Sixty Degrees North (16 page)

On a still evening, just outside the village of Moose Pass, I drove beside a roadside pool where, unconcerned by the traffic, a buck moose stood knee-deep in the water. He was enormous – two metres tall at the shoulders – and almost comical, like a cow on stilts. His strange, broad antlers
seemed not majestic, like a stag, but fabulous nonetheless. Seated in that sealed-off little world, I rumbled around the peninsula, stopping when I felt like stopping. I would camp at night, though I never slept well. In those midsummer days, darkness didn't come, and I would doze on and off in the bright tent. Sometimes I would open my eyes, disorientated, unable to tell what time it might be, and only the silence from the road nearby would suggest that morning was still hours away.

The landscape was always astonishing. Sometimes it was hard to concentrate on the road, so beautiful was the world beyond the bitumen. Blue glacial rivers spilled through stony valleys, with white-capped peaks all around. Silvery lakes appeared, then were gone – rumours among the trees. Cottonwood seeds wisped through the air like flurries of summer snow. The sky folded and unfolded. The land invited both eye and mind. But all over the peninsula, among the pink and purple flowers at the roadside, among the trees and tall bushes, among the rivers, streams and lakes, there were signs: ‘Private property', ‘Keep out', ‘No trespassing'. There were chains slung over driveways and roads; there were padlocks and high fences; there were lines that couldn't be crossed.

It's difficult to explain precisely why these signs offended me. Perhaps because I live in a country that does not have trespassing laws. Or perhaps because there is something about this place in particular, something about its vastness, its wildness and its wonder that makes the idea of property and of exclusion seem foreign. I thought back to Greenland, where land cannot be privately owned, and where the relationship between people and place is founded on the idea of use and of community. I thought of how appropriate that seemed, and of how inappropriate these signs felt. ‘Keep out', they said. To which I responded, from inside the truck, with two equally offensive words.

In Alaska, as in the United States as a whole, the relationship between people and the land, particularly people and ‘wilderness', is fraught with historical and cultural baggage. The land is a place to be exploited and to be preserved; it represents both the country's past and its future; it is fragile and it is dominating. Here too, the notion of a frontier, with all of that word's emotive implications, remains strong, and brings its own tight bundle of conflicts and contradictions. Not least over the issue of ownership.

Offensive though these signs appeared to me, private land ownership is in fact not the norm here, as it is elsewhere in the US. The vast majority of Alaskan land is owned, in one way or another, by the state or federal government, and the extent to which they allow development – whether it be large-scale mining or the building of cabins and homesteads – is understandably controversial. Less than one per cent of the state is in private hands, with an exception that, for outsiders, is surprising.

Native Alaskans did not own Alaska before Europeans arrived. They did not, in fact, know what land ownership meant (nor, for that matter, would they have understood the concept of ‘wilderness'). They didn't need to. Like the Inuit of Greenland, the indigenous people of northern North America were users of the land and its resources. They dwelled and were at home upon it. Possession was not only meaningless, it would have been entirely counterproductive to a sustainable relationship with the place.

But that changed, as it did for native people across the continent, when the land they had never thought to own was usurped by colonisers. And, here at least, it changed again in 1971 with the passing of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA), under which the state's 60,000 indigenous people received one billion dollars compensation between them, as well as 44 million acres of land, split between regional and local ‘corporations'. According to
John McPhee, ‘This was perhaps the great, final, and retributive payment for all of American history's native claims – an attempt to extinguish something more than title … The natives of Alaska were suddenly, collectively rich.' This was in some senses a real victory, and it was certainly better than anything that native people had been offered elsewhere in the country. But the price of this deal was the acceptance of a system of ownership and of value that was not their own. It was, in other words, complicity.

Susan Kollin has written that ‘the corporate model introduced by ANCSA has brought with it new forms of “institutionalized competition” between native peoples that had not existed before and that violate a standard belief in forging reciprocal relations with the natural world.' The effects of this change are social and psychological as much as they are financial. Writing about the enclosure of common land into private holdings in England in the late nineteenth century, Deborah Tall observed that, ‘After enclosure, the communal sense of place and identity was divided into numerous fenced and hedged private loyalties.' Those private loyalties were imposed on native Alaskans under the terms of ANCSA.

Jeff recently bought a piece of land from the government. The state continues to sell off a few small parcels to individuals who wish to homestead or build cabins, and that is precisely what Jeff wants to do: to build a cabin where he and his family can spend time together, on the land. Doing so has been a dream of his since he was a child. Though he grew up in the south, in Washington State, he has always looked forward to this place, longed for it. When he finished university, this is where he came. And now, settled here with his wife and children, he makes sense to me in a way that I don't think he ever quite did before.

One afternoon, the two of us set out from Anchorage to visit his ‘property'. It was a two and a half hour drive
from the city, then a short way on a dirt track into the forest. When it became impassable, we got out and hiked, first along the track, then out into the bush. The going was slow, over fallen trees and brush, up a steep ridge to where the land levelled out, then began to fall again. A fire several years before had left some of the trees brittle and dead. Some still stood, leaning at peculiar angles, while others cracked underfoot. The ground was alive with plants – bluebells and Labrador tea. Snowshoe hares scampered behind bushes as we approached. Every few minutes, Jeff would call out, calmly: ‘Hey bear, just passing through. No surprises here.' And each time he spoke I felt relief.

