Noatak National Preserve Residency Interview with Andrea Spofford (July 15th-August 15th, 2014)

Floatplane return, backcountry trip two.

Bio: Andrea Spofford's essays and poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Vela Magazine, Revolver, the Kudzu Review, the Oklahoma Review, Red Paint Hill, Town Creek Poetry, Sugar House Review, and The GulfStream: Poems of the Gulf Coast, among others. Her chapbook, EverythingCombustible, is available from Dancing Girl Press and her chapbook Qikiqtagruk: Almost an Island is forthcoming from Red Bird Chapbooks. A native Californian transplanted to the South, Andrea is Poetry Editor for Zone 3 Press.

It is the intersection of person and physical place that characterizes Andrea’s writing overall and the collaboration between science and art—the point where conservation meets poetry—that most interests her. Andrea participated in the Noatak National Preserve residency in northwestern Alaska from July 15th to August 15th, 2014.

Q: Why were you interested in participating at the Noatak National Refuge residency?

A.S. All of my work deals with nature and conservation issues, place specifically. Recently my focus has been on conservation and wilderness, but also how humans find their place in wilderness and how we define wilderness.

Alaska was particularly appealing because it is stereotypically known as this last frontier. Alaska is a wilderness area that I had never been to, and had wanted visit for a very long time.

I planned some Alaska trips, and they kept falling through, so I applied to this program thinking, “Wow, this is right up my alley.”  This is funny because Tama, Jess, and I were all recommended by friends to apply to this program. I read through the listing, and I thought that the Alaska biome sounded really perfect. It sounded like the goals of the residency—celebrating the Wilderness Act while exploring how we define wilderness and how we experience wilderness—seemed to be exactly what I was doing in my poems and essays. I am always trying to find my place in the natural world and reconcile my impact and influence upon it. That’s why I applied and was specifically interested in Alaska. I was very excited when I found out the location because there’s so much historical human interaction within the landscape of the Noatak National Preserve. Getting to see how people interacted with their landscape thousands of years ago was specifically appealing to me.

Q: Why is the intersection of Art and Science so important to you and your work?

Tundra and the onset of fall.

A.S.  Well, first I think scientific language is really interesting and I think there’s a lot of overlap between scientific thought processes and creative thought processes. I like to compare writing a formal poem like a sestina or a sonnet to something that has a very specific format—much like an equation. You want to get to a final product in as few steps as possible, but there’s an element of creativity and thinking outside the box that’s necessary as well.  There’s satisfaction with writing a sestina  that not only successfully follows the pattern but is also very creative.  I think there’s a similar thought process that happens in the sciences and I think there’s a specific part of the brain that both the sciences and the arts explore.

My writing reflects my interests. I read a lot of scientific articles and I like to steal from that language because it is foreign and exciting to me as a writer. I like to take these articles or issues and try to work through them in my poems and essays; at the same time, I like to dissect the language and make it something that I understand and that a layperson reader would understand as well. In that way I feel like a translator, beholden to the original as well as the new product.

I think there is a necessary collaboration between science and art when it comes to wilderness in that there is an element of subliminity experienced by both scientists and artists who devote their lives to wilderness issues. The overlap is great and it just makes sense that there would be collaboration.

 I write so much about environment and place that I see part of my made-up job description as being a translator for that. It seems it’s the same part of the brain that goes into vivid descriptions, and a lot of my writing is very vivid. The most exciting thing for me is to combine my personal experiences of abstractions like place and environment with very physical and concrete sciences.  

An essay I wrote about Alaska can be found in Vela Magazine; it addresses fishing but also ideas like, what is wilderness and how do we interact with wilderness? There are hard facts in the essay but it is also more thoughtful, philosophical, and tends to wander off into tangents—that’s one of the best parts about writing, the ability to wander.

I like learning, and that’s why combining science and art is especially interesting. It’s this opportunity to learn something I’m not familiar with; I mean I’m not a scientist but sometimes I wish I was. This has become a chance for me to explore something different and learn something new.

Q: What are some of your first reactions to the Noatak Wilderness?

