Walking Alaskan BedrockAlive in the Sea of Information

with a wink and a nod to Gary Snyder*

Spruce, hemlock, pine
Rain—fine droplets—rising and falling
Walk around puddles
                           stones worn free in the path.

Noiseless drizzle (lush moss)
Silent poison blushing crimson
Trudge on and upward; slick rock terraces
Bare of lichen, adorned
With cabled hoop earrings
Rusting like the uplifted pyrite
     exposed.

Descend into the silent woods:
Alder, moss, mud, glazing rain.
Waterproof jacket, pants, boots—
Frothy mountain streams taken in a leap

Gridlock in a teenage forest:
    inch    forward
                        to a glistening rocky descent

Scenic trail—bookmark it!
A well-worn path dips down to the edge of a glacial lake—
       bushwhack to skirt the flooded trench
Ten literary scholars following
       a geologist, a biologist, and their pedagogue
Jagged rockface ripped by a receding glacier
Above, the uplifted rock ground smooth
But for a grooved fingerprint
The scored mirror of a frozen Sea
Of Information.

Lichen and clear pools
Slabs of smoothed rock
And in between, mineral-rich detritus
Like the dust between the floorboards the broom ignores
Tenacious fireweed in miniature at a mid-summer full bloom
Alder cones patiently waiting for nitrogen—
           breathe.

Sliding rock with only a film of dewy rain
And below, flowing ice
Frozen in the impassive scene and inaccurate memories.
Cameras at the ready, scramble down:
   white sheet, depressions, hollows, tunnels—
       rock gives way
       to mud the color of cement and as packed with gravel—
   an arch carved in the ice, a subterranean stream,
   the cave its rising steam expands—
       crouch on the ground
       in the frigid air
       beneath a Sea
       of Information;
       wipe melted data
       from the digital photographic apparatus—
   electric blue.

Appointments loom more impressively than the ice cliffs
The obvious path unintelligible, walk     into the wild
Move, pause, move*
Ridge-top view of unnoticed gullies
                                                                           a large pool
                                                                                                     stepping stones

       Resume the trail;
       Seek the shelter of an open-air shed.

             Cool mist and friends

       Rivulets down cheeks

             One story—thirteen tongues

       Alive    in the liquid Sea of Information.


*Gary Snyder, “Walking the New York Bedrock Alive in the Sea of Information,” The Gary Snyder Reader, 1999, New York: Counter Point, 2000. 587-91.

South Sawyer Glacier (Tracy Arm)

Yesterday, a group of us Bread Loafers boarded a small icebreaking vessel to travel down the Lynn Canal from Juneau and then back north up Tracy Arm toward Canada to see South Sawyer Glacier. South Sawyer is the most actively calving glacier in Alaska and for that reason it has become a tourist destination. People dedicate a whole day to a journey whose sole purpose is to witness and capture on film the breaking up of a glacier into icebergs which will float away to melt in the relative warmth of the ocean. For those of us who made the pilgrimage aboard the Wild Alaskan yesterday, the irony of our own attitude chilled us more than the crisp sea air cooled by the over-sized ice cubes floating next to us. We had come to see a glacier calve, but each time an ice shelf crashed into the water, we remembered South Sawyer's staggering statistic: While the glacier is currently 30 miles long, we are sitting 6 miles from the Canadian border, and the glacier is melting 60 feet per day. At the current rate of recession, Alaskan visitors to South Sawyer glacier will need to carry a passport in January 2008!

An extensive series of photographs accompanies this entry. The viewer may find that the photo blog for my Tracy Arm trip lacks a cohesive caption sequence typical of my other photo series. My loss for words reflects a combination of awe and the lack of a narrative framework to the spiritually nonlinear pilgrimage.

Click here and scroll up to join me.

Blue Ice

Today, Alaskans Cathy and Erin Connor (geologist, biologist; mother, daughter) took the Wildness class on a "fiesty" hike in the rain. Beginning in a successionary coniferous forest, we passed through a much younger alder forest out onto bedrock only recently uncovered by Mendenhall Glacier.

For this entry, I've decided to narrate the journey in an extensive series of photographs, commenting and reflecting on the experience through the caption sequence.

