NEW YORK CITY
John Muir struggled for years to write his autobiography. In 1908, Edward Harriman invited him to his family’s summer home near Crater Lake, in Oregon. Harriman was by that time fighting stomach cancer, his condition exacerbated by a dispute with his former friend Theodore Roosevelt. The progressive president had singled out the railroad tycoon as one of the immoral businessmen whose monopolies needed to be broken up for the good of the country. Efficient to the end, Harriman arranged for a secretary to follow Muir around his estate for three weeks, recording Muir’s every utterance in shorthand until he had dictated a thousand pages of memories, which later formed the core of The Story of My Boyhood and Youth. A year later, Harriman was dead. “I feel very lonesome now my friend Harriman is gone,” Muir wrote to John Burroughs. “At first rather repelled, I at last learned to love him.”
On Christmas Eve 1914, Muir, suffering from pneumonia, died alone in a Los Angeles hospital bed at age seventy-six. It seems probable his last thoughts were of glaciers. Scattered around him on the bed were the manuscript pages of what would be his final book, his recounting of his early trips through the Inside Passage with Tlingit guides, Travels in Alaska.
In the essay “General Geography,” published in volume two of The Harriman Alaska Series, geographer Henry Gannett gives a quick overview of the things that still make Alaska unique more than a century later: its immense mountains, extreme climate, majestic glaciers, towering forests, and mysterious interior. After providing a summary of Alaska’s resources, he finishes with a rather radical suggestion. Alaska’s chief asset, “more valuable than the gold or the fish or the timber, for it will never be exhausted,” is its scenery. Echoing his Elder shipmate John Muir, the father of American mapmaking notes that, for the one Yosemite in California, “Alaska has hundreds.”
He concludes by offering a “word of advice and caution” for anyone considering a trip to Alaska. “If you are old, go by all means, but if you are young, wait. The scenery of Alaska is much grander than anything else of its kind in the world, and it is not wise to dull one’s capacity for enjoyment by seeing the finest first.”
A few months after I returned to New York, a new administration was voted into the White House. With regard to the environment, the forty-fifth president was no Theodore Roosevelt. Among his first proposals were slashing the national parks budget, lifting a federal ban on hunting hibernating bears and withdrawing from an international climate accord that was the world’s best hope for slowing the effects of global warming. The year 2016 ended as the third in a row of record-breaking heat in Alaska. The new chief of the Environmental Protection Agency, who had spent the last several years at his previous job suing the EPA to loosen regulations on the oil and gas industries, declared that carbon dioxide is not a major contributor to climate change. The new secretary of the interior, boss of the national parks, announced that drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge—the Serengeti of the North—was one of his first priorities. Alaska’s representatives on Capitol Hill, while paying lip service to the effects of climate change on their state, pushed to make their dream of drilling in ANWR come true.
A year after my visit to Juneau, the price of oil had risen only slightly. Economist Scott Goldsmith had seen little sign that it would again approach a hundred dollars a barrel. The Alaska State Legislature sat through three special sessions, still trying to close its enormous budget gap. After much debate, a state income tax was again rejected and the annual Permanent Fund Dividend was raised back to eleven hundred dollars per person. Included in the budget was twenty-two million dollars to build a replacement for the Tustumena, which had canceled most of its sailings for the summer after cracks were found in its hull. Since the full cost of the new ship was 244 million dollars, the federal government chipped in the remaining 90 percent. The Crystal Serenity once again departed on a monthlong Northwest Passage cruise, stopping at Dutch Harbor and Nome before continuing into the Arctic.
The winter was surprisingly cold, and Shishmaref survived intact. A new mayor was elected, and plans for the relocation continued to be discussed. William Jones happily returned to full-time police work then lost his job due to budget cuts. On Kodiak Island, the harsh winter minimized the summer’s wild berry crop, but Harry and Brigid Dodge reported that a strong salmon run had resulted in favorable conditions for both hungry bears and those who love to watch them. Sitting at my desk beneath my enormous map of Alaska, I felt a pang of bruin envy. Then someone forwarded a video of a massive brown bear bursting out of the woods to chase an automobile along the same two-lane Yakutat road I’d blithely bicycled down a year earlier, and I got over it.
In and around Gustavus, the corner of Alaska to which I most often found my mind wandering, the ice continued to melt and the land continued to rebound slowly like bread dough. David and Brittney Cannamore purchased a plot next to Kim and Melanie Heacox, where they planned to start building their own home once kayak season wound down. The Heacoxes sketched out plans to convert their homestead into the John Muir Alaska Leadership School, which would tutor future generations of environmentalists. Kim churned out another novel in the winter gloom. Melanie trained another batch of interpretive rangers to enlighten cruise ship passengers with the story of Muir and his Tlingit guides, though she fretted that an even rainier-than-usual summer would scare many away from returning.
One half of Henry Gannett’s caution about visiting Alaska—his warning that its spectacular scenery will ruin anything that follows—still holds true, to an extraordinary degree. The lands set aside during Theodore Roosevelt’s benevolent conservationist dictatorship have aged remarkably well. Some scenes from the Harriman Alaska Series are largely unchanged since 1899. I have seen the sun rise over Paris, above the ruins of Machu Picchu, and on the horizon of an elephant-dotted African savanna, and none of them can equal the dawn breaking in Glacier Bay.
The other half of Gannett’s warning, that potential visitors should wait until later in life to witness Alaska’s wonders, may be rapidly approaching its expiration date. I don’t worry that a trip to Alaska will dull my sons’ capacity to appreciate natural beauty elsewhere. I do worry that if current climate trends prevail, the spectacle will become a little less spectacular with each passing year.
Shortly after returning from the Harriman Expedition, John Muir wrote, “Fortunately, Nature has a few big places beyond Man’s power to spoil—the ocean, the two icy ends of the globe, and the Grand Canyon.” Muir’s hopefulness resonated with George Bird Grinnell, who in 1902 published the quote on the front page of the year-end edition of Forest and Stream.
The optimism of men like Muir and Grinnell helped preserve Alaska for generations that followed. As I type this, however, the ocean is warming and clogged with millions of tons of plastic. The frozen poles are melting into the sea at an alarming rate. America’s new president is reviewing monuments preserved under the Antiquities Act and considering lifting a ban on uranium mining in the area surrounding the Grand Canyon, which could contaminate its waters.
If you are old and want to see the finest scenery in the world, there’s no time like the present. And if you are young, what are you waiting for? Check the ferry timetable, grab a sleeping bag, and go. Stay for a while. Believe me, it could be the event of a lifetime.