A.S.  It is really large, and it is really, really quiet. Mike and I were the first floatplane trip out.  At camp it was just Mike, me, and the group’s gear. Tama, Jess, and Hannah were meeting us on the second flight. It was so absolutely quite out there.  When Tama, Jess, and Hannah arrived we could hear the plane from miles and miles away because there was literally no other air traffic.

That said, it wasn’t completely silent; we heard some loons and foxes and the sounds of grass and wind. It was quiet compared to the busy sound of Tennessee, almost painfully so.

Q: What do you believe to be a highlight to your time spent in the Noatak Wilderness?

A.S.  I think the three of us got really lucky in terms of the people we worked with in the Park Service. The Park Service employees in the Western Arctic National Parklands are some of the most generous, kind, intelligent, and wonderful people I have ever met. They went above and beyond to make sure we had an excellent experience so my trips to the backcountry became this magical time.

 In terms of the backcountry, going into the Noatak the first day, that rush of silence and how big Alaska actually is was amazing.

On the Nigu River, we got to participate in archaeological surveys. The day we dug exploratory 50 x 50 centimeter squares was such a great opportunity. In the pit Hannah and I dug, Hannah found an almost perfect atl-atl spearhead that was dated to about 4000 years old. The next day they found datable charcoal in the same pit. That time, at that place, felt like we were doing real archaeology. We were getting to learn so much about the people that worked with and lived upon the landscape thousands and thousands of years ago.

Prepping fireweed blossoms for syrup.

In town there was a day when we made fireweed syrup. We got up early, and Tama and I went with Norma Booth and Frank Hays to collect blossoms. Together we spent all day just making fireweed syrup and taste-testing it. Later, Mike and Ann and Levi came over for lunch.  It turned into this all day, hanging out in Kotzebue experience.

That night everyone came over to our house and I made the salmon I caught the day before. I caught my salmon off the seawall and it weighed about fifteen pounds after it was cleaned—it was a huge salmon and my fishing pole was broken after! It was just this enormous fish, and it didn't even fit on the cookie sheet we put it on; it was bent over in the oven.

All the kids in Kotzebue were so excited when I caught that fish. I think partially because I’m a girl and I caught a really big fish, but also because I was a visitor and I caught a really big fish.  They were giving me directions on how to reel it in because I had never used a snagger before and I didn’t even bring a knife. I mean, we weren’t planning on going fishing. It was just a group of us walking home and we decided to throw a line in and see. Once I had the fish pulled up the boat ramp, one of the boys killed the fish for me and cleaned it too.  The kid’s father said, “So next time you’ll bring a knife.”

There was also a day at the first backcountry location when we sort of took the day off to explore, read poetry, and fish. That day we caught trout. We had six trout when all was said and done. We caught them on a homemade fly. I had a lure and the fish weren’t biting so Hannah made a fly from materials from the surrounding environment. We all started catching fish with the fly that Hannah made—we were fly fishing with a spinning reel, which is pretty funny.  

This was totally the perfect residency and I kept thinking, can it get anymore perfect?

Q: Did the residency make any impact on the way you view the natural world, or facilitate ideas for future work?

 A.S. In terms of focus, my writing the past couple of years has really taken more of environmental direction. I just finished my Ph.D. in the beginning of the summer and my major areas of study were American literature and Environmental Poetics. I’m really interested in early American literature and contemporary writing about environment. I think there is a certain bigness to wilderness, and certain people are drawn to wilderness because of that. I think I’m really drawn to wilderness and gravitate toward people who are drawn to wilderness for that same reason.

Backcountry camp.

Writing about wilderness is just one of those things that is so large it is hard to put into words. I think this residency really influenced my writing. It helped me focus my ideas even more than they have been in the past. It gave me a subject that is really unique—wild in a lot of ways—but also a place people have been interacting with for a long time. There is not a separation from people and wilderness in Alaska; there are people interacting with their landscape. Ideas of ownership are really different in Alaska and I think that made me reconsider how I think about wilderness.  