Click here and scroll up to join me in an electric-blue glacial ice cave. I'm sorry I have no photos from our climb up the waterfall on the way there.

Climbing Ripinski

When I climbed Mt. Ripinski a week and a half ago, I wanted to summit. I set a fast pace--too fast--at the outset so that my climbing party might reach the goal by our established turn-around time. The others in the group seemed to be of like mind, and we fed off each others' determination all the way up the trail.

Above 2000', we met another party returning from the top. They warned us that visibility wasn't good further up and that there were strong winds above the tree line. Rather than discouraging us, the news spurred us on. Getting to the crown of a veiled mountain had become more important than reaching the point from which a 360-degree vista is possible.

I no longer needed to see the wide world of the surrounding mountains rising from the bay fed by the Chilkat and Chilkoot rivers. Alpine meadows of lush flowering heather, mist-encrusted lupin, and scattered buttercups attracted my attention, each more glorious--to use John Muir's term--than the last. The summit was still my goal, but only in as much as pressing on towards the summit meant passing through the next meadow further up the slope.

Once at the rocky top, my friends and I noticed the chill air, added layers, snapped a few photos documenting our success, and headed down the mountain without much ceremony. We had underestimated the time needed for our descent, however, for each turn brought into focus a new view for my camera. Reviewing the photographs now, I can see how powerfully the mist-enveloped flowers on the cloud-enveloped mountain pulled at my soul.

Gary Snyder is correct that "Mountaineers climb peaks for the great view, the cooperation and comradeship, the lively hardship--but mostly because it puts you out there where the unknown happens, where you encounter surprise" (164). I've sought great views of the wild--my photo blog is testament to the desire--but my experience on Mt. Ripinski surprised me. Under a veil of clouds, I noticed myself most strikingly out there.

In that the mist shielded the range of mountains from my view, it also invited me to focus on the immediately proximate in my life. All around me was silence. And then I heard myself breathing. As much as I admired the striking colors of the ground cover and the angular shapes the fog brought into relief, I considered my presence in the midst of the scene.

*Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild, San Francisco: North Point, 1990.

At Home in a Sea of Information

We are indeed, as Gary Snyder puts it, "the most highly developed tool-using animal" (Snyder, "Four Changes" 245). As I sit before my computer, emblem of the religiosity of the technological, I wonder to what purpose we have progressed. While we are highly developed animals, so are our tools, yet what good does our historical collective innovation serve? My laptop is a convertible; its monitor can spin to form an electronic version of a stone tablet. The logic behind producing such a machine--more importantly, behind purchasing such a commodity--is to enhance the rapidity and facility of recording and recalling information.

American society in general has moved beyond the formative wilderness condition and the successive technological ages into the information age. Our national product is no longer the object "Made in the USA" but knowledge transference. The human mode of experience seems no longer to have to deal with the real but exclusively with the categorized, the interpreted, the transmitted.

It was precisely for this reason I sought wildness this summer. I came to Alaska in order to continue gathering and digesting information as a graduate student in an environment I perceived as more real than the suburban one I usually inhabit. In this place of more palpable wildness, I have noticed the correlation between the "life network" and the information technology network (Snyder, "Four Changes" 250).

Increased understanding has been the goal of philosophy since time immemorial. Schools of the Liberal Arts press students to ponder the positions of multiple disciplines on converging and divergent issues in the hopes that they arrive at a state of enlightenment. While most such schools do not encourage their instructors to teach "while walking," Americans approach the process of learning as a journey (Snyder, Practice 88).

Through what environment do the student and teacher walk? Regardless of the academic discipline, the pair walks into the wild, for "Wildness is the state of complete awareness" (Snyder, "Four Changes" 251).

The Beauty of the Dark Side

Reading Gary Snyder's "Decomposed" in The Practice of the Wild, I come across the line: "the dark side of nature--the ball of crunched bones in scat, the feathers in the snow, the tales of insatiable apetite" (118). The feathers on the concrete path here on campus come to mind. I've never seen anything quite like the two-foot-wide scatter pattern of feathers. Having lived in suburban areas my whole life, I'm used to seeing carcasses on pavement. The sight isn't pleasant, but it's familiar.

