Four Quarters of Light
Page 38
I smiled as I thought of Michener sitting here in the library absorbing facts and creating characters to carry the huge weight of his research. I wasn’t really interested in the factual history of Alaska; it was only a gloss on the surface. What intrigued me was the land itself as the immutable force behind history’s cause and effect, and the unique power of transcendence that seems to breathe out of the land and can sweep all rational preconceptions away, just like the tsunami at the end of Michener’s Alaska.
Before going to bed for our last evening, I searched my memory and leafed through the pages in my diary for a particular phrase or specific incident that would render up this invisible Alaska. But, like Moses before the burning bush, I was speechless. Like a child, I suppose, I wanted some fairy-story image to lullaby me during my last hours here; more importantly, something that would connect my spirit to the spirit of the place, which I had felt with me everywhere. Instinctively, I picked up Barry Lopez’s book Arctic Dreams and copied these words from it as the closing note in my diary:
I looked out over the Bering Sea and brought my hands folded to the breast of my parka and bowed from the waist deeply toward the north, that great strait filled with life, the ice and the water. I held the bow to the pale sulphur sky at the northern rim of the earth. I held the bow until my back ached, and my mind was emptied of its categories and designs, its plans and speculations. I bowed before the simple evidence of the moment in my life in a tangible place on the earth that was beautiful.
When I stood I thought I glimpsed my own desire. The landscape and the animals were like something found at the end of a dream. The edges of the real landscape became one with the edges of something I had dreamed. But what I had dreamed was only a pattern, some beautiful pattern of light. The continuous work of the imagination, I thought, to bring what is actual together with what is dreamed is an expression of human evolution . . .
Whatever world that is, it lies far ahead. But its outline, its adumbration, is clear in the landscape, and upon this one can actually hope we will find our way.
I bowed again, deeply, toward the north, and turned south to retrace my steps over the dark cobbles to the home where I was staying. I was full of appreciation for all that I had seen.
I recalled making this same instinctive act of supplication on Oneson’s hill. I knew, too, that in some confused way the pattern and outline of my own dreams had brought me here. Even though I would be leaving the next day, I knew those same dreams would bring me back again.
I rose to go to bed and looked in on Jack and Cal. Littered across their bed were toy sea eagles, bears, wolves, moose and musk ox. I laughed, thinking of the racks of antlers waiting to be shipped home with us. If my dreams ever failed me, my sons’ totem animals and my own ‘toys’ would not let me forget.
Text Acknowledgements
The author and publishers are grateful to the following for permission to reproduce extracts:
To Barry Lopez and Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc., for lines from Arctic Dreams, published by Scribner, reprinted by permission of SLL/Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc., copyright © 1986 by Barry Lopez.
To Macmillan, London, for lines from Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer, published by Macmillan, 1998, used by permission.
To Thad and James Poulson, for an extract from All About Sitka, a publication of the Daily Sitka Sentinel: All About Sitka 2001 Copyright © 2001 Daily Sitka Sentinel, used by permission.
To Ned Rozell, University of Alaska Geophysical Institute, for a passage from his article ‘World’s Oldest Mammals’, in Anchorage Daily News, 25 February 2001.
To the University of Washington Press, for an extract from Alaska’s Copper River Delta by Riki Ott, published by the Artists for Nature Foundation and the University of Washington Press, reprinted by permission of the University of Washington Press, 1998.
To Alfred A. Knopf, for an extract from Going to Extremes by Joe McGinnis, © 1980 by Joe McGinnis.
The author and publishers have made every reasonable effort to contact the copyright owners of the extracts reproduced in this book. In the few cases where they have been unsuccessful they invite copyright holders to contact them direct.