Q: As an artist do you feel like you influenced the scientist that you worked with?

A.S. When we were in the backcountry we worked with Michael Holt who is the lead archaeologist and head of cultural resources as well as his assistant, Hannah Atkinson.  Having us around—the three of us who are not archaeologists—asked Mike and Hannah to explain things they may not have explained if they had been with a team of other archaeologists. I noticed the small details of things, but the types of rocks and the stories those rocks told were not as apparent to me as they are to Mike. I think the artists’ presence really asked Mike and Hannah to express these things. I think the thing they really had in common with the three of us is that we are all storytellers.  Jess tells stories through visual art, Tama tells stories though her photography, and I tell stories with my writing. Mike especially is a storyteller—a huge part of his job is telling stories about the way people interacted and experienced their landscape. I think Mike was excited to have us there; he’s so earnest and so invested in his resource and so willing to share. I think that quality can be rare.

Stone tools.

I think there is a question, especially in archaeology, about what we present to the public and what we hide away. I think when we present something to the public a lot of times the public wants to destroy it. But if we don’t present it to the public they don’t know that they should care about it; it’s a catch-22. Because they were so willing to share, I think Mike and Hannah took on the role of teacher more than they would have otherwise. I like to think that maybe they experienced the backcountry a little differently, not just from the lens of an anthropologist, but also from the lens of a writer, photographer, and visual artist.

I think we realized we were telling similar stories in different ways. We don’t do exactly the same thing but there is a lot of overlap in our goals and in what we value. 

Q: What were some of the beneficial outcomes of your experience?

A.S. I think the amount of work I produced is a hugely beneficial outcome. There’s so much more to say! I think experiencing this place, a place most people don’t get the opportunity to experience, was hugely beneficial to my creative process as well.  I also think that getting to work with Tama and Jess was fantastic. I don’t get to work with people who are visual artists very frequently, which is a shame. I think there should definitely be more collaboration across mediums and I really admire what both of them do. Just seeing and getting to hear about things from their perspective and observing what they noticed compared to what I noticed became very eye-opening. Tama is a writer (in addition to being a photographer) so I feel like she and I really bonded; we will always have this shared experience.

I also think getting to work with the Park Service was great.  Like I said earlier, everyone we encountered was dedicated, generous, and excited to share—that is really refreshing. The level of care for these parks demonstrated was admirable. 

"Walk it Down" and Vela Magazine

by Andrea Spofford


As I'm writing an "update" post--where I've been and what I've been doing after Alaska--I wanted to take a moment and share an essay I wrote about fishing in the Kotzebue Sound. Vela Magazine (an excellent magazine that publishes "creative nonfiction inspired by travel, written by women") was gracious enough to publish my work.

If you have ten minutes take a moment to check it out.

Happy, happy travels.

Fieldwork: The Noatak National Preserve

 

Text and Images by Tama Baldwin

 

We flew low all the way back to Kotzebue.  Dodging the clouds, our pilot said.  We were flying under the weather this day, at an altitude where the material world was still visible--for the most part.  More or less.  Somewhere around 1,500 feet.  Rain sheeted the windscreen, the wings, the window next to my head where I sat, my hand on the plastic handle I was to never let go of were we to land upside down and underwater (one hand is your anchor while the other liberates you from the tangle of belts and latches and handles and headset cords and knobs until somehow against the pressure of all that black water pressing in on your crippled plane you manage to open the door.)  I kept rehearsing the lesson in my mind--choose one hand for a hand-hold and do not let go until you have a way out of the plane, until you know which way is up, until you know where the surface is and how you are going to get there.  This quick lesson in underwater egress was based in someone else's very real misfortune--a frightening tale we were told in detail and which we very much took to heart. I appreciated the care with which our pilot instructed us in this matter every single time we boarded his float plane.  I accepted it--I welcomed it as part of the risk  I knew you have to  take when you are going where there are no roads, where there are no easy ways in, no easy way out, where your pilot lands and takes off only on water or tundra or gravel bars.  These are the  kinds of places I absolutely adore for the way in which they remind me of what it really means to have a body that inhabits this world.  The kind of places where you have to suffer a little  for your travel and where the reward of rest and a cup of tea at the end of a long day are all the more sweet.  Where you have to plan long and hard as you calculate about how you going to get where you are going, who you are going to trust to take the journey with you, the kinds of places where you have to be your best self, as strong as you can be and evermore smart.

