our new friend Frieda asked us if we’d seen him, the swimmer. Turned out his adventure was no fantasy. At each successive stop on the trip, people told us of meeting him and of calling ahead to friends in downriver communities to warn them.

These are the kind of people who inhabit the remote North. They will drive down to the boat landing just to see where you came from. They’ll call ahead to let their relatives know you’re headed that way. They’ll ask the relatives to call them back when you’ve arrived safely.

When my friend Kristin and I were driving through Haines Junction, YT, en route to Alaska, our car blew a radiator hose. After limping it a ways (I think we tried some duct tape, too), we settled in by the side of the road to decide what to do. It was fall – colors blazing – but not too cold. Before long, a man stopped to pick us up.

“We don’t leave people on the side of the road around here,” he explained as he gave us a ride into town. “In the winter, you could freeze to death there. In the summer, a bear could get you.”

In beloved Arctic conservationist Margaret Murie’s Two in the Far North, a warm cabin with fresh pies seems to always be waiting at the end of a long voyage. An hour after their arrival, a man will show up at the door, having walked or sledded several miles to the cabin just because he saw the smoke or heard a dog team. Crusty old miners materialize, having left their wilderness camps for a cup of hot coffee and a new conversation.

This book, widely available in Visitor Centers across Alaska, was a fitting choice for a honeymoon paddle through the subarctic. Not only did Murie spend her “honeymoon” on the Koyukuk River and on dogsled in the Arctic, but she had a valuable perspective about what happens to the mind when we go to the woods:

At least once each day there was an adventure….For each evening by the campfire, some adventure to live over again. And each little event, each lonely vista, every wild creature, held importance for us. Our appreciation was keen, not diverted by other people, newspapers, radio, or too many contacts. Have you ever noticed that books read in the wilderness stay with you a long time? Their entry into your mind is unimpeded. (222)

This passage, taken from a 1926 journal that chronicled a trip up to the headwaters of the Porcupine River, is typical of Murie’s insight. She captures a far northern country populated by people who seem familiar to me: people who, despite their differences, won’t leave a stranger out in the cold.

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I read this book in the evenings by the fire, or more often in the tent, propped up on my elbows, ready for bed. Once or twice, on calm days, John and I would switch off paddling to allow the other to lounge in the front of the canoe and read. Sometimes John was even able to write in his journal this way, a feat I could never quite master. I preferred to lay down in the bow, level my eyes with the gunnels, and watch the water swirl past.

I could watch the water like that all day, maybe even for days at a time. It occurs to me that this might be a defining trait of my personality: I’m slow. We’ve attributed a slew of negative attributes to this word, but I maintain that it is more honestly a positive word. Eating slowly, for example, aids the process of digestion. Thinking slowly – something we are intensely critical of in our society – also has its benefits. It promotes rumination, a slow chewing of ideas that pushes at their nooks and crannies. It leaves room for critical thought, that step back from our initial ideas and beliefs to view them from different perspectives.

I do tend to be pretty quick on my feet, and so sometimes daily life seems to be a struggle to process all the stimulations. As summer changes to fall and John and I are swamped with work, processing the day becomes even harder. There’s still the garden, house, yard, etc., needing work, and then there are classes to plan, syllabi to write, meetings to attend.

We are trying our own hands at northern hospitality. A few weeks ago, Pia arrived. She will be living with us this year as part of a goodwill exchange program between the US and Germany. We’ve been baking bread, cooking meals from the garden, and doing a little sight-seeing. Who knows – there may even be a few warm pies waiting on winter nights.

This weekend, we’re embarking on another canoe voyage – a much shorter, overnight trip to the Swanson River. We’ll meander through the Kenai Wildlife Refuge and Kenai Wilderness Areas, and we’ll end up at the shore of Cook Inlet tomorrow evening. The layering continues. I may be years in processing our honeymoon voyage down the Yukon, and by then we may have returned and paddled all the way to the Bering Sea. Time will change the river, and us, and we’ll have to find our way all over again.