It was easy to lose direction among the trees, and we walked half an hour or so before seeing a lake out to our left. As we stopped to look over the water, I noticed the silence. No human noise whatsoever, just the air fussing among the branches. An eagle cried from somewhere not far away. Mosquitoes hummed around our faces. A stillness rose, as though from the ground itself. We found the corner post of the property and followed the ribbon markers around its edges, first towards a small pond, then out to another lake. Neither of these pieces of water is yet named, and Jeff is considering the possibilities before making his mark on the map. We had reached a place away from people, where things had no name. It felt a very long way indeed from the road, from the city, and from home.

I asked Jeff again about his motivation for building a cabin here, about whether he was trying to escape from other people. I could sense him becoming defensive. It is not about escape, he said, or about living some kind of outlaw lifestyle. ‘I just want a bit of peace and quiet.' He knew I was uneasy about the idea of owning this place, and that uneasiness was tainting our conversation. But in truth, despite my reservations, I was deeply jealous. I was jealous of the comfort that he seemed to find here – a comfort that, in my fear, was not
available to me. But if I am honest with myself, I was jealous too of the very ownership that caused me to flinch. It was a quiet, wonderful place, and I had no difficulty in seeing why he wants not just to spend time there, but to call it his own.

I felt guilty then for the suspicion with which I had treated his purchase of the land, and for allowing my dislike of that word – property – to become a judgement. Jeff does not view this place as a commodity. It belongs to him, legally, but his desire I think is for that belonging to become deeper, beyond law and title. What he hopes to find here, over time, is a kind of belonging that is complex and reciprocal: a relationship based on affection, devotion and love. I can understand that hope.

The two of us stood together beside the lake, looking out through a haze of mosquitoes. Three ducks cruised the opposite shore in silence. ‘I like it,' Jeff said.

‘I like it too,' I agreed.

Driving back to the city together that evening, we spoke with more ease and frankness, it seemed, than we ever had done before.

On the west coast of the Kenai Peninsula, the sixtieth parallel skirts the edge of a small town. Ninilchik is centred on the Sterling Highway but reaches out in both directions – down towards the beach, where the old village lies, and up into the river valley. Most businesses are huddled around the highway, seeking passing trade: the gas station; the wooden general store, stocked with knives, fishing gear and food; a Chinese restaurant; a diner.

Down at the long, stony beach, I sat beneath a warm sun. Streaks of high cloud were skeined over Cook Inlet, and on the horizon the hazy blue peaks of volcanoes loomed. Mount Redoubt, fifty miles away, towered above its neighbours, a scarf of cloud wrapped around its middle. A high
wooded bluff hangs over the beach here, with cabins and campsites at its top. A crow patrolled the seaweed line, requesting, repeatedly, that I vacate his scavenging ground. Out in the water, salmon jumped close to the shore. Fish followed fish as the thick silver bodies leapt skyward, their tails flapping in the afternoon air, then returning to the ocean. At the river mouth, by the old Ninilchik village, I watched a juvenile bald eagle wade out into the shallow water, bathing. He dipped one wing, then another, then bowed his head into the stream, then lowered his tail. He splashed, stretched out both wings and shook, then repeated the process.

Down in the village, rotting boats and dilapidated shacks shared space with new homes and restored cabins. This is one of the oldest settlements on the peninsula, first inhabited in the early nineteenth century by employees of the Russian-American Company. When Russia sold Alaska to the USA in 1867, many of these workers remained, and overlooking the village sits a wooden church topped by five tiny onion domes. This is the Orthodox church, built in 1901 and still doing business, though services are in English these days. Inside, a three-part iconostasis is covered with gilt portraits, including one of St Herman, who came to Alaska from western Russia, then ended his days as a hermit on Spruce Island, in 1836. Outside, the cemetery was overgrown and blooming with life. An old man knelt among the white wooden crosses, mending the little fences around the graves and cutting dandelions away from their edges. Magpies hopped from the church roof onto the grass, then croaked back up into the trees. Eagles winged slowly through the blue above. Birds scattered their songs onto the ground.

People come to Alaska for many different reasons. In Ninilchik, they come to catch big fish. I met some of these visitors at the hostel where I stayed, overlooking the river. There was Bill, an octogenarian from Chicago, who twice a year comes north to fish or to hunt, and who sometimes
brings his grandchildren. Bill likes to tell stories about his previous trips to whoever will listen. Then there was Frank and Elaine, from San Francisco. They were staying for two weeks, and every day he would pay for a charter fishing trip: halibut one day, king salmon the next. Elaine stayed behind, and when Frank returned she cut up his catch and put it in freezer bags, ready to take home. ‘This fish costs us about $800 a pound,' she laughed. Frank looked at her and smiled, proudly.

Other people travel here to see ‘wilderness', that vague, indefinable thing they feel is missing from their own lives. They come to experience nature, to gaze at it or move through it, and then to go home. There is a kind of nostalgia in this: a desire to return and to connect to something that is lost, or in the process of being lost. It's a longing for the country's past, for an imagined American Eden, pre-Columbus and pre-Bering. To visit the wilderness is to cross ‘out of history and into a perpetual present', in Gary Snyder's words, ‘a way of life attuned to the slower and steadier processes of nature'. That crossing, for some who come to live here, represents freedom. It is a chance to escape from rules and bureaucracy, and from the noise and muddle of the modern world. ‘The last frontier', as this state is often called, is a kind of refuge or a spiritual haven, just as America itself was to the first pioneers, and it offers an opportunity for people to feel more like themselves.

Some people come to Alaska – and Jeff, I think, is one – because they dream of the place and that dream will not let them go.