When the rain eased we could see more of the Noatak National Preserve unfurling beneath the plane, the drenched tundra still holding on to the last little bit of its summery yellow green. As one of four parks in the 11 million acres of wilderness that make up the Western Arctic Parklands, the  Noatak lies in its entirety above the Arctic Circle and is still considered to be so pristine it has been included in the International Biosphere Reserve--which is to say it constitutes one of our planets' most precious and rapidly diminishing resources:  a true wilderness and by wilderness in this case I mean only a place that occasionally rewards the prepared and punishes fools who sadly can sometimes  in blink of an eye become one and the same.   Its namesake river crosses over from the Gates of the Arctic in the east and empties hundreds of miles to the west  through Kotzebue Sound and on into the Chukchi Sea.  It is roadless and utterly undomesticated in our current sense of that word even though we were all amazed by the significant evidence of the long history of human habitation we had just born witness to in our second archeological survey.  Those ruins evoked a lost era when the wall between human beings and nature did not really exist, a wall we now call civilization.  Etymologically "wilderness" means nothing more than "a place where the deer are."   I would imagine that if you were to live in a skin tent, if you were to move with the seasons--following fish and game as they follow their own ancient migrations--you might know the word wilderness in its older merely descriptive sense, a word that means little more than  the world beyond the walls of whatever shelter it is you have built around yourself--the place where the deer--or the caribou--or the bears--or the wolves--or the muskoxen--are not.  Maybe we should measure the purity of a wilderness by this idea of the distance between your body and its vulnerability to that part of the world that has nothing to do with being human. Maybe we should rank our National Parks in order of importance starting with the least visited and ending with the most paved.  I say this because once again I was allowed such a privilege, the privilege of feeling that old vulnerability--a good vulnerability I might add, the kind of awareness of my smallness which is merely a matter of being reminded once again of the fundamental interdependency of all things.  

Much of the time I was on the ground out in the Noatak I revisited the idea that time is not as linear as we have been given to believe--that it is in fact a mosaic in which these convenient categories like "prehistoric" and "modernity" utterly overlap.  There was, for example, the miracle of flight and the technological precision of the pilot who ushered me into that wild place navigating with an iPad strapped to his thigh coexisting with the fabulous technology of the past--the stone blade of the atlatl  that Hannah found in the pit next to mine--the tip of what proved to be a nearly perfect artifact jutting from the wall she had carefully carved with her trowel. If any of us had had any sense of how to use it we could have for it was as strong today as it was the day it was made 6,000 years ago.  I will never for as long as I live forget the silken lightness of aeolian loess as I helped sift a screen for what the park service archeologist Mike Holt referred to as "datable material."  We had found so many stone tools beyond Hannah's blade that we set ourselves to  sifting for evidence of a hearth--a fleck of charcoal from a campfire that kept someone warm and drove away mosquitoes from that very spot five or six or seven or eight or ten or twelve or fourteen thousand years ago.  The soil in my hands had been made by the wind working the earth for hundreds of thousands of years  Mike said.  That earth might well have been made of feathers for all I knew--it was so light it was like a dream of soil, it was earth as it is weightless in the expanse of the universe.  Somewhere in the clouds above us I heard the sound of an engine--a plane making its way through the nearby pass somewhere very close to our work site and out over the North Slope--and in that sound my dream of what the wilderness had been to the person who had made and used that blade was zipped up tight and I was back in my time again, this time of digitized being.   Before departing for the Noatak we had been asked to tweet from the field--a request we all had a good laugh about for the tweeting would have required we charge the satellite phone with a solar charger in order to make the extra call itself to some willing soul on the grid probably back down in the lower 48 who would make the tweet for us by which point the essence of our isolation--the force of the distance we had traveled to get away from the tweeting world and all it signifies--would have been utterly lost.  We joked fake tweets to one another over our cups of tea and felt much the closer for our shared refusal.  We were beyond the twitersphere for those few blessed days of our life, and I know that I for one am much the richer for that brief separation from the wired world, the very isolation that is one of the great gifts our protected wilderness areas continue to give us.  I'm the last person to resist new technologies--but if this summer has taught me anything it is that we have always been intensely technological--sometimes for good and sometimes not.  The people who lived here along the Noatak before the advent of the Holocene had to have been strategic geniuses if only in the ways they learned to work well within the boundaries of the weather and the seasons and the latittude--forces that in the far north still deter visitors.

