Seth Kantner's Changing Alaska

June 8, 2008

I’m in the New York Hotel, in Ketchikan Alaska—wildernessboy following the trail of a booktour, past the halfway mark and heading home.

Outside it is raining, and my hair drips on the keyboard from a foray out to find a grapefruit, my only connection to nature right now besides my shrinking bag of dried caribou.

Below the window steady traffic roars past. Just beyond the narrow road is water; sailboat masts rise like aluminum light poles in the harbor. Something tied to the dock looks like a hovercraft, or maybe a UFO. Out across the water gray clouds drape beautiful timbered hills.

I’m finally back in Alaska, though now a zombie, the result of leaving Breakup in the Brooks Range (where ice drifted down a quiet river, sparrows sang, my dog lay in the trail watching for caribou crossing; where my family and I spent our days peeling logs and looking for meat for dinner), then landing too quickly in LA, at a convention: Book Expo America. Fifty thousand book publishers and booksellers all under one most amazing roof.

“Too much pook,” the Eskimo elders from my childhood would have said.

I arrived in LA without sleep, strolling stunned past people and thousands and thousands of books on display, embarrassed that I—who worry about the environment—had written another one and jetted here through polluted skies to promote it. Wondering why the world needed a book about some long-ago kid who ate frozen fish and wanted to be Eskimo and now was concerned by climate change.

What followed was a blur of taxi rides, coffee in paper cups, dinner on top of a skyscraper with an open-air swimming pool beyond the bar, more taxis, jets, TSA, freeways, signing books, shaking hands.

In San Geronimo I gave half my dried caribou to Willow Jones, a family friend formerly from the Arctic. Another one of those, Mara Schiro, gave me a green shirt to wear on tour. The night was warm and dark—a strange and pleasant combination, something we never have at home—and we talked long into it, catching up on the years. In San Rafael I whined to a third friend, Linnea Wik, and she dropped her duties as an organic strawberry-seller to accompany me northward for a few days as navigator and automobile driver.

Flying over Oregon, I sipped water from one more plastic cup, stared down. The Earth everywhere was marked and marred by people sign: roads and scabs—deforestation—and yellow flowers where it was healing. Or trying to.

In Eugene, my dad’s old friend and climbing partner Paul Dix appeared at my reading. He talked of war-crimes in Nicaragua. I signed books, tried to spell my name right. In Sisters a woman pressed into my hand an article she’d written about the melting Arctic—square in the gun sights of the oil companies. In Redmond a man said there was no hope for Northwest Alaska, too many minerals there in the ground. I scrawled my autograph, went next door to the bar, drank grayhounds—grapefruit squeezed on vodka.

In Portland I read in a glitzy mall. The next day Linnea drove, calmly swirling us out the dangerous cement spaghetti to I-5. Highway and more highway blurring under my gas-powered ride. Mr. NatureWriter in a blue convertible Chrysler, satellite radio panting against rain-laden air.

The last night in the Lower Forty-Eight I read at Elliott Bay Books, downtown Seattle, to forty people who knew how to laugh. Afterward in the car I pressed buttons on the Avis Garmin GPS. Karmen, I’d nicknamed her, and she told me to fasten my seatbelt. Over and over she repeated in her Replicant voice: “Recalculating.” I hurled north toward my brother’s house, top down, heater blowing, radio bashing out a beat. The river of red taillights flowed in front. The terrifying yellow eyes of the pursuing automobiles glared in my mirrors. I rocketed down an exit, changing lanes, muscling through yellow lights. The night was full of damp dark, speed, and power. After all these years I thought I might understand what people liked about the city. For a few seconds I loved it.

I pressed Seek, and Hank Williams Sr. came to life, singing: “Your cheating heart will tell on you . . .” What came next was the feeling of being a hypocrite, a frigging environmentalist blazing though the night, radio forcing back the lonesome dark.

Now, here in Ketchikan, in a small room, the miracle of the internet has Hank singing to me in his long-ago voice. In the sink is my grapefruit. I’ve been squeezing it on vodka and ice. The grapefruit has a thumb hole in it. Because I lost my knife in Seattle, or Port Angeles, somewhere. I was doing fine until I lost my knife. Life without a knife is not one I care to live. I can manage without a gun, much as I don’t like it, but not without a knife. I’ve tried everything, tried to cut the grapefruit in half with Gore-Tex dental floss.

Tonight I’m so homesick I could die. Although I think Hank wrote all this before me.