Ramblings in a mental wilderness

A commercial last night showed a broad expanse of snow-covered tundra while the announcer said something like "observe this stretch of tundra and imagine the future. We see a new drill pad with wells pumping   ...."  I physically shuddered at that thought and turned it off.

Oddly juxtaposed in my mind was a story a friend of mine wrote about finding the skeleton of a missing man in the Alaska wild 30 years ago. His story is added at the bottom here and it was attached as a comment to a news site article that gave some of the history of people who have ventured into the wilderness never to return.  That story only guesses at the number who wandered into the wild without telling anybody they were going.  As the article says it could be dozens and it could  be hundreds.  There's a link below to the article.

My mind was kind of racing around and I recalled a stretch of tundra east of the village of Shaktoolik on the Bering Sea coast. It looked very much like the image in the commercial. One day during an Iditarod race I was staring at that white expanse trying to find the words to describe it. Barren tundra had been used to the point of cliché. An elderly man from the village walked up to me and asked what I was doing and I told him I was trying to find the words to describe what I was seeing.  All I saw was empty white, but he told me it was actually more swamp than tundra and he started pointing out where the river runs full of salmon in the summer and the slight rises where the arctic hares can be found in winter and another spot where edible birds gathered and about the caribou that occasionally showed up near the mountains on the eastern horizon. The nuances of shadows here and there accented the white and that land slowly came alive for me. He described a world full of life that I could not see, but he drove the word barren out of mind and I thanked him for sharing his knowledge.

Today I wonder in the centuries his people lived there how many of them wandered out into that wilderness and never came back. And then think across Alaska, the Arctic Slope. the Brooks Range of mountains rising from it to the south and the deep forests of the Interior stretching to the sea even farther to the south and opening onto more tundra to the southwest. A large portion of it is bordered by ocean along a coastline longer than the whole rest of the United States put together. There are lots of places to get lost.

White men only started coming to Alaska in the 1700s but archeology tells us the Natives lived here for at least 10.000 years before that. How many of them did the wilderness swallow even though they would have been so much more savvy about survival than those white men who came along later.

Trappers, gold miners, adventurers, how many wandered into the wilderness leaving no trace with only tentative connections to relatives in the Big Outside many of whom never learned what happened to Uncle Jack or a father or a son or a daughter.

Today it's mostly adventurers who take those steps off the roadways and disappear. But now they carry cell phones and GPS emergency locaters and have access to rescue by airplanes and helicopters and boats all over the state. Still now and then someone slips away, like the fellow Joe May and Harry Sutherland found thirty years ago, his bones mixed with those of two grizzlies, telling the story of a horrendous battle that neither bear nor man won. It can still happen today. As a matter of fact two adventurers are missing along the southern coast of Alaska right now.

But that wilderness and the danger it holds won't always be there if the visionaries like those who sponsored that advertisement have their way.  Drilling pads and strip mines and roads and dams and all kinds of possible developments have those people lusting after the land to take it over and make it like everywhere else, paying only required lip service to preservation and wilderness. And one day, maybe as soon as my grandson's time people will ask where it went. At times I wonder even now.

Given a choice of a horizon dotted with drilling pads or what at least looks like Arctic wasteland, I'll take the wasteland, the one described by that elder in Shaktoolik that a person can enter and never return from, one that is bustling with life if only we take the time to see it. 

Here's how my friend Joe May described his discovery:

Trapping shelter used by several people over several decades.

Photo is 30-35 years old.

Photo courtesy -- Joe May

"Thirty years ago, Harry Sutherland and I were prospecting a creek south of the Little Peters Hills. Gathering firewood for our evening camp I came upon bones lightly covered in moss. To kill time until bed time we dug the bones out and reassembled them like Tinker Toys. We ended with two grizzlies and one human. Later, in discussion with Cliff Hudson, the Talkeetna bush pilot, we surmised that we had found Jack Sneider, a trapper who had failed to make a rendezvous with Hudson near there years before. Jack obviously shot the bears but not before they got him. Today, a nearby lake is named for the man. Schneider had no close relatives so we left him where we found him. So...everyone who goes lost up here doesn't always stay that way. I like to think Harry and I gave Sneider a more proper send-off... twenty years after the fact, but better late than never.

"Jack Schneider's bones, those that haven't washed down the creek as a result of our disturbance, lie within a few feet of of the south bank of Bear Creek at the south toe of the Little Peters Hills.

"The photo is of cabin he left from to make the rendezvous with Cliff. The cabin is on the north side of Bear Creek.

"The cabin was originally built by a party of prospectors about 90 years ago. It was used as a line cabin by a former owner of the Fairview Inn (a famous historic bar in Talkeetna) and a trapping partner during the Depression in the 30's. Schneider refurbished and used it as a line cabin in the 50's. George Sanderlin (in the Talkeetna cemetery now) and I put a makeshift roof on it and used it as a trapping shelter in the 70's. Photo is 30/35 years old. I have Schneider’s frying pan around here somewhere … it still smells like fish."

Missing in Alaska without a trace by Craig Medred in the Alaska Dispatch News
Lost in the woods, a blog post