If I had the time to walk the Noatak from end to end as others have done many times and for many reasons during the last 14,000 years I would do it.  As much as I loved flying I longed to be on the ground almost all the way and flying closer and closer to it only made me yearn more to turn back, to land on some quiet misty lake where I could reflect on all the issues my time in the Aldo Leonardo Wilderness Residency has raised.  There's something about the speed of a human being moving according the the mechanics of his/her own body that allows a kind of sanity that itself seems to be a diminishing resource.  Near the end of our flight  our pilot steered the plane through a narrow pass just as the storms we had been dodging began to assert themselves again.  I stared at the rock face that seemed much too close to the wings of the plane--this to take my mind off the fact that  I couldn't see very much through the rain veiling the windscreen--an observation that spiraled into imaginary catastrophe, the worst kind of panic, panic based in the kinds of facts I've gathered over the years, facts like the average survival time of pilots who find themselves suddenly without an adequate view of the horizon:  those not trained in instrument flying last about 90 seconds before the brain says up is down and down is gone.  I cursed myself for having spent all those hours in air traffic control towers interviewing controllers for a book I've been researching for as a lot they love nothing more than to share flight disaster stories all of which I listened to much too closely.  I must have crashed our plane a dozen times in my mind  before I noticed the stone shouldering the plane had begun to shift in color from slate to lavender, as sure a signal as any that  the sun was somewhere near and would return shortly, the color prompting a long ago stored memory in which  I am on one of a dozen or so of my childhood vacation pilgrimages to  our nation's parklands.  Trapped in the back of that station wagon with three siblings singing the song my parents were singing along with us--"America the Beautiful."   My cynical self would like to say that song is little more than the anthem of the mid century middle class who set about worshipping nature even as they violated it at an unprecedented rate and with a kind of abject totality.  And it may well be about manifest destiny and merely a pretty propagandistic veneer for all the horror that comes with that, but those mountains  beside me truly were purple and they were  majestic and I right then and there decided  to never apologize for thinking that  we've lost something good in the fact that it is no longer as common for parents to bring their children to the wilderness as it used to be--and worse yet no longer teach them a song  to sing  praises to our nation's physical beauty, a song to be committed to memory just like the pledge of allegiance and any number of essential poems and prayers that can be used to carry a body forward in this life.  

Exiting the pass we flew even lower over the Kobuk River.  I could just make out the glow of the Kobuk Sand Dunes a couple of miles to the south, their white folds gloaming and ghostly in the dark rain-wrapped light.  I have read so much about them I dreamed all summer of setting foot on them--but that was a dream that will have to be deferred until another summer. The glimpse in the rain was a tease, just exotically beautiful enough to lure me back--again, again undoubtedly by hook or by crook and hopefully by way of Kotzebue.   As the rain intensified we dropped  lower still over the river.    I heard Jim through my headphones on the radio announcing to the village of Ambler our altitude and course and soon we could hear other pilots somewhere in the air nearby respond, each giving their location and altitude, outlining in speech their respective flightpaths so we could avoid a collision on what had become nothing less than a wilderness highway. Above the village of Kiana Jim radioed again to give our location, but this time no one answered.  The sky had  began to open up a little and by the time we reached Kotzebue Sound we could see the kind of weather the sea had in store for our return:  the wind was busy doing its millennial work, worrying rock into till, shoveling the clouds out off the coast and on in to the interior.

