Coming Out of the Country
July 06, 2008
Filed in: Alaska
Yes, the title is a play on John McPhee’s brilliant Coming into the Country, which I am about halfway through and will someday reagle/bore you with my thoughts on (I know that’s not quite 100 percent good grammar, but bear with me—I’m typing in the dark next to my snoring family). “In to the country” is a term Alaskans use, and McPhee liked enough to swipe for his title, for going deep into the bush, as if all the rest of Alaska is some kind of suburb and only the real wild stuff, the bush north and east of Fairbanks, is the real “country.”
They’re tough up here with their categorizations, baby. What we saw was pretty wild, pretty “country,” specially as compared to, say, Swellville or the rest of our suburban 70s upbringing.
We never went anywhere near McPhee’s kind of country, but up til the 4th of July (a cool coincidence), we had been going out and out and further out. Anchorage to Homer, then across the bay to Kachemak State park, then up to the face of the Gwruwink glacier...it’s country up there.
Then out the other way, north across Cook Inlet to the Lake Clark national park, which is, depending on which guide you trust, either the least-visited or the third-least- visited national park in the United States, the reason being you need either a small plane or a pretty sturdy boat to get there. There are no trails in that wilderness at all. The very few people over there, the ones who’ll show you the bears for a largo fee, stick to the coast. The bush is too dense to hike through for any distance. Also there are the volcanoes—we were closest to Mt. Iliamna --and of course the bears to contend with.
The point is, that was out there. Definitely as out there as I personally have ever been—looking at thousands of acres of wilderness that no human has ever set foot in, that’s pretty awe-inspiring, and humbling. ( I wonder how long it will hold; they’ve discovered gold of all things just down the peninsula from the Lake Clark park, and there are apparently plans afoot to build a nice, environmentally friendly mine.)
I wonder if T and I will ever be in a place that remote again in our lives—we have loved this, but we do have Italy and France and Spain and Hawaii on our life lists (and I of course have Kansas and ND too), and them college costs are coming closer every day.
I wonder if the boys will—will there be anything left by the time they get the means and wherewithal to travel on their own? Especially in Homer, we saw lots of 20-something kids from the Lower 48, girls with tats and boys with those little goat beards the guys all wear these days. Will either of my boys grow up to be one of those boys? (Just typing that and thinking of my wired-boy C makes me LOL, but you never know; he might make a digital conversion and give up his e-ways.)
Either way, from that moment standing on the volcanic sand as the tide was coming in, watching our Piper cub circle around to land and take us back to Homer, from that point forward we’ve been coming away from the country, coming back into civilization, adding baggage quite literally.
Like Adam and Eve, once we returned to Homer and a real hotel, our eyes were opened and we saw that we were dirty and disheveled and had been wearing the same hiking socks for three days in a row. Last night, I did laundry for the first time in a week (as opposed to my other life, when I literally do a load every single day).
Yesterday we made that big long beautiful drive up the coast and around Turnagain Arm back into Anchorage. I imagine that must always be a shock, even for native Alaskans, simply because Anchorage and its plain boring anywhere outskirts appear out of nowhere after a final turn in the road. Wilderness one mile; Office Depot the next.
Today is big carbon-footprint day for us— two flights that will take us to San Fran, then back across the continent tomorrow to Boston and, finally, back on into Swellville and our middle-middle-middle life (that’s middle-class, middle-aged, middle-brow, for those not in the know).