The feathers on the concrete path would shelter a naked bird, but the body has left them behind. Some animal sat on the path one night, stripped its prey of her clothing and stole off with the body. I shudder at the thought of being denuded and carried off by an unknown predator. In the context of wilderness, though, the feathers on the concrete represent an appropriate cycle. They are a sign that everything will be alright. I mourn the loss of the bird; I'm glad the bear had a nice meal. I thank him for not leaving the carcass behind after the kill.

*Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild, San Francisco: North Point, 1990.

Glacial Succession

Today, Alaskan naturalist and birder Matt Brooks took the Wildness class on a walk through glacial succession land uncovered by Mendenhall Glacier (2.5 miles away) a hundred years ago. It was amazing to see 60 year-old coniferous trees stunted to the size of a 15 year-old Christmas tree due to an abundance of water in the detritus slowly becoming soil as nitrogen gets fixed by red alder growing from nutrients deposited by moss and lichens.

For this entry, I've decided to narrate the journey in a series of photographs, commenting and reflecting on the experience through the caption sequence.

Click here and scroll up to join me.

Be Playful

"Be playful," says Kim Heacox, conversationalist-conservationist. "Be playful with language." That's precisely what I've been thinking my writing lacks. After all, I'm writing about my "search for wildness." I've sought a wilderness experience in Alaska, the state I had until this summer considered a U.S. territory--the land of the freer than I.

I sit in class listening to guest lecturer Heacox wondering when I have taken a moment this summer while in Alaska to be playful. Sure, I've gone on hikes and have socialized with friends (obviously, after we've each climbed to the next camp up our mountain of reading), but have I "introduced levity" to my experience of Alaska?

Auke! Auke! Auke-Auke! My hosts to Juneau, the ravens of Auke Auke! Bay Lake! swoop over head as I sit outside Egan Library at the University of Alaska Southeast looking at a giant welded raven sculpture. They no longer terrify me as they did when I arrived three weeks ago. I want to know what they're saying. Auke! Auke! They welcome me into the conversation, but I plead ignorant and walk away.

Sitting in the gazebo beside Auke Lake, named for the people who once lived here, I wonder--English teacher that I am--at the redundancy of the name: translated, "Lake" Lake. The cartographer must have been listening to the ravens without knowing their destination either.

Chilkoot: "No-Fish Basket"

I've just returned (Sunday) to Juneau from Haines via fast ferry. Haines is a small town north of the island of Juneau up the Lynn Canal. My "Searching for Wildness" class camped out on the Chilkoot River just north of Haines (which is located at the mouth of the river. The trip was lots of fun. We saw a couple brown bears and many bald eagles (one roosted above our campsite). Seals bobbed to the surface in the bay from time to time. I climbed Mt. Ripinski (roughly a 3000' climb), summitting in dense fog and chilly persistent wind. The scenes I got on film from that hike are amazing. We met with Tlingit Alaskans in Klukwan who showed us how they live closely with the land, and enjoyed the companionship of Dick and Nora Danhauer, linguists and poets.

For this entry, I've decided to narrate the journey in an extensive series of photographs, commenting and reflecting on the experience through the caption sequence.

Click here and scroll up to join me.

Smokey Shower

Mid-afternoon shower. What a blessing. I stand under the falling water sealed away from the wild Alaskan experience from which I've just returned. Warm water washes over my forehead and down to my toes. Not until this shower have I noticed how the water will trickle through my beard in droplets like Plinko chips. I think of the slender mountain streams which meandered down rocky cliffs in cascading torrents. They were ice cold. I waded into the Chilkoot River and quickly returned to the fire. The air, thick with steam, doesn't raise a mountain-fresh scent. Instead a smokey cloud hangs about me. I peer into the fire from the shower closet. The glinting embers dance in my mind.

Who is not drawn in by fire? At our campsite on the Chilkoot, everyone settled round the fire, staring into it and chatting. Beside a rushing river, surrounded by a dense forest, and under a gloriously lavender twilight which lasted for hours, we concentrated our attention on the fire located at the focul point of our encircling presence.

The seductively orange embers haunt me. They provide the warmth I sought after joining the polar bear club. Their intense heat warns me off. Paradox: that which would sustain me would also burn me. The fire, while alive, doesn't care about me. I find myself an individual not in society but in natural wilderness.