Noatak National Preserve 

Camp Two,  Noatak National Preserve

At the day's end we make one final survey.  Noatak National Preserve

the jaw of a caribou--another means of keeping time--such reminders were everywhere

for those few short months of summer the arctic tundra contains a feast

making our way back to camp on caribou trails through muskeg--an honest mode of travel;  Pictured:  Mike Holt, Hannah Atkinson,  Andrea Spofford, Robin Gibbs

bad weather moving inland over Cape Krusenstern

When Leaving

 by Andrea Spofford

Noatak National Preserve

you must always love this place, as deeply as you love yourself and all others 

When I leave a place I love I go through a period of sadness, a moment of mourning for the loss of a beloved, the familiarity of a landscape pulled from me as if by sudden death, or the way of disappearance. The Alaskan arctic where I spent the last month is not gone, so this sadness of leaving has not been as deep as it could have been. This place is still very present for me—as present as the promise of an Arctic Oven and a camping trip across a frozen sound.

Nigu River Sunset

I have dreamed about Alaska for seven years but I had no idea that Alaska could be this largeness of experience: a terrain of tundra and rolling muskeg, a boreal forest, a herd of muskoxen circling a lone baby as we fly over in a float plane, a large blond grizzly bear raising a paw, an expansive scattering of lithics along river shores, the saltwater taste of fermented walrus, the deep red of frozen caribou, a dog in war-paint, a polar bear researcher and her artist husband, a woman from Arizona sorting fireweed blossoms, her partner simmering the syrup, an archaeologist with a quick smile, a town of generosity full with children, three a.m. fishing, a trip to Cemetery Hill to hunt for the aurora borealis, and a vibrant, expansive day lit sky that darkens mid-August and reveals only the brightest stars in partial light—this is only a small piece of Alaska. This place is more than all of this; it is an outdoor museum, a testament not to “untrammeled land” but to the relationship between humanity and landscape, an incomprehensible largeness, like opening your arms atop a mountain, the wind buffering around you, closing your eyes to balance and just standing there in darkness, in flight.

Tundra Along the Nigu River

Before we leave Alaska we go on one more trip into an area that runs along the edges of the Noatak National Preserve. We fly close to the Kobuk Dunes, farther east than our first excursion to the base of the Brooks Range. We camp along the Nigu River, a north-flowing river that runs through the Brooks and down the North Slope. We map sites and dig exploratory 50cm by 50cm square pits, shaving layer after layer of soil and screening each batch as we go. We find flakes and stone tools and Hannah finds a nearly perfect atlatl spearhead that dates back four to five thousand years. She beams.

Atlatl Spearhead

Everywhere we go we see evidence of human life and subsistence—tools and flakes, stone-cut caribou bones, game drive lines, cairns atop gravel, tent circles, and even shotgun shells. The people who lived and hunted here did not just survive—they thrived in a climate of sub-zero temperatures and swarms of mosquitoes. One night on the Nigu we take the canoe into the lake. Mike paddles and I steer. We pull ashore near an archeological site more recent than others we have seen. The tent site here is square. Mike, Jess, and I walk up the hill to the site and Tama stays in the boat with the shotgun—she photographs the bank, the way the grass emerges from the water far from the shore, the water so clear stones are visible through it.

Fall Color Changes

The magnitude of this place is biblical in proportion. One night at the visitor’s center Tama and I watch a film about a man who walked alone across the Brooks Range, beginning at the Gates of the Arctic and ending at the mouth of the Noatak River. We watch a film about the Noatak Wilderness itself. We gather fireweed and blueberries, akpik, or cloud berries, or salmon berries. We walk the loop road outside of town. In one of the films a scientist says that Alaska is where he will take his grandchildren. See, he says, this is wilderness; this is what God made.

