In Search of Wildness

An English teacher's Alaskan sojourn
Funded in part by a William C. Friday Foundation Fellowship Grant

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Location: Juneau, Alaska

From mid-June through late July 2006, I posted my thoughts and photos to this blog in journal fashion. Unlike Chris McCandless, though, I welcomed the opportunity to engage in dialogue across thousands of miles. While blogging from the edge of the Tongas subarctic rainforest in Alaska, I encouraged readers to drop me a line using the comment function. Mail from home is always welcome, and I relished messages from family, friends, students, colleagues, and total strangers.

I traveled to Alaska to further understand and experience nature without human influence. I read literature about the wild as I explored nature in a purer form than we normally can. Alaska, despite its development has not been tamed. In such an environment, we can learn a lot about nature, ourselves, and our society. We all share a common root in the wild and a common future relationship with the natural world as we together choose to sustain it.

Sunday, July 09, 2006

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.

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