I wish my shower wouldn't wash away the fire's smoky wildness.

I reach for the washcloth.

Pressure Change

Seated indoors before dinner, some friends and I were continuing our ongoing conversation of the human relationship to wilderness when we felt the air turn chill. A cool breeze, persistent as a wind yet gentle as a feather, stroked our cheeks. The conversation halted; our eyes met, communicating in silence. All four heads angled toward the door to inquire the messenger's secret. The breeze bid us turn our heads toward the window for it heralded a climatic shift.

The sun had been shining since 4 a.m. and had warmed the land around Auke Bay sufficiently to finally dry mowed lawns and even elevated patches of moss climbing up the bases of trees. I had read John McPhee's Coming Into the Country outside under the warm sun this afternoon. The University of Alaska Southeast grounds crew had turned on the sprinklers with reason for once.

In an instant, the barometric pressure had dropped over Auke Lake. The air became active again, tossing young trees and older boughs about. Birch leaves fluttered like wind chimes designed for the hearing impaired. The breeze shaped the water's surface as glaciers carve valleys from rock. We awaited the storm.

The clouds we had seen obscuring Mendenhall's icy slopes have now descended over the lake. The towering spruce sway in the wind, groaning as their boughs rub. The blueberry bush beside me shivers beneath the icy touch of fine rain.

A gust of wind slaps my face: the land has been communicating with and through its inhabitants for two hours now--well, at least that's how long I've been listening. Prof. Jeff Nunokawa suggested to his Social Character of the Victorian Novel class that communication is the practice of secular faith: the hope that the interlocutor will "get through" to someone. The land would seem to have a natural faith in the populations it sustains.

Were we to listen to the voice carried on the wind and let the land "get though" to us, what would our environment say? Climate changes with pressure, but so does society. Policy which affects the sustainability of the planet is subject to the whim of the social environment. For societal pressures to shift, individuals will have to observe the wildness which is around them. Through observation and experience comes appreciation.

As John Muir writes in his Travels in Alaska, "the eye is called away into far-reaching vistas" yet "where there is no distant view [...] your attention is concentrated on the objects close about you" (13, 12). The human eye opens in wonder and scrutiny; in tandem, a neurological dialogue ensues offering perspective after reflection.

*John Muir, Travels in Alaska, 1915, San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1988.

Through a Glass, Brightly

These [small islands] the eye easily takes in and revels in their beauty with ever fresh delight. ~ John Muir

I have been snapping many photographs since my arrival in Juneau two weeks ago, downloading on average twenty-four a day from my digital camera. When I look at a lush scene crowned by a grayish-purple peak cooled by a cap of fresh snow, I see it in a frame on my wall. I'm in the wilderness, yet my technique of observation is urbane. My eye revels in their pixelated beauty.

I grew up on the border of suburban Maryland and Washington, D.C. My schoolmates and I would joke about the tourists, cameras at the ready, who seemed to desire the visual preservation of the moment over the actual multi-sensory experience. I am repulsed by the thought that I may act like a tourist. To me the tourist is an individual who passes through a scene without engaging the setting.

My parents taught me to want to assume the identity of a local when visiting a new place. While adopting a new accent may not be possible or even considered appropriate by the local populace, making an effort to adopt local outlooks, at least temporarily, allows the tourist the opportonity to experience the flavor of the visited community. Perspective, therefore, can be achieved through discourse as well as the camera.

Face-to-face interaction enriches the tourist act, which is the modernist pursuit of making familiar that which is strange, by establishing a two-way exchange thereby encouraging mutual understanding; observation "through a glass, darkly," only leads to partial understanding (1 Cor. 13:12). Yet how does the adventurous tourist communicate with nature? The language barrier seems insurmountable. I must resort to my camera!

Indeed my camera has documented Nature's discourse. Every few days I have stopped at the same spot along Mendenhall Loop Road to take two photographs--one westward, the other eastward. Alone they present pretty scenes: glacier, spruce, ocean, mist, fog, sky, cloud. Yet read in series, they tell a story: Juneau has been breathing--rain; bright day; mist rises out of the forests; clouds form over the mountains; rain. In and out within a closed system. That nature is alive is not news; the most urbane scene presents critters who creep and crawl. That my environment breathes with one lung shakes me awake. I rub my eyes clear of their scales.