Alaska is the sky that night on Cemetery Hill, the circle of darkness dotted with bright stars and haloed by gray light, the sun set fully but still lingering along the edges. Alaska is not the rosy-fingered dawn of Homer—the sunsets, not sunrises, are vibrant pink and pulsing. Alaska is, instead, that place in the middle of the sky, the coldness of fall approaching and fogging breaths, the space of electricity not mechanical but human, not entirely wild but impossible to contain—the wolf that runs for miles and the fox that follows close at hand.

While I am figuring out Alaska for myself, what part I have taken and what part I have left, I do know that I will bring my children to this place. I will say: See, this is the landscape. This is the sky in all clearness; this is the ground in all brightness. Those are mountains. This is silence. This is where your ancestors lived, where they slept, where they ate. This place is you, the core of you, and you must always love this place, as deeply as you love yourself and all others. 

Noatak National Preserve

Noatak Sunset

Flying Back to Kotzebue; Noatak National Preserve

Noatak National Preserve

Noatak National Preserve

Kotzebue, Alaska

Nature Provides

 

 

By Jessica Segall

 

July 22nd - Deposited by float plane somewhere within the 6.5 million acres of the Noatak National Preserve.  Before our trip, we met with a local elder and Native Alaskan liason for the National Parks Service. He laughed when we mention the word "wilderness," saying that we are about to enter his "backyard".  I think about this sentiment on our trip, considering the meaning behind the term "backyard" - familiarity, governance.  A demarcation of the view of nature between Native Alaskans, who have thrived by subsistence hunting and gathering on this land for centuries, and the majority of modern Americans, who, if they have familiarity in the wilderness, know it on a recreational level.  Times have changed.  Motorboats replace the umiaq, snowmachines replace dogmushing or hunting on foot, yet the knowledge for Native Alaskans required to subsist on this land is an intimate, and communal understanding of animal migration patterns, seasons, distance, materiality and necessity.  

I re-read the definition of wilderness in The Wilderness Act, stating wilderness is "untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain ...without permanent improvements or human habitation."  Archeological artifacts are strewn throughout this preserve, dating back centuries.  There are lithics, stone formations and cache pits.  Yet this only triples the need for protection of these lands - as an important archeological site hosting some of the oldest relics of North American civilization, as a vast reserve of nature in an unaltered state and as the lifeblood and food of Native peoples.  I was aiming to write about wilderness and American identity, how the millions of protected acres and varied wilderness biomes could and should define our country as much as the latest media trends and foreign policy.  However, the protection of this land is larger than a question of American identity.  Alaska was ratified into statehood in 1959, while the indigenous inhabitants have continued to maintain culture here for centuries.  Borders may shift again.  I see the protection of this place not as an identity, but as a legacy.

And nature provides for us here, as it has for centuries. We pick tundra tea and blueberries, (not too much tundra tea - its a laxative!) and catch brown trout caught with a home-made fly fashioned out of gull feathers.  It took us days for us to prepare coming here - to pack food properly, to seal tents, to go through bear training.  I am nervous, as this is my second time in a Cessna (the first time of which was very turbulent and nauseating ride in the Nasca Desert, Peru).  Also, this is the most remote camping I have done, and the best chance I've had to encounter grizzly bears.  Bear spray, a highly potent form of pepper spray dangles from my hip at all times.  This hyper-awareness, the carrying of weapons, the shouting of "hey, bear!" every time we walk by a willow tree to warn bears of our arrival reminds me of the same 360 degree consciousness I employ when walking alone to my apartment at night.  There is a fear of the outdoors by the urbanite, the suburbanite, yet it presents no more realistic danger than driving to work or taking the subway.  Little brown sandpipers run along the lakeside, pecking about and cutely reminding me of my pet starling at home.  Later, I realize they have flown here from the southern tip of Argentina for their yearly migration.  We are not the only creatures who have traveled the distance to be here. 

  

A close - up of the spongy tundra, walking on it feels as if it wasn't designed for bipeds, leaving us off balance, and tired after a 3 mile hike. Meanwhile, wildlife leave elegant trails, superhighways shared by caribou and fox alike.

 

                   A simultaneous view from the east and west.  Time is confusing, and the lack of darkness means a lack of urgency.