I want to thank you, the reader, for taking the leap of faith required to move through these pages alongside Nicky, Clete, Veronica, and Josie. I hope they have left you with a sense of urgency, but also a feeling of possibility, and perhaps even responsibility.
Now that you’ve read Whispering Alaska, I’d like to tell you a bit about how I came to call Alaska home. A breath, really. That’s all it took. But here’s the longer story.
At the age of nineteen, twenty-three years ago, eager to leave the city and find forest not interrupted by farms and towns, I boarded a Greyhound bus in Philadelphia. I traveled first to California, then up the coast to the Pacific Northwest, before boarding a plane to Alaska.
It was September, the days already shortening. We lifted off in the evening, Seattle’s swirl of lights giving way to shapes of tree-covered mountains to the east, the new-fallen snow on the craggy tops reflecting the light of the moon. After a couple of hours, a single strip of light along the coast of an island appeared. We touched down in Sitka, where I stepped out of the airport, inhaling the briny, faintly astringent scent of rainforest and sea.
But I still wasn’t close enough.
After a few months working at the salmon hatchery, I moved out of my log cabin apartment into the woods, about twenty minutes outside of town. Using gangion line, I strung a corridor of tarps and lived at the far end, in a butterscotch North Face VE-25 tent. I whittled a spoon from yellow cedar, pouring three packages of shrimp ramen into a blue enamel bowl, which I boiled over a fire. Fall storms such as the one at the end of Whispering Alaska blew down from the north, shredding my corridor of tarps. Cold set in. I’d arrive home at night to find my tent coated in hoarfrost. One evening, while trying to prime my camp stove inside the tent to build a bit of heat, I burned down my vestibule. Despite spending time on my uncle’s farm as a kid—in Danville, as you might have guessed—I spent most of my childhood in the city. I had no idea what I was doing.
After a few months I packed up my sleeping bag and moved to another spot, on a hill by Kaasda Héen—Indian River. I cut down saplings and built a hut, filling the spaces between the branches with jars of olive oil and cans of soup. I lived there for the next five months.
Each evening after work I returned to my site, the cedar boards in the muskegs bending beneath my weight, burping up muddy water, the northern lights shivering above Gavan Ridge. I became good at drying wood and building fires, pulling my scarred pot from the hemlock embers with pliers. Afraid of attracting brown bear with the smell of mint, I stopped brushing my teeth at night, falling asleep with the spice of cedar in my mouth, surrounded by trees swollen with the flesh of salmon.
As winter wore on, I began reading about the history of my new home. I learned that the indigenous Tlingit had inhabited Sheet’-ká X’áat’l—or just Shee, meaning “The Island”—for ten thousand years, give or take, before the Russians settled in Old Sitka, in 1799. I read about how the Russians, eager to build ships large enough to stand up to the fleets of the Spanish, Germans, British, and upstart Americans, fashioned masts from the oldest trees, before selling Alaska to a young, war-torn United States. America took up where the Russians had left off, except now on an industrial scale, logging the valleys and coasts, before clearing the sides of mountains.
On walks back to my hut, I began to pick out great stumps, large as cars, crumbling back into the earth. I pictured men in wool vests swinging their broad, barbed axes, chanting Russian folk songs as spruce trees crashed to the ground. At night, crawling into my sleeping bag, I imagined that the trees all around my hill whispered stories of annihilation as bolts of energy trembled through the soil.
Spring fell over the island. One sunlit March afternoon, I hiked back into the fan of the valley. I crossed and recrossed rivers, finding a wide bear trail that cut through a muskeg dotted with dwarf pines, their branches hung with aquamarine strands of old man’s beard. The spongy moss, bright with new growth, flexed beneath my boots. Holding my hands to my face, I pushed through a thicket of golden devil’s club. The temperature plunged, while around me rose ancient behemoth trees with trunks as thick as lighthouses. I was standing in a grove of undisturbed old growth, with trees hundreds, if not thousands, of years old, just like Nicky and Clete.
Since that spring day, I have hiked from the house in Sitka where I now live with my family back to that stand of old growth, to hunt, or just to roam, any number of times. I have clambered up the slopes of the Three Sisters, mountains that rim the valley, and walked to the root of the valley, where a glacier-fed waterfall pours into a turquoise pool. I have fished for Dolly Varden trout, watching as alder leaves drop into the current, moving toward the ocean. I’ve watched salmon school up each year up at the mouth of the river, beginning a journey upstream to lay eggs at the point of their own hatching. And I have watched the brows of friends from the Lower 48 soften as they bear witness to all this, a hush of wonder moving over them.
When my oldest daughter was about eight months old, I took her to my first campsite along the muskeg, where I burned down the vestibule of my tent from all those years ago. It was late summer, and the few remaining pink salmon, chalky with age, finned against the current. Devil’s club, just starting to turn yellow, grew over salmon carcasses, their eyes picked clean by eagles. Mushrooms shiny with moisture pushed up from the rich earth. As we stood there beneath the crowns of the hemlocks, she stared up at me with her big hazel eyes, her chest rising and falling.
Over the last few hundred years, salmon streams around the world have been filled in, paved over, just as the forests that feed these fish oxygen have been obliterated. Scotland, Norway, Connecticut—lands where salmon once thrived and trees grew tall—now have only patches of forest left, and a few token vestiges of salmon runs. The Greek word krisis means “turning point in a disease.” We are at such a turning point now.
Covid-19, of course, is about breathing as well. As you’ve read, Josie and Nicky’s mother dies from lack of breath, sending her children and husband on their own journey across the country, which ends in a seaside town similar to Sitka. Both Josie and Nicky realize, in their own ways, that attacking the earth—especially the forests—is akin to attacking ourselves. Logging, global warming, forest fires, ocean acidification—how many ways can our planet choke at once?
As you’ve read Whispering Alaska, I hope you have been able to breathe beside Nicky, Josie, Veronica, and Clete. I hope you could taste the citrus scent of spruce and hemlock needles, and that your own heart rushed as the brown bear rose from the devil’s club, and that you could taste the spice of the Old Yellow Cedar on the back of your tongue. Maybe you’ll even feel some of the same wonder staring up at the crowns of these great trees as Nicky does when she follows Clete into the forest, and as I did that spring. Alone in the forest, chest rising and falling, almost hearing the trees breathe, giving back pure oxygen. Allowing all of us together, across this planet, to breathe.
If you’d like to continue the work of the foursome in this book, you’ll find on the following pages a number of environmental groups in Alaska to reach out to. I’ve also included a few suggestions for further reading—a list by no means exhaustive, but a starting point, for sure. Perhaps some of these writers will touch you with their commitment to understand how to live sustainably in one of the world’s last wild lands, and their pure celebration on the page of what it means to be alive, and just breathe.
Alaska Rainforest Defenders
Alaska Wilderness League
Salmon State
Sitka Conservation Society
Southeast Alaska Conservation Council
Sustainable Southeast Partnership
Blonde Indian: An Alaska Native Memoir, Ernestine Hayes
The Dead Go to Seattle, Vivianne Faith Prescott
Fishcamp: Life on an Alaskan Shore, Nancy Lord
The Island Within, Richard Nelson
Ordinary Wolves, Seth Kantner
The Raven’s Gift, Don Rearden
The Rising and the Rain: Collected Poems, John Straley
The Smell of Other People’s Houses, Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock
The Stars, the Snow, the Fire: Twenty-Five Years in the Alaska Wilderness, John Haines
Unseen Companion, Denise Gosliner Orenstein
The Wake of the Unseen Object: Travels Through Alaska’s Native Landscapes, Tom Kizzia
A Wolf Called Romeo, Nick Jans