*John Muir, Travels in Alaska, 1915, San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1988. 15.

Nobility

Can a forest possess nobility? John Muir writes of Puget Sound as "the noblest coniferous forest on the face of the globe" (7). I have encountered references to individualized woody nobility: most notably the noble oak. Oaks are strong trees through the density of their trunks, yet an especially old oak is venerated back East for having been considered worthy when all its neighbors were clear cut to make way for farmland. How noble of the lone oak for sticking around so long without any company!

The oak's steadfastness would warrant our esteem were the tree sentient. Nobility, though, is present in old trees of every species, just as nobility resides with the human elderly. The elderly automatically assume a higher rank in society than they enjoyed or suffered individually in their youth. One can assume that the coniferous forest of Puget Sound which Muir encountered in 1879 was an old-growth forest--the collective elderly.

The nobility of a forest therefore signals its age. Yet why do we respect a forest for its age when we daily discard countless objects which seem to have outlived their utility yet are perfectly serviceable. I contend that a forest may possess nobility because humanity could not have created it. We did not create humanity itself--a higher being or Nature performed the act. So when we acknowledge the nobility of a whole forest or that of a single tree, we tip our hats not simply to the forest but more significantly to the majesty of the creative force in which we individually believe.

*John Muir, Travels in Alaska, 1915, San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1988.

Permanence

Having hiked the Nugget Creek trail up the canyon south of Mendenhall Glacier earlier in the day, I turned to John Muir's Travels in Alaska last night after dinner. The poetry of the second paragraph drew me in immediately. What I had sat down to read fairly quickly (for I knew that I'd lap up every word) I met with slow progress. Each phrase called to my pen; scribbling ensued, yet my marginalia is neatly printed, developed, methodical--far from ordinary, even for this student and teacher of literature. Muir's style had tempered my anxiety to speed through the text. He writes that "to the mountaineer a sea voyage is a grand, inspiring, restful change;" the same could be said of an awe-imbued travel narrative for the fictionist (3).

Muir writes that we can see the ideal of permanence expressed in the "water hills and dales in eternal visible motion [or] rock waves" (3). The ocean's surface undulates, yet its motion is the very essence of its constancy--its dependability. Permanence, then, can be represented in the interconnectivity of the dynamic and static elements of nature. Glaciers, like Mendenhall, appear static but in fact suffer annual measurable decay.

I had not previously considered change coincident with permanence. In my experience, change has described abandonment: the world is irrevocably changed as it continues to lose the glacier. How does a melting glacier express permanence? The world does not lose the water; the molecules remain within the closed system of the Earth's climate. Seasonal change is a given. Permanence is not static at all, but rhythmic.

Mendenhall glacier will recede, though, at a faster rate than glaciers of past ice ages. Increased CO2 levels which increase at a rate which far excedes that of any of the past 650 million years threaten the permanence of the system. The climatological system which contains the ebb and flow of hot and cold extremes has been ruptured, altering systemic permanence itself. When change no longer occurs within consistent margins, the model is no longer dependable.

A "formless" free verse poem whose line length varies from eight to twelve syllables expresses permanence--reasonable, reliable fluctuation--and therefore adheres to a formal convention. Were a seventeen syllable line to break the poem's convention, the structural integrity would collapse, leading to metaphysical and actual losses of permanence. The poem would not be anthologized because of its instability--its lack of unity.

Our glacier has become a line of verse which is too short for its poem. Disunity abounds in the system; nature's anthology is in the process of being trimmed. The time of ascetic wonderment has passed. The moral imperative incumbent upon the non-permanent members of the world community--which is a permanent body as long as the global system is not imperiled--must act to preserve the observed order of the natural environment in order that we might sustain ourselves to enjoy permanence.

Individuals, communities, whole societies, peoples have come and gone innumerable times, yet humanity is not a permanent fixture on Earth. Neither is our glacier; nor the ocean, or even the mountains. Change is permanent. Fluidity is the sure foundation of the world. We must remember that as we continue to face new challenges, we must update the ways by which we approach the fragile permanence which we inhabit.

*John Muir, Travels in Alaska, 